A federal judge on Monday appointed a pair of outside monitors to track the length of time the government is imprisoning children inside President Trump’s immigration camps, following numerous reports and hundreds of declarations that officials are holding them for far longer than the legal limit in squalid conditions.
The order from Judge Dolly M. Gee, the chief of the Central District of California, confirmed that the federal government likely violated the 1997 Flores settlement, which limits the detention of immigrant kids to 30 days. As the Prospect reported in July, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been violating that many times over for months, in some cases holding children for nearly a year. Testimonies from children and families describe inhumane conditions and routine abuse from guards, including physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. Some testimony recounts male guards targeting teenage girls, including one who repeatedly entered a woman’s bathroom when he knew teenage girls were showering inside.
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The order came a day before the federal government held an online meeting for detention contractors to discuss expanding immigrant child imprisonment even further. As the Prospect reported, the government is seeking new detention sites across the country, including facilities capable of supporting up to 3,000 children.
“If it’s a permanent facility, if it’s a temporary building, if it’s a site that is blank that you plan on building on, whatever the case may be we will definitely look at it and take into consideration,” Tony Canelas, a branch chief in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), said on the call. The key consideration, he told contractors, is that the facility should be fully operational within 90 days. The date for releasing a request for proposal is not set, but the government aims to grant awards by December 31, Canelas said.
Judge Gee appointed former U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Andrea Sheridan Ordin as the special master and Stanford University pediatrician Paul H. Wise as the independent monitor for child detention. Wise previously served as a federal court-appointed monitor for the medical care of immigrant children and in 2023 called the death of Anadith Danay Reyes Álvarez in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody “clearly preventable” and a result of “catastrophically inadequate” CBP policies and procedures; immigration advocates credit Wise with resolving such issues as the government’s failure to provide immigrant toddlers with appropriate food and separating young children from their families, and say they hope his appointment will bring about necessary changes.
Ordin and Wise will monitor the length of time children are in CBP custody in the Rio Grande Valley; El Paso, Texas; and San Diego, California sectors. They’ll also monitor whether the temperature at facilities in those sectors is adequate following reports that they are typically “freezing.” Specifically in San Diego, they’ll monitor whether there are adequate sleeping conditions and access to soap, after reports that children have neither.
The two will monitor the length of time children are in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, and various hotels, and whether medical care is adequate in Dilley. Gee noted that reports of inadequate medical care and neglect are rife, saying that families “commonly report” failures like detention staff administering only Tylenol or ibuprofen for medical needs and delaying medical treatment even when a child is “crying in pain,” including one case in which a child required emergency surgery for appendicitis. She also noted that detainees at Dilley filed 64 grievances about medical services between August 2025 and May 2026, and that the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) received around 1,480 complaints about medical services between May 2025 and May 2026.
“At a minimum, the evidence regarding medical care is conflicting and the reported differences in reality are stark,” Gee wrote.
Gee ordered the two monitors to prepare reports at least quarterly and notify ICE and CBP of failures to comply with Flores, which the court may investigate and hold hearings to resolve. While the monitors themselves can’t issue orders or impose sanctions for failures, they can recommend that the court impose them.
The order comes as the Trump administration is preparing to imprison thousands more immigrant children following its refusal to renew a legal services contract with Acacia Center for Justice. That group coordinated funding for nearly 100 legal aid organizations across the country to provide unaccompanied immigrant children with representation, as required by law.
The administration subsequently awarded a tiny Trump-affiliated law firm in Texas, Burke Law Group, a $150 million no-bid contract to provide that service, even though just two of their attorneys have experience in immigration law. The firm later pulled out of the deal and said it never happened. The administration also gave a no-bid $244 million contract to disgraced anti-sex-trafficking NGO Our Rescue to represent immigrant children, though it has no experience doing so, as the Prospect reported.
“Obviously children who no longer have adequate representation are more likely to be removed and detained for longer,” said Sarah Kahn, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, adding that for-profit facilities operate with much less oversight when the children inside have no attorney visiting and protecting them.
“Children without lawyers are extraordinarily vulnerable to harm. A child doesn’t know what their rights are, a child doesn’t have any way to enforce their own rights.”
At the roundtable discussion on Tuesday, Office of Refugee Resettlement officials told contractors about the detention facilities they wanted; the office is seeking multiple award “emergency influx facilities” under an IDIQ, or “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity,” a type of contract the government uses to buy a good or service before they need it. Officials at the meeting, which the Prospect attended along with about 130 others, said they wanted proposals for any facility in any location but would not say exactly where. The government is looking for facilities with the capacity for between 100 and 3,000 beds, said Canelas, the ORR branch chief, who added each task order would likely be for about 1,000 beds. The event was only for market research and was not a solicitation.
Potential vendors on the call repeatedly asked for more details, including where the government wanted the facilities and how many beds they needed; Canelas responded each time saying that those factors would be determined by “mission needs.” He also told contractors that some of the required facility parameters are changing, including the parameters for recreation space. The current standard is one acre per 100 children. The anticipated change will say that the facility “must meet a physical space which can accommodate the mandatory recreation hours required for every single child in accordance with ORR policy.” The space does not need to be continuous and can include a combination indoor and outdoor space.
“These facilities are brutal and profoundly traumatizing for children,” Kahn said. “Any new facility that they’re planning to build is likely to continue in their track record of mistreating and harming children.”
