The Forum Daily | Wednesday, February 11, 2026https://www.forumtogether.org

According to a lawsuit filed Friday, an 18-month-old being detained with her parents was rushed to the hospital with respiratory failure only to be sent back to detention and refused medication, reports Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News [link removed]. 

Amalia was rushed from the Dilley detention facility in Texas to a San Antonio hospital Jan. 18 and returned Jan. 28, per the suit. She was freed from detention Friday in response to an emergency habeas corpus petition. 

It’s among the latest examples of concerns for children at Dilley, Hixenbaugh and his NBC News colleague Daniella Silva reported [link removed] — and as we’ve highlighted from Mica Rosenberg of ProPublica [link removed]. 

Lisa Desjardins of PBS News [link removed] interviews Jackie Merlos, who was detained with her four U.S. citizen children in Tacoma, Washington. The children were released after two weeks, while Merlos, who has applied for a U visa [link removed](Victims%20of%20Criminal%20Activity), was detained for more than three months. 

In just a small sample of other impacts related to children, families and their communities: 

* Dozens of Kids Entered Foster Care After Immigration Agents Detained Their Parents [link removed] (Jackie Llanos, NOTUS). 

* Exclusive: HISD has lost nearly 4,000 immigrant students amid ICE crackdown: 'We fear coming to school' (Claire Partain and Julián Aguilar, Houston Chronicle [link removed]) 

* In Minnesota, sending a child to school is an act of faith for immigrant families [link removed] (Bianca Vázquez Toness, Associated Press) 

* Minnesota child care providers try to make ends meet as immigrant families keep kids home [link removed] (Madison McVan, Minnesota Reformer) 

The resulting trauma can be ongoing, pediatricians Andrew D. Racine, Sural Shah and Kimberly Mukerjee write in a USA Today [link removed] op-ed: Enforcement actions "deprive children in immigrant families and their neighbors of a sense of safety — an essential pillar of a young child’s growth and development." 

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The Forum Daily. I'm Dan Gordon, and the great Forum Daily team also includes Jillian Clark, Nicci Mattey, Malaika Onyia, Luisa Sinisterra and Clara Villatoro. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. 

**POPULATION GROWTH** — In many small towns and rural communities, immigration remains essential to keeping a robust population, report Holly Edgell and Daniel Wheaton of Iowa Public Radio [link removed]. "If it weren’t for immigration, rural areas in Iowa would have shrunk by probably 10 to 12% in the last decade," said Iowa State University professor David Peters. "Instead, they only shrank by 2%." In Florida, even as population growth decreased 56% last year, 90.1% of the growth came from immigration, reports Tom Hudson of WLRN [link removed]. 

**PRACTICES AND PRIORITIES** — The expansion of immigration enforcement raises national security concerns, Council on National Security and Immigration leader Theresa Cardinal Brown writes in a new white paper [link removed]. The administration’s shifts in priorities also have meant the loss of many staff who helped keep immigration processes moving, report Andrea Fuller, Albert Sun and Eileen Sullivan of The New York Times [link removed]. And administration immigration officials faced tough questions in yesterday’s congressional hearing, report Rebecca Santana, Lisa Mascaro and Meg Kinnard of the Associated Press [link removed].  

**DEFYING THE COURTS **— The administration "has slow-walked or outright defied judges’ orders [link removed]" regarding immigration detainees, Kyle Cheney of Politico [link removed] reports after the outlet reviewed hundreds of cases. "There has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights," one U.S. district court judge said in a recent order. 

**ECONOMIC HIT **— Trade groups in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley say increased immigration enforcement in the area is hurting the local economy, report Elizabeth Findell and Ruth Simon of The Wall Street Journal [link removed]. Delayed building projects are triggering a domino effect, with related businesses also suffering. "They are basically taking everyone in there working, whether they have proper documentation or not," said Mario Guerrero, chief executive of the South Texas Builders Association. 

Thanks for reading, 

Dan 

**P.S. **If you’re tuning in to the Olympics like we are, you’ll be interested in the number of U.S. Olympians who are foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Marissa Kiss and Jim Witte of George Mason University have the numbers in their Tribune News Service [link removed] piece. 

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