ICE Has Arrested 8,500 Kids, and Now It's Stashing Them in Hotels

The Bunny Hat Did Not Change a Damn Thing

Remember Liam Conejo Ramos? Five years old, arrested by immigration officers while wearing a bunny hat. The image set off a national uproar. Ms. Rachel and Madonna called for the closure of the Dilley immigration processing center in Texas, where Ramos and many other children were held. Lawyers filed complaints about contaminated food and shoddy healthcare. Hundreds of activists showed up to protest outside the camp.

It worked, sort of. Within months, the government started sending fewer children to Dilley. That's the whole victory. The arrests themselves never slowed, according to a Marshall Project analysis published by The Guardian. They just got rerouted.

Twice the Arrests, Same Cruelty, Fewer Witnesses

ICE has arrested more than 8,500 children since Trump retook office. It has detained more than 8,750, a slightly bigger number because kids also land in detention through other routes, like Border Patrol apprehensions. Through July of this year, arrests were running at more than double last year's pace.

The spikes are brutal in specific places. In Massachusetts and Florida, more children were arrested in the first seven months of 2026 than in all of 2025 combined, and that's more than double. In New York and New Jersey, arrests tripled.

And these are not hardened criminals. Most immigration violations are civil, not criminal, and the vast majority of the children in ICE's arrest data have no criminal conviction or pending charges beyond the immigration violation. They are kids. The offense is existing in the wrong country on paper.

Welcome to the Black Box Hotel

Children held for long stretches usually end up at Dilley, and hundreds still did this year. But plenty of kids are being held for shorter stints in hotels and hold rooms in office buildings. Becky Wolozin, a lawyer with the National Center for Youth Law, calls these places "black boxes," where families essentially disappear with little to no contact with lawyers or relatives.

The ICE data doesn't even record when children are held in hotels. We only know the scale of it because of court filings in the Flores settlement litigation, which document 86 children held for more than three days in hotels in February and March. Think about that. The government keeps no public record of where it parks kids, and the only reason we have any number at all is that a court made someone write it down.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn't respond to questions about it. In court filings, officials said some hotel stays were necessary because of flight delays or trouble obtaining travel documents. Sure. Flight delays. For nine days.

Nine Days Without a Window

In February, a woman on Long Island, identified only by the initials MSP because she fears retaliation, took her two children to a scheduled ICE check-in. She planned to take them to a favorite restaurant afterward. Instead, officers detained all three.

The family had lived in New York for nine years. They were taken to Texas and jailed in a hotel. For nine days, she said, they were not allowed to leave the room, or even look out the windows. Two guards were in the room at all times.

This is a mother who did what the system told her to do. Show up. Check in. Comply. Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia Law School professor who has represented more than 100 children and parents in ICE detention in the past year, said many of her clients were arrested while following immigration court instructions. The reward for following the rules is a hotel room with armed guards and covered windows.

Guns, Handcuffs, and a 12-Year-Old

A 16-year-old identified in a court declaration as JAI said he had lived in Texas with his family for eight years. One morning around 5am he heard yelling and pounding on the front door. Officers charged in and went to his 12-year-old brother's room.

"They pointed a gun at my little brother; threw him against a wall; grabbed him by the hair; and then put handcuffs on him. They did the same thing with me," he said.

A twelve-year-old. Pointed at with a gun. Handcuffed. This is the policy working as intended, according to immigration lawyers, who say the government is arresting children because it wants to remove as many immigrants as possible, regardless of age or vulnerability.

Telling Families to Hide

Nuala O'Doherty-Naranjo, an attorney who founded the Jackson Heights Immigration Center in New York City, sees ICE driving up and down the street outside her door. When she visits high schools, she can feel the fear in the room. She used to tell immigrant families they were welcome, that they should register their kids for school, take English classes, join community groups.

Now she's telling them something else. "I was wrong. Hide."

That's the real product here. Not just the arrests, but a lawyer who spent years encouraging families to participate in public life now telling them to disappear from it. Every kid who stops going to school because a parent is afraid is a casualty that never shows up in the 8,500 figure.