Trump Has Detained Twin Five Year Old Girls as Retribution for Speaking Out

5-year old twin girls and their family have been detained for over 8 months now, in prison-like conditions at Dilley Detention Center. A GoFundMe has been setup for the family.

What is happening to the El Gamal family at the Dilley Family Detention Center (Or should we say Dilley Concentration Camp) is not an accident. It is not confusion. It is not the unavoidable friction of a complicated system. And now a GoFundMe Campaign has been setup to help them out.

At the center of this cruelty are two five year old twin girls. Children who should be learning to read, learning to play and learning to feel safe in the world. Instead they have been waking up every day for the past 8 months inside a detention facility surrounded by concrete cold rooms and fear. They are drinking water that makes children sick. They are eating food that attorneys say has caused illness. They are denied toys books and basic education. At an age when the brain is still forming these girls are being taught one lesson by Donald Trump’s immigration system that power can hurt you and no one will stop it.

Picture drawn by 5-year old detained girl that reads “I am 5 years old. Let us go”

These five year old girls have committed no crime. They are not accused of anything. They are not dangerous. And yet they are being punished anyway. Punished for who their parents are. Punished for asking for asylum. Punished because their mother dared to speak to the media and expose what was happening inside Dilley. In any moral society this would be unthinkable. In Trump’s America it is policy. A government willing to traumatize five year old children to maintain control has abandoned every claim to decency.

It is the direct result of Donald Trump and the cruelty he has deliberately injected back into American immigration policy.

This is what Trump governance looks like when stripped of slogans and spin. It looks like children locked in cold rooms. It looks like babies losing dangerous amounts of weight. It looks like sick kids denied medical care. It looks like families punished not for crimes but for speaking the truth.

For months, the Trump administration through, the Department of Homeland Security, has denied the reality of what is happening at Dilley. They have dismissed firsthand accounts from Hayam El Gamal and her children as lies. They have insisted that conditions are safe humane and closely monitored.

That claim is now indefensible.

Court filings confirm exactly what the family has said and more. Children are confined in cramped cold spaces without toys books or education. There are no in person visits. Kids describe feeling scared trapped and depressed. Food and water have made children sick. One baby lost nearly nine pounds in a single month. Children with cancer and cystic fibrosis have missed lifesaving medical care.

Living conditions at the Dilley Detention Center — as outlined in court document

These are not allegations from activists. These are facts documented in court. And yet Trump officials continue to lie.

We spoke directly with Eric Lee one of the attorneys representing the El Gamal family. What he described is a government that is not merely indifferent to suffering but actively retaliating against it.

Hayam El Gamal and her five children came to the United States lawfully in 2022. They are seeking asylum through legal channels. They are not accused of any crime. The government admits this.

Still they have been detained for eight months. Eight months of confinement for a family whose only offense is asking for protection and then daring to tell the public what was happening to them.

When Hayam El Gamal spoke to the media the Trump administration responded not by fixing the conditions but by punishing her family.

Her eldest daughter was separated from the family. Not for safety. Not for health. Not for any legal reason. She was separated as retaliation for speaking out.

That daughter turned eighteen while in detention. She is now denied visitation with her family. She is denied religious accommodations. According to her attorney this separation was explicitly punitive.

Eric Lee told us that every time the family wins in court the government invents a new excuse to keep them detained. Two habeas petitions have already been won. A third is pending. Each victory is met with a new bureaucratic trick to continue the abuse.

The immigration judge denied bond not because the family is dangerous or a flight risk but because they lacked assets and property. Poverty was weaponized to justify continued detention. Because of this a GoFundMe has been setup to help the family prove that they have assets.

Under Trump a mother and her children can be imprisoned indefinitely not because they broke the law but because they are poor and inconvenient. This is not law and order. It is authoritarian cruelty.

In a democracy children are not punished for the alleged actions of someone else. Families are not torn apart to send a message. Medical care is not withheld. Religious rights are not denied. Speech is not criminalized.

Yet under Donald Trump every one of those lines has been crossed. This is not a broken system. This is a system working exactly as Trump intends.

The El Gamal family should be released immediately. Not after another motion. Not after another fundraiser. Not after another round of suffering. Now!

If this is what America does to innocent children in the name of immigration enforcement then Donald Trump has turned the United States into something unrecognizable.

And no amount of denial will erase that truth.