“We have been here for nine months. I really miss playing with my toys and my watch,” wrote the 9-year-old. “Please get us out of here.”

“I have seen with my own eyes, food that has mold in it. I even saw food with actual worms,” the 16-year-old said.

“I miss my bear,” scrawled one of the 5-year-old twins.

“I want to go home,” his sibling wrote.

These are among the exclusive accounts from an Egyptian family imprisoned at the nation’s only family detention center for more than nine months, believed to be the longest held in that South Texas facility during President Donald Trump’s second administration. The declarations, which span 59 pages, include hand-written letters and pictures drawn by the five children. They were first obtained by The Texas Tribune before lawyers submit them to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Wednesday.

Taken together, the family’s accounts provide what lawyers and child advocates call new and disturbing details into the conditions at the detention center in Dilley, about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio. The family, including the mother Hayam El Gamal and her five children ranging in ages from 5 to 18, detail what they describe as abhorrent medical care, inedible food and a disregard for their religious freedom as Muslims.

“This prolonged detention has and continues to destroy our lives. It is slowly killing us on the inside,” the 16-year-old boy wrote in a letter submitted Wednesday. “Our mental health is at great risk. It is rapidly deteriorating with every day we spend here. Our lives are without purpose. We are just waiting for this nightmare to end.”

The family was detained after the father, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was charged with attacking mostly Jewish protestors at a Boulder, Colo., event last June, accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at demonstrators supporting Israeli hostages. He allegedly wounded at least 29 people and an 82-year-old woman died from her injuries. The father, who has pleaded innocent, remains in federal custody on more than 100 charges related to the incident.

His wife, who wrote that she met her husband through an arranged marriage, and their children have repeatedly denied knowledge of his attack. They have consistently said that the father was emotionally and physically absent and barely spoke to them. The family has since disavowed the father and is no longer in contact with him, their attorney said.

“We are six innocent people, including 5-years-old twins, trapped in a nightmare we didn’t create,” wrote Habiba El Gamal, the 18-year-old daughter.

The family has been held at Dilley since last June – far longer than the average stay there that the Department of Homeland Security maintains is about two weeks. A decades-old federal settlement agreement holds that parents and children can generally not be detained together for more than 20 days in immigration facilities, but the Trump administration is seeking to end that ruling in court. At Dilley, lawyers say, the administration has violated that agreement many times, forcing ongoing litigation.

"The five El Gamal children have been detained at the Dilley concentration camp for nine months and counting,” their attorney, Michigan-based Eric Lee, said in a statement. “Their letters will be read by future generations as proof that they were victims and witnesses of a great historic crime.”

Spokespeople for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the facility, did not immediately respond to questions about the allegations. Neither did spokespeople for CoreCivic, the multibillion-dollar private prison company that runs the detention center. Previously, DHS spokespeople have defended the care of immigrants in their facilities as the “best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.” Spokespeople for CoreCivic, which runs among the most ICE detention centers in the country, including several in Texas, have refuted the allegations about Dilley, saying, "comprehensive, around-the-clock care is delivered by licensed physicians, dentists, advanced practice providers, nurses, and mental health professionals.”

The El Gamal family’s declarations come as the Dilley facility has faced increasing scrutiny of its care for the more than 3,000 parents and children held there on any given day, many of whom have lived in the United States for years and were detained under Trump’s recent interior crackdown on illegal immigration. The conditions, which are alleged to include impotable water, inadequate health care, and prolonged detention, has made detention at the Dilley facility increasingly dangerous, attorneys and detainees said.

“Their bodies and minds are being destroyed by the White House and they'll never fully recover,” Lee said in an interview. “It keeps me up at night knowing that it is possible that any day, I could get a call saying that one of these kids has taken their life.”

Hayam said that her 5-year-old son, who was potty trained, started wetting himself. His twin sister wakes up at least three times a night, screaming that she is “chased by something but can’t escape because of the fence and locked gates.”

The Dilley detention center, which the Trump administration reopened last year after President Joe Biden’s government shuttered it following years of complaints, reentered the public consciousness after photos of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a blue hat and Spider-Man backpack, went viral following his January arrest in Minneapolis. He and his father were sent to the facility, but following widespread public alarm, were quickly released while their asylum cases proceed in the courts. This week, an award-winning South Texas mariachi family who had been invited to perform at the White House were similarly freed from Dilley after congressional intervention, including from U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, a Republican facing a competitive reelection in South Texas.

Yet the El Gamal family remains locked up in this cordoned-off prison surrounded by vast Texas brushland that was temporarily shuttered last month due to a measles outbreak.

The El Gamal mother and her five children, along with their attorneys, said that here they suffer ongoing torment. Despite immigration judges ruling that they should be released while their cases proceed through the courts, the administration has repeatedly sought to block their freedom. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who the administration abruptly ousted this month, has previously accused the family of knowing about their father’s crimes, despite their repeated declarations otherwise.

Lee, the family’s attorney, said that the family refuses to speak with the father.

“They're very clear that he ruined their lives, and they want nothing to do with him,” he said.

"This place broke something in us"

Hayam El Gamal met her husband when she was 22 in Egypt and said she was pressured into an arranged marriage with a man she barely knew, she wrote. They had five children.

The wife soon discovered that her husband was closed off and did not emotionally meet her needs, according to her submitted declaration, and she considered divorce, but felt pressured because of their children and the financial burden.

