While the United States is likely to soon lose its measles elimination status and the Trump administration continues to undermine public confidence in vaccines, two people detained at an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas have active measles infections.
ELIZABETH JACOBS; [email protected]
Jacobs is Professor Emerita of Epidemiology at the University of Arizona and a founding member of Defend Public Health.
Jacobs wrote on Bluesky: “This has the potential to be very serious. Somehow I don’t have a lot of faith in the ‘ICE Health Services Corps.’”
Jacobs told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “The media should be taking a very hard look at the disease outbreaks currently going on in ICE detention centers. It was brought to my attention that ICE’s healthcare services [ICE Health Service Corps] has changed its language. In a nutshell, ICE health services used to indicate that they were dedicated to providing healthcare, but now they state that their role is for ‘assessing alien’s fitness for travel,’ which is offensive. It has nothing to do with providing healthcare anymore. I’ve never seen one of the detention centers in person, but from the photos I have seen, I cannot even guess how they think they are going to isolate and quarantine enough in these facilities, given the conditions, to stop an airborne illness.
“Those cases could explode soon. Many countries that migrants come from may have vaccine programs that are better than the U.S.’s, and it’s also possible that migrants have been unable to get their kids, in particular, vaccinated in the U.S. This is U.S.-borne illness. Bad actors are going to focus on the idea that migrants are spreading disease. The media needs to be really alert to that narrative. Americans spread it; these migrants got measles in the U.S. This is a homegrown problem, and it’s not their fault.”
Jacobs added that ICE stopped paying contractors that provide medical treatment for detainees in October 2025.
“This is another example of ICE’s complete inhumanity. This is not a group of people dedicated to public health. It’s vile.”