Behind the Bars of ICE: Children Are Being Raped

Sexual abuse, and the systematic violation of bodies in America’s immigration detention camps.

I have spent years learning how a camera holds what the eye sometimes cannot. In Gaza, it was dust settling on skin after American bombs dropped from Israeli warplanes. In the US, across oceans and borders, I find myself turning the same lens toward another kind of ruin, the places where people seeking life are taken and held unjustly and illegally.

In the so called immigration detention centers of this country, those they call “detainees” arrive carrying their own fragile histories, moms, dads, children fleeing what they could no longer bear, imposed on them by the very same beast that kidnapped them. And in those facilities, many have spoken of another violation added to their journey. They reported vile sexual assault, rape and beatings. Some of the accounts surface years later, some not at all.

Even before the Trump administration started tearing down the law and any shred of humanity left in the US, between 2018 and 2022, records from 129 facilities documented 922 allegations of sexual assault in the custody of ICE. More than one every few days, with a third pointed toward staff. Only a small fraction were ever investigated. Earlier years told similar stories, over a thousand reports received by oversight bodies in just two years, with investigations opened in barely a fraction of them. A recent review of complaints between 2015 and 2021 found 308 cases, more than half against officers and guards who were supposed to keep people safe.

The new fact-check from Factually and another intensively detailed investigation published by Prism, pieced together from peer-reviewed studies, lawsuits, and survivor accounts, confirms what the fragments already suggested.

Reporting and public records put names and voices behind those fragments. At Stewart Detention Center in Georgia women described medical encounters that became assaults, one asylum seeker said a nurse “pressed my hand against his penis” and later felt “immensely invisible,” another recalled a nurse placing a stethoscope on her while making lewd faces and leaving her “frozen.” Just Detention International documented Esmeralda Soto saying the thought of what an immigration officer did to her “makes me nauseous and fills me with fear, disgust and anger” after she was forced to perform oral sex. Court records and reporting about Berks describe a 19‑year‑old Honduran asylum seeker who felt she “wasn’t in a position to say no” when a guard used threats of deportation and promises of favors to coerce her. These accounts, alongside hundreds of complaints in DHS records, lawsuits, and advocacy reports, echo the patterns in other facilities: medical exams and pat‑downs used as cover, grooming with small favors, threats of deportation, blind spots in oversight, and many allegations left redacted or uninvestigated.

Children in ICE custody have been raped and sexually abused by agents and contractors. Court records and reporting document minors sexually assaulted while detained, filings and news coverage tied to family and child care contractors include allegations of children, in some cases as young as five, being abused by staff or contractors, and a Department of Justice investigation and related litigation cited more than 100 documented sexual assaults of children across certain contractor-run facilities.

Few cases reached criminal proceedings or produced convictions, and those that did were rare moments of visibility in a system that shields far more than it punishes. In late 2025 a contract officer, David Courvelle, pleaded guilty to repeated sexual abuse of a Nicaraguan woman at the South Louisiana facility. He had brought her food, small gifts and photos of her daughter, a calculated kindness that can feel like mercy inside a cage until it is not. Other cases surfaced that year: ICE deportation agent Andrew Golobic was sentenced in March 2025 to 12 years for coercing detained women into sex; DHS employee Alexander Steven Back was arrested in November 2025 for soliciting sex from a child; ICE assistant field office director Samuel L. Saxon faced charges of felonious assault and strangulation in December 2025; and Border Patrol agent Bart Conrad Yager was indicted on 24 felony counts, including child sex trafficking. These moments of accountability remain exceptions, not the rule.

I do not write this to reduce lives to cases and numbers. Numbers remain when the full weight of a person’s story cannot be carried by paper. I think of the silences, the fear of speaking and of being disbelieved, or worse, removed before the words can settle. Power isolates the body first, then the voice. I have seen these patterns before, occupation works not only through force but through the slow erosion of dignity, the normalization of what should never be normal.

The system speaks of PREA standards and prevention programs, while contractors point to audits. Yet the ironic gap between those claims and the testimonies that surface remains incredibly wide. Private companies run many of these places by design, so when investigations sometimes fall to the very entities with something to lose, they vanish. The archives grow, but slowly, and always filtered, deliberately denying justice.

Still, there is something persistent in remembering. It lives in the small resistances of those who speak anyway, whether in whispered testimonies, or in the hands that braid hair before another uncertain night, in the children who still find reasons to laugh against the concrete, and in the quiet, radical refusal to let the body be reduced to mere evidence.

To the survivors, and to those still inside, Your anger is justified, your stories are true, and you deserve far more than just our sympathy. You deserve justice, safety, and freedom.

If you are reading this from the outside, do not let your heartbreak end with this article. The people inside need resources, not just readers. The system relies on us looking away once the story is over. Refuse to do that.

Take the energy this story gave you and direct it to the people fighting the system:

• Support Detention Watch Network and La Alianza Nacional de Trabajadoras del Hogar, who are actively organizing survivors and demanding oversight.

• Donate to local community bail and bond funds that help immigrants navigate the legal system and secure their release.

• Share this investigation+Take action. Make it impossible for the DHS to claim they are unaware of the abuse happening in their own facilities.

We honor your survival not just by remembering you, but by actively fighting to tear down the system that harmed you. There is no grace, no cover-up, and no making amends for those who kidnap mothers and rape children.

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Sources

• Futuro Investigates reporting on Stewart Detention Center (2023).

• Just Detention International, survivor testimony and reports (Esmeralda Soto).

• ACLU reporting and court records on Berks Family Residential Center (E.D. case).

• DHS OIG and ICE complaints data summaries covering 2015–2022 (records of allegations across facilities).

• Department of Justice investigation and litigation involving Southwest Key and documented assaults ofminors.

• Investigations by Prism and Factually (fact-check).

• Reporting on convictions and charges (David Courvelle, Andrew Golobic, Alexander Steven Back, SamuelL. Saxon, Bart Conrad Yager) from court records.