Two detainees at the nation’s only current immigrant family detention center, 70 miles south of San Antonio, have “active measles infections,” federal and state officials said.

Federal officials halted “all movement” and quarantined some migrants, said Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, in a statement. The measles cases were first confirmed Saturday, setting off concerns from medical professionals and immigration advocates about the potential for spread in the Dilley facility.

The cases at the South Texas Family Residential Center come amid renewed nationwide scrutiny of the facility following the transfer there of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy who federal agents arrested along with his father in Minneapolis. Photographs of federal authorities detaining the child, who was wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversized blue winter hat, quickly went viral adding to the frustration by some Americans about the immigration tactics playing out in Minnesota, where federal agents shot and killed two people last month. A federal judge in Texas ordered Ramos and his father released and they returned home this weekend.

More than 1,400 people, including infants as young as two months, have been detained at the facility in Dilley as the Trump administration in recent months has ramped up arrests of families in the interior of the country. Despite a federal settlement that governs the rights of children in detention and generally holds that they can not be imprisoned for longer than 20 days when accompanied by their parents, many families at the facility have been detained for more than two months and some as long as eight months, lawyers and advocates said.

They have described unsafe conditions at the facility, including poor drinking water, food, and hygiene conditions and being forced to sleep with the lights on 24 hours a day.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, declined to provide details on the two infected detainees or say how many people in the facility had previously been vaccinated or were now being vaccinated and quarantined. She said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking "appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection."

"All detainees are being provided with proper medical care," she added.

The Texas Department of State Health Services is working with the federal government to determine how many doses of vaccines to provide, its spokesperson, Chris Van Deusen, said in an email. He deferred questions about the facility and impacted people to the federal government, which he said would lead any investigation into the spread.

Elissa Steglich, a co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s immigration law clinic, said the presence of measles is especially concerning given the historically subpar conditions of immigration detention centers.

“Over the many years that immigration detention has happened, we have heard complaints, and there has been plenty of reporting, about the poor quality health care and medical attention in these immigration detention facilities,” Steglich said. “Importantly, this is just now occurring in the context of the highest death rates in immigration detention in decades.”

At least 32 people died in ICE detention last year, the most in two decades. Four deaths have been reported in Texas immigrant detention facilities, including a 55-year-old Cuban man whose death in January the El Paso Medical Examiner’s office has ruled was a homicide.

In 2025, the U.S. also saw the most measles cases in decades, recording more than 2,200 such infections. That included 762 people in a West Texas outbreak, in which two children died and 99 people were hospitalized. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define an outbreak as three or more related cases.

While it is difficult to assess how grave the situation may be without knowing more about the cases, Peter Hotez, a leading infectious disease expert and dean for Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, said an investigation is necessary to understand how the infections happened. Key to know is how many detainees and staff are vaccinated, he said.

“Measles is the most contagious virus agent there is and so it can spread very quickly in an institutional facility if there’s a significant cohort of unvaccinated kids and adults,” Hotez said.

Spokespeople for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the Dilley facility, did not respond to questions about if or how an investigation would be conducted.

One person with measles can spread it to 12 to 18 other unvaccinated individuals on average, Hotez said. The virus has a long incubation period and people with measles are also contagious for about four days before and after the rash appears. It’s unclear what officials know about the vaccination statuses of other migrants in the facility.

The Dilley facility also holds families that were detained and brought in from other states, which Hotez said could further complicate an investigation and add to potential exposures during transport.

Ultimately, Hotez said it’s important to take special care of any unvaccinated person who has measles because the disease has a high morbidity rate.

“Twenty percent of unvaccinated kids with measles usually require hospitalization, so what’s being done to take care of them medically?” he asked.

Lee Rogers, chief of podiatry at UT Health San Antonio, urged in a letter to the state health services agency and local officials in Frio County, where Dilley is located, that an “immediate, unified public health command-and-control” was necessary.

“In this setting, the public health emergency is more dire than a typical outbreak because congregate detention creates near-universal exposure risk, while overlapping federal-state operational lines risk delaying decisive outbreak control,” Rogers wrote. “This has the potential to quickly overwhelm local health resources, including at [San Antonio’s] University Hospital.”

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat who visited Liam last week and accompanied the family to Minneapolis, urged federal officials to immediately shut down the facility.

"Because of the close-quarter conditions at Dilley, lack of prompt medical response and capacity, and lack of expertise with diseases such as measles, Dilley is not equipped to combat any spread," he posted on X.

He said that ICE confirmed that no one detained at Dilley faces criminal accusations, but merely have immigration offenses, which is a civil matter.

Anyone diagnosed with measles should be moved to a facility with the "medical capacity for proper treatment and containment," Castro said. "The men, women, and children who have not been diagnosed with measles should no longer be detained at Dilley for their own safety."

Neha Desai, a lawyer for the National Center for Youth Law which represents children in immigration custody, said that for months, she and other lawyers have been “deeply concerned about the health of children and families at Dilley given the substandard medical care.”

“Some children have come in sick and have gotten worse while detained,” Desai said. “Others have come in relatively healthy and become seriously ill while detained. The active measles infections at Dilley have only exacerbated our grave concerns. This is an untenable situation with a simple solution -- families should never be detained.”

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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.