In the beginning of March 2026, Alix Webb and Mike Ishii joined community and faith leaders from around the country on a 90-mile march from the Dilley immigrant detention facility to San Antonio, TX, to raise awareness about the expansion of the child detention industry by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Webb and Ishii represent organizations that are part of the National Coalition to End Child Detention, a network that evolved from campaigns formed in response to the first Trump administration’s efforts to separate families and children in 2018.

Ishii is the director of Tsuru for Solidarity, a national Japanese American organization that advocates for the end of forced removal and family separation. Webb, chief of staff at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, said that one of the motivations for the march is to ensure that people understand how rapidly the child detention industry is expanding.

“People in Pennsylvania don’t know what’s happening in New Jersey, let alone Kansas or Oregon or Texas,” she told NPQ. “We are bringing faith and community leaders together to spread information about how the situation today is much worse than it was in 2018.”

Under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy in 2018, more than 2,300 children were separated from their parents at the US–Mexico border. As of January 2026, the Marshall Project found that ICE is holding around 170 children, a sixfold increase from the Biden administration, with Dilley being the main site for family detention.

At least 3,800 children have been detained since January 2025 with 1,300 of them being held beyond the 20-day limit for child detention, as established under the 1997 Flores settlement agreement. Advocates report abhorrent conditions in detention centers including measles outbreaks, inadequate drinking water and food, lack of medical care, and only one hour of schooling per day.

“For more than 30 years, there had been policies restricting immigration enforcement in sensitive places such as schools, childcare centers, hospitals, and places of worship,” Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), told NPQ.

“Feeling isolated and hopeless about whether they will ever be released, some children ask to return to the very countries they fled.”

Read the full article about the child detention industry by Deepa Iyer at Nonprofit Quarterly.