The Dilley Immigration Processing Center near San Antonio costs taxpayers roughly $15 million a month to operate, according to a Houston Chronicle investigation.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pays $13.1 million monthly for use of the facility, plus another $2.5 million for medical care to run the only U.S. detention center for migrant children and families. The controversial lockup is located about an hour southwest of the Alamo City.
Most of the federal money goes to CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates the facility. Some of it goes to the town of Dilley itself.
That $15 million isn’t dependent on the population inside, and the total cost to taxpayers hasn’t been reduced even though the prison’s population has fallen sharply, the Chronicle reports.
Lawyers for CoreCivic accidentally sent a contract detailing the amounts to the Houston Chronicle as an addendum to an email, the daily reports. It appears the company had instead intended to send the document to the Texas Attorney General to block its release.
However, these numbers have been reported before, dating all the way back to 2018 when the facility was operated under the previous Trump administration.
Dilley has been under capacity since the Trump White House reopened it in April 2025. At its peak in January of this year, the site had an average daily population of approximately 900. Now, that average is down to 222, according to an an online tracker.
What’s more, Congressman Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, and others who have urged the government to shut down Dilley argue that no one inside the trailer prison has a criminal record.
Castro shared an Instagram post on Thursday afternoon about the feds paying CoreCivic $13.1 million to operate the controversy-plagued camp, writing, “In America, it is now the norm to commodify child suffering and allow private investors and companies like CoreCivic to profit from the imprisonment of innocent children.”
“Dilley must be shut down so we can #FreeOurChildren,” he added.
Millions’ worth of medical care?
Much like the millions spent to detain slightly more than 200 people with no criminal record, the $2.2 million doled out for medical expenses per month seems incongruous with the stories prisoners have shared of delayed, denied or insufficient care they have received inside Dilley.
In a report about a flurry of 911 calls coming from within another detention facility in Pearsall operated by GEO Group, Jonathan Ryan, a San Antonio immigration attorney and former CEO of RAICES, told the Current that immigrant detention centers often delay treatment until a detainee’s condition worsens enough to call an ambulance.
The companies use the tactic to avoid cutting into profit margins by administering in-house medical treatment, Ryan alleged.
“You always have to remember that these are for-profit detention facilities,” the attorney said. “These are corporations that are profit-based, and medical care is expensive. And so even if they have the facilities to provide medical care, if they are able to offload those services to the local community, they’re going to do that because that’s more money in their pockets.”
Castro has also stated after his tours of the Dilley camp that the medical facility was unstaffed. Indeed, when 2-month-old prisoner Juan Nicolás was choking on his own vomit, the detention center’s medical facility was forced to rush the baby to a hospital before he was deported.
The 16-year-old son of a recently released Egyptian family also faced a life-threatening medical episode inside due to untreated appendicitis, according to the family’s attorney, Eric Lee. The boy was told to take a pain reliever when he complained about his discomfort, Lee alleged, adding that the teen ultimately collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, the attorney said.
“He could have died,” Lee told the Current.
Many detainees have also reported being “prescribed water” for medical issues, according to Ryan and other immigrant advocates and attorneys.
However, Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, told NBC no child “has been denied medical treatment or experienced a delayed medical assessment” at Dilley. Staff are trained to call 911 when a child’s condition exceeds what can be managed on-site, he added — not because of inadequate care, but out of “an abundance of clinical precaution.”
Separately, ICE released a statement responding to “mainstream media lies” and “debunking” claims of mistreatment in Dilley, stating that “in most cases, this is the best healthcare illegal aliens have received in their entire lives.”
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