In 2022, the couple came to the U.S. on a tourist visa, which the government argues later expired, making their stay in this country illegal. Before that visa ended, however, the family’s attorney argued that the family applied for asylum, as is allowed by law. Their attorney contends that they have a valid claim based on the father’s political views supportive of the previous president and the gender biases faced by women in Egypt.

In May, Habiba, the eldest daughter, graduated, was chosen as one of the “best and brightest” students in the state and was recognized by a picture with the mayor with a scholarship from the Colorado Springs Gazette.

She wants to be a doctor and dreams of Harvard medical school.

“In one minute our entire lives were changed and our plans and dreams were destroyed,” wrote Habiba, who was separated from her family at the detention center after she spoke out about conditions earlier this year.

She added, “this place broke something in us. Something that I don’t know if we will ever be able to fix.”

Among the complaints was finding a fingernail in her food and that her siblings frequently cry because there isn’t enough to eat. Her 16-year-old brother wrote that he’s lost 20 pounds while detained and that he saw mold and worms in food.

“If we didn’t have some money to buy instant noddles (sic,) they won’t eat anything,” the daughter said.

Unlike many families detained at Dilley, the El Gamals have a big support system in Colorado that has raised about $100,000 for them on a GoFundMe site and petitioned to take in the family as vetted sponsors.

That community support, and the possibility of their danger back in Egypt, makes the decisions by immigration judges and federal officials even more egregious and confusing, the family’s lawyer said.

“This family cannot go to Egypt,” the attorney said. “I see a lot of asylum cases. I know the difference between a legitimate asylum claim and a not legitimate one, or one that has a very low chance. And these are very strong asylum claims.”

“I can’t help you”

In the nine months that the El Gamal family have been detained at Dilley, they said they have experienced deteriorating medical care. 

The 16-year-old son, who described suffering from appendicitis, wrote that he began feeling “severe abdominal pain” one morning and was unable to walk to the medical unit. Hours later, he was brought in a wheel chair to see a nurse who he said told him, “‘I can’t help you. Go and come back if you still have pain in 3 days.’”

“I then fell to my hands and knees and threw up inside the waiting room,” the teen wrote. “It was only then that I was taken seriously and transferred to a nearby ER.”

The family also testified about one of the 5-year-old’s persisting dental issues. The youngest girl was scheduled to get a procedure before their detention to take care of 13 cavities. In detention, however, she has been denied treatment, the mother said, even as her daughter’s pain has worsened.

“The dentist only prescribed ibuprofen,” the mother wrote. “I told him I was scared the cavities would require root canals if left untreated but he said he would try to treat them at the facility, even though the facility has no means to treat children’s dental pain.”

The accusations about poor dental care come after a 56-year-old Haitian man died at an ICE facility in Arizona last week following a tooth infection that was left untreated, according to his family. Emmanuel Damas is among at least 23 fatalities in ICE custody since September, marking a record in more than two decades. Since December, at least six people have died in ICE detention in Texas alone, three of them at the troubled Camp East Montana tent camp in El Paso with one ruled a homicide involving the facility’s staff.

At the same time, the mother in Dilley said that she has repeatedly complained about spots on her body and face for the past two months that a doctor believed was stress related. She said she was prescribed a temporary treatment and referred to a dermatologist, but that treatment was delayed for weeks because it was unavailable. Dilley’s medical department recorded in Hayam’s case that she refused treatment, she said.

“Also I have a weird bump under my rib cage,” she wrote, adding that she explained her family had a history of cancer. Instead she was provided Ibuprofen and despite a doctor’s referral for a comprehensive scan, was denied multiple times for that procedure.

The government last fall temporarily stopped paying many medical providers due to bureaucratic changes under the administration. As a result, ICE for months has been unable to reimburse health care officials, including for prescription medication, dialysis and chemotherapy, according to redacted ICE documents first reported by Popular Information.

“I am still suffering and waiting,” Hayam said in her letter. “I feel helpless and frustrated, taking steroids for my pain without knowing what is truly wrong with my body.”

The conditions, are particularly difficult for the women in the family who are Muslim, as Islam encourages women to cover their hair and bodies in front of men to whom they are not related. 

The El Gamal mother described male officers walking into her room while she was sleeping, and her daughter only being given heavy sweaters to cover her in the blistering Texas summer, despite requests for lightweight clothing to cover her body. The family was forced to eat food “contrary to [their] religion for months, until after many complaints, halal food was finally provided.” 

“I wondered how we could survive in a place that does not respect privacy or religious rights,” the mother wrote.

The five children remain hopeless at Dilley, where they have seen their friends released. As one of the longest held families at that facility, they have become known as the “leaders,” their attorneys said, people from whom newcomers can seek advice.

But as they keep losing friends, and their future remains uncertain, the children are becoming increasingly desperate and their attorneys are concerned.

A 13-year-old friend of the family, for example, was deported to Colombia last month after attempting suicide with the facility’s plastic silverware, said one of the lawyers. Like her, several El Gamal children have expressed increasing disillusionment with their fate.

“We forgot what it feels like to be free,” Habiba, the family’s eldest daughter, wrote. “We miss what it feels like to wake up in our own beds with our phones next to us. We dream about how we want our first meal together as a family to be pizza and then cake. We dream of a time when each one of us will be in school and will be able to work on his future. We dream of a normal life where we still are able to make a difference in the world.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.