A team of self-described Disney superfans runs a site called DisneyDining.com, a collection of news and tips for folks traveling to the theme parks.

The site calls itself “the place to be for delicious Disney foodie content, tips and tricks for planning the most magical Disney Parks vacations ever, the best in Disney nostalgia and history content, and the most up-to-date and credible Disney news from around the globe.”

Recently, while America was busy debating Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance, an atypical story quietly popped up on the site: “A Child Asked To Go to Disney World. Her Family Agreed, and Ended up in ICE Custody.”

“A planned Walt Disney World Resort vacation turned into a 113-day detention for nine-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya after ICE intercepted her travel and ‘used’ her to detain her mother,” the story reads. “ProPublica published the child’s handwritten letter on February 9 as part of a collection of documents from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. The letters were collected throughout January 2026. Hundreds of children remain at the facility.”

It’s a jarring juxtaposition. But then, so is life in America right now.

Maria’s letter is one of several published in early February by independent, nonprofit newsroom ProPublica. More than 750 families, nearly half with children, are living at Dilley and reporter Mica Rosenberg asked detainees if their children would be willing to share letters or pictures about their experiences.

A detainee who was being released Jan. 20 gathered the letters and brought them to ProPublica. All but two of the children who wrote letters had been living in the United States when they were detained.

Maria, who is from Colombia, had been living in detention for 113 days when she wrote her letter.

“I miss my friends and I feel they are going to forget me,” she wrote. “I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside. When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well. I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

Each letter is as heartbreaking as the next.

“Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” 14-year-old Ariana wrote.

From 9-year-old Susej: “My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live, and my mom was looking for a Good job.”

Dilley was built in 2014 under President Barack Obama's administration’s expansion of family detentions — a blemish, to my mind, on his presidency. And for those of you asking where the outrage was when Obama detained families, the answer is: front and center.

The National Immigration Justice Center called his approach “reckless” and “a shameful response to the humanitarian crisis in Central America” in 2014. The American Immigration Lawyers Association wrote in 2016, “This practice is a due process and humanitarian disaster and must end.” The ACLU in 2015 said: “The Obama administration doubled down on one of its worst immigration legacies: the return and expansion of family detention.”

President Joe Biden's administration moved to stop family detention, and Dilley began holding adults only until it closed in 2024. But the facility was reopened in March 2025 and retrofitted to again house children.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second administration, the number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention has increased sixfold, according to ProPublica. Of those detained, 73% had no criminal conviction, nearly half had no criminal conviction at all, nor any pending criminal charges; and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to Cato Institute data.

And yet.

There is a 9-year-old girl sitting terrified and tearful and blaming herself for wanting to see Disney. For every one of those letters we read, every one of those stories we glimpsed, there are hundreds upon hundreds of others we haven’t and won’t.

The damage — to their health, to their futures, to our humanity — is staggering.

“All children held in immigration detention should be immediately released, and these facilities should be permanently shuttered,” leaders of the American Academy of Pediatrics, including AAP president Andrew Racine, wrote in a USA Today op-ed on Feb. 10. “Children, regardless of their immigration status, belong in their communities, in school and with their families.”

If we can’t agree, as a nation, on a truth so self-evident, I truly don’t know where we go from here. If we can’t align our minds and hearts and priorities around preserving the unalienable human right to a childhood not spent in captivity, I’m afraid it doesn’t much matter what else we align on.

There’s not a policy or a party or a platitude in the world that justifies scaring and scarring children the way we’re doing right now, in the name of immigration reform.

Bravo to ProPublica for asking for those letters, and bravo to the children brave enough to write them. I only hope we don’t ignore them.

©2026 Tribune News Service. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.