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 whom 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.
