Earlier this year, a 16-year-old student at a Los Angeles high school was looking forward to starting his junior year, where he planned to try out for the school’s varsity tennis team. His parents were both college psychology professors.

But in April, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested the family, who immigrated from Iran more than a decade ago, after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told immigration officers to revoke their permanent legal status. ICE separated the family, sending them to two different Texas detention centers.

For the past 123 days, the teen and his mother have lived in an immigrant detention facility in Dilley, where he and other detainees share their rooms with swarms of cockroaches, spiders and mosquitoes, he wrote in a sworn affidavit. Meanwhile, his father is at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall.

“We have been put through hell for the past four months, and our physical and mental health have deteriorated in ways that might not be reversible for years,” Maryam Tahmasebi, his mother, wrote in The Nation on Tuesday. “We are only allowed to speak with my husband for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision.”

The teen is one of at least 60 children who the Trump administration has held in the Dilley detention center for 100 days or more — far exceeding the 20-day limit for detaining immigrant children — according to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal government data.

On average, children in the Dilley detention center spend 25 days there — but in a six-month period ending in December, that average peaked at 47 days, according to the Tribune’s analysis.

The teen, who is only identified by his initials — S.M.H. — in court documents, said in a sworn declaration that being arrested and detained was “terrifying” and he has lost 10 pounds since his arrest.

His four months of detention is illegal, the family’s lawyers argued in court documents, because it’s six times more than the limit set by a federal court in what’s known as the Flores settlement, a legal agreement from a 1985 class-action lawsuit accusing the federal government of mistreating children in immigration detention.

U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee in California, who oversees the Flores settlement, said in a court hearing in June she plans to appoint a monitor to force the Trump administration to comply with the agreement. The case is currently before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In President Trump’s first term, his administration attempted to end the Flores settlement. Now the administration is trying again to end the agreement, arguing in court that it’s “outdated” and “judicial micromanagement” of its immigration policy.

In a statement to the Tribune, the Department of Homeland Security called the settlement “a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources.”

ICE also said in a July court filing that Dilley’s average length of stay was ballooning because of a small number of detainees who are being held longer after being declared national security risks, among other reasons.

In the first year after the March 2025 reopening of the Dilley facility, the country’s only detention center for families, the Trump administration held around 3,000 children for deportation there — more than half of them for more than 20 days.

The Biden administration had ended the practice of detaining families and closed the Dilley facility before the Trump administration reopened it last year as part of its mass deportation efforts.

“The facility is in perpetual violation of the law,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio. Castro, who has made seven oversight visits to the Dilley detention center, has demanded that the Trump administration shut down the facility.

Immigrant children’s rights lawyers have renewed their legal fight against the federal government, claiming the conditions at Dilley and prolonged confinement is evidence the Trump administration is violating the Flores settlement. As part of the ongoing legal dispute, lawyers have collected testimony from families, including children, who describe rotting food, non-potable water and lack of medical attention.

The teenager’s father, Seyed Eissa Hashemi, entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2014. His wife and S.M.H. then 5, followed a year later. Hashemi found a job teaching psychology at The Chicago School, while Tahmasebi teaches psychology and statistics at Los Angeles Pierce College, a community college in the San Fernando Valley. In 2016, the family received their green cards.

S.M.H. described himself as “an average American kid” in his court affidavit. Outside of school, he read Japanese comic books and played video games.

But to the Trump administration, the teenager and his parents’ presence in the country is a foreign policy risk. Their arrests came just over a month after the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran.

Rubio wrote an April memo to immigration officials that he believed the family’s green cards should be revoked. Rubio cited a little used immigration law that allows the secretary of state to seek the deportation of specific people for foreign policy reasons.

Their presence in the U.S., Rubio wrote, could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” and “undermines U.S. foreign policy interests.” The reason, he wrote, is because 47 years ago, S.M.H’s then-19-year-old grandmother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, served as a spokesperson for a university student group that held 52 American citizens hostage for 444 days inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Islamic revolution.

“It is shameful that Secretary Rubio takes the position that children should be held accountable for the acts of their parents and grandparents,” said Curtis Morrison, a lawyer in the family’s legal team.

In her article, Tahmasebi wrote that she, her husband and son have never been accused of a crime while living in the U.S. “Not even a traffic ticket.”

“I have struggled to understand how this can happen to people who have never broken the law, in a system I believed to be based on the rule of law,” she wrote.

The family’s lawyer has filed a petition for their release, arguing that for S.M.H., California “is the only home he has known, and he is closely bound to his family, friends, school, and community there.”

The U.S. State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. But after the family’s arrest in April, it released a statement saying the administration “will never allow America to become a home for foreign nationals tied to anti-American terrorist regimes.”

A DHS spokesperson said the family “posed a clear threat” to the country’s foreign policy and national security. The department also pushed back against detained children’s complaints about conditions at Dilley.

“All detainees are provided with 3 meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries,” the spokesperson said.

Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, which operates the detention center, defended the company’s practices and said it has no control over how long children are detained.

He said staff regularly clean the facility and drink the same water that detainees do — he added that the water quality is tested regularly. He also pointed to a recent ICE report that said Dilley “has maintained core Flores-related services” such as medical and mental health care, sanitation and food service. The report cited education as an area that needs improvement; Gustin said the company has been working to address that.

Attorneys in contact with detained children have called this report “a fiction of compliance.”

Teen calls Dilley experience “a nightmare”

Like the teen from California, O.S. was also arrested and held for months at Dilley when he was 16.

In June 2025, immigration officers arrested the teenager, his mother, Hayam El Gamal, and four siblings when his father, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, according to prosecutors, threw Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel demonstration in Colorado. A state judge sentenced Soliman to life in prison earlier this year after he pleaded guilty to 101 charges including murder.

The rest of the Egyptian family, however, was never charged with any crimes. They also said they were estranged from Soliman and did not know about his plan to attack the event. Still, they were detained for 323 days at Dilley before their release in April.

“With the El Gamal family, the Trump administration began to set a precedent whereby innocent people could be punished for the actions of others,” said Eric Lee, an attorney for the family. “And that has no place whatsoever in a democratic society.”

O.S. called the experience “a nightmare.”

“This prolonged detention has and continues to destroy our lives,” the boy wrote in a letter in March. “It is slowly killing us on the inside.”

His family also raised concerns about moldy food and lack of adequate medical care. O.S. wrote that a dentist in the facility found that his 5-year-old sister had 13 cavities but didn’t properly treat them. The girl’s pain became so unbearable that she would cry for hours, and staff treated her with painkillers for two months before their release, he added.

Their deteriorating mental health and complaints about the facility’s conditions are similar to what many detained families have said after being held in Dilley.

A 13-year-old girl who grew up in Miami before she and her mother were arrested by immigration officers during a periodic check-in had spent 90 days in the detention center when she wrote in her court declaration that if she had to “describe Dilley with one word, it would be ‘horrible.’

“It is awful to be inside here all the time and feel like you’re locked up,” she added.

These experiences can also stay with the children long after they leave the facility. O.S., for instance, said it had been difficult to return to normal life after his family’s release in April.

“Being at Dilley distances kids from the real world and takes away all the normalcy from everything,” he wrote in a court declaration weeks later. “After you get released, the effects are still there. Nothing is normal anymore because you live in fear of going back to that place.”

“There’s no humane way to detain a child”

Democratic lawmakers and immigrant rights advocates’ have called for Dilley to be shut down, saying holding children in such conditions is causing harm to innocent families.

Over the past year, Castro, the San Antonio congressman, has visited detention centers in Texas, including Dilley, to document the conditions immigrants are living in. The vast majority of people detained in Dilley do not have a criminal record so it doesn’t make sense to treat them like criminals, he said.

“People were very desperate and traumatized, and you can see it in their faces,” Castro said in an interview. “The kids are usually either shellshocked and just quiet and detached, or they’re very overcome by emotion sometimes. But most of all, they don’t understand why they’re there.”

Leecia Welch, a lawyer with Children’s Rights who has visited Dilley a dozen times and interviewed children held there, said in a court filing that some would also cry all night, isolate themselves or have panic attacks.

Welch told the Tribune that the concerns for children become more extreme the longer they stay in custody: “A hundred days for any of us feels like a long time, but 100 days is an eternity in the life of a child.”

Sural Shah, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health, said children should not be in a detention center and is concerned the federal government wants to get rid of the Flores settlement.

“There’s no humane way to detain a child,” Shah said.

Complaints about food, education

Tahmasebi, S.M.H.’s mother, said that her son, who only speaks English and has only had schooling in California, is “struggling to understand why the only country he considers home is treating him this way.”

At the time S.M.H. wrote his affidavit, he and his mother had been in the Dilley facility for 100 days.

He said staff routinely yell at children and deny anything they ask for — such as the pizza and cupcakes the staff brings from outside for themselves.

“It’s really hard for them to see it and have that food be just another thing they are denied here,” S.M.H. wrote.

He added: “They don’t seem to really know how to actually deal with and work with children,” he wrote. “They all trash talk and gossip about residents everywhere. It’s like watching Mean Girls but irl,” he added, referencing the teen comedy movie and using the textism for “in real life.”

The food they’re served, he wrote, is “terrible and unhealthy.” And the food detainees can buy at the commissary is mostly junk food.

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said detainees receive “three nutritious meals a day, plus snacks” from a dietician-approved menu.

S.M.H. wrote that he missed his friends, and school.

At the Dilley facility, the education is “non-existent” compared to what he was getting in California, S.M.H. wrote. He added that classes are more geared toward younger kids, with “nothing for teenagers.”

Back home, he was arrested just before his class was scheduled to do a pig dissection in his biology class.

“Maybe I will get to do some of the biology things I missed when I go to college,” he wrote.