Edgarianny Cortez Gervis and her daughter were going hungry.

The pair from Venezuela were being held at a federal immigration detention facility in Dilley, Texas, and beginning to lose weight. Cortez Gervis was pregnant and struggled to keep down the rice and meat mash that workers served in the cafeteria. Her child barely ate and was suffering from diarrhea.

Then Cortez Gervis learned about a woman who deposited money into detainees’ commissary accounts so that they could purchase bottled water, ramen noodles and other foods their children liked. She didn’t know her name or how to contact her. But she heard she’d been sustaining hundreds of families by offering them an alternative to the cafeteria food no one seemed to tolerate. Soon she was getting help, too.

“If she doesn’t deposit, I have nothing,” Cortez Gervis said in a recent phone call from the detention center.

It’s all the quiet work of Casey Revkin, a self-described California mom who began helping immigrant children about a decade ago. Early last year, she learned that the Department of Homeland Security had reopened the South Texas Family Residential Center to house the rising number of children being held with their parents while waiting for their immigration cases to be adjudicated. Parents reported finding cockroaches in their food and said their children were vomiting after drinking the tap water. Some children were so depressed that they weren’t eating at all.

“I wanted to help fix some of that,” Revkin said. “I comfort myself with the fact that I am doing something, making these children’s lives a little easier in these horrible circumstances.”

Revkin is now sending more than $10,000 a week through her nonprofit, Each Step Home, to families being held at Dilley so that they can buy food and other essentials at the commissary. Over the last seven months, she said she has helped families buy everything from candy bars for birthdays to nasal sprays for children suffering in the dusty Texas landscape.

“She’s a fairy godmother,” said Kristin Etter, an attorney with the Texas Immigration Law Council. “People literally could not survive in Dilley without her.”

Detainees in federal immigration detention across the country have reported getting sick after consuming food that was spoiled, infested with bugs or not fully cooked. The solution, for many people, has been to buy food from the commissary, but advocates and detainees say the prices are inflated. A bowl of instant noodles, for example, cost $1.11 a unit in January, according to receipts Revkin shared with The Washington Post. The unit price at a Texas grocery is nearly half that.

Revkin said she became aware of the issue after reading about Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy detained while returning from preschool during DHS’s surge in Minneapolis. He had gotten sick while being detained with his father at Dilley. Revkin knew the family detention center from her work helping immigrant parents who were separated from their children during the first Trump administration.

Now Revkin saw an opportunity to help families again. She reached out to her network of immigration lawyers, advocates and lawmakers and began inquiring about how to fill someone’s commissary account. Dilley and other facilities use third-party software systems that allow individuals to deposit funds for a specific detainee. Her first deposit went to the family of a 2-month-old boy with a respiratory infection. Soon thereafter she began hearing from lawyers and families about other children detained at Dilley who were in need.

The number of children in ICE custody has increased significantly during President Donald Trump’s second term. Revkin regularly sends money to 67 families a week, helping a total of nearly 80 children at Dilley. She said funds for the donations come from every day people who learn about the campaign online and give small dollar donations through her nonprofit.

Immigrant families moving in and out of Dilley pass along Revkin’s contact information to each other. Attorneys also reach out to Revkin and ask for help with a specific child. Revkin communicates directly with some families through the detention center’s messaging portals.

Many times they ask for help with basics like toothbrushes. Other times the requests are more personal.

There was the plea from the mother of a 3-year-old boy who had nothing to celebrate his birthday. She asked for a few dollars to buy him candy bars. Another family bought cookies they smashed into pieces to fashion a crude cake to mark their father’s birthday.

The Dilley detention facility is run by CoreCivic, a private for-profit company, and company officials said they provide basic necessities such as bed linens, personal hygiene products and showers. Company spokesman Ryan Gustin refuted claims about poor food and water quality, saying independent tests show the water is clean, filtered and sourced by the same utilities used for the surrounding community. The rotating menu of “nutritious” meals are inspected for quality and freshness, he said, and include a salad bar and fruits available daily.

Gustin said commissary goods are sold at prices aligned with convenience store merchandise, and that CoreCivic’s staff conducts price assessments every two years. Proceeds from the sales go into the facility’s “resident welfare fund” to buy items such as books.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said all detainees receive clean water and three meals a day evaluated by certified dietitians.

“Dilley does meet federal detention standards and actually undergoes regular audits and inspections,” the statement said. “Being in detention is a choice.”

Revkin started her nonprofit in 2018. Through social media, she connected with other mothers who were outraged by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to several thousand children being separated from their parents.

Revkin said she has visited Dilley and witnessed the toll detention takes on parents and children. Families at the facility are largely kept in trailers, and parents said the bathrooms frequently become filthy and that stressed children routinely wet their beds.

They also told her that basic items the facility provides like toothbrushes broke easily and that they didn’t get enough toothpaste.

A number of the families at Dilley have been held beyond the 21-day limit established by the Flores Settlement Agreement, she said. The federal consent decree has set basic standards for the detention of migrant children and teenagers by the United States since 1997. Their testimonies are now documented in federal court filings. The Trump administration has rejected allegations that children are being held for extended periods of time as a “hoax.”

Revkin said she has been in contact with families from 26 countries, including Nepal, China, Jordan, Iran and Ukraine. She said she tries not to ask too many questions because calls are monitored by detention officials. But she nonetheless tries to get to know them in a way that feels personable.

“I ask them what their favorite movie is, what music they like or what sports team they follow,” she said. “I got to humanize these families.”

Revkin noted that many detainees, like the Cortez Gervis family, were allowed into the country on parole and were following ICE check-in protocols. Some nights she said she cries herself to sleep thinking about it all.

“We are not asking to abolish ICE or change the system,” she said. “We are saying stop locking up children. There are humane alternatives that allow people to live freely while their cases are adjudicated.”

For Cortez Gervis, each day stuck in detention is one more than she worries about her children — both the one sitting next to her and the one still in her belly. Her 7-year-old daughter told her she wants to die last month. This past week, ICE gathered the family to leave on what they hoped would be a deportation flight. Instead they were eventually taken back to the family detention center.

Their commissary account was back to zero. The little girl is devastated. She thought she was going home.

Revkin learned what happened and deposited $100 in their account.