The Scripps News ICE Inc. investigation cast a light on the business of immigration detention, exposing record revenues for corporate owners of jails given government contracts to help carry out President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The investigation traveled across the country, unearthing mounting evidence of inhumane conditions and lack of accountability inside private immigration detention centers as investors benefited from record revenues from tax dollars.

As the investigation moves beyond the one-year mark, Scripps News is continuing to follow the money, examine the contracts and investigate the human impact of a rapidly growing detention system.

The Dilley detention center in Texas, owned by the CoreCivic company, is the only lockup designed specifically to hold children with their families. It is where two teenaged star Mariachi brothers and Liam Ramos, detained in Minneapolis wearing a bunny hat, were held.

A longstanding court order has said children should not be kept in ICE detention for more than 20 days, but Scripps News found hundreds of children being held at Dilley for months. First responder records and audio of 911 calls revealed children and pregnant women were in medical distress at Dilley time and again.

“I’m calling for a little kid going through respiratory distress,” a Dilley employee is heard in one 911 call.

“And how old is the child?” the dispatcher asks.

“17 months,” the caller replies.

Parents spoke to Scripps News about their own first-hand experience trying to keep their children’s spirits up while locked at Dilley for weeks.

“I feel like it hit all of them deeply, but mostly the youngest,” said Aury Cadena, a mother who spent 50 days detained at Dilley, referring to her son. “’I want to go out! I want to go out!’ he was screaming, screaming. They would ask, mom, what did we do? And I'd say, well, I didn't know how to answer other than telling them that we came here without authorization.”

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Scripps News captured the voices of other children in drawings included in court filings.

“When will we go home?” a child wrote in crayon in one picture.

As the federal government sought more bed space, the private detention system grew faster, especially in the Texas desert where Scripps News discovered an unmarked plane offloading handcuffed immigrants at the El Paso airport. Some of the detainees were still wearing their work shirts.

ICE was bringing them to Camp East Montana, the nation’s largest immigration detention center. An obscure company called Acquisition Logistics LLC won a $1.2 billion no-bid contract to stand up the soft-sided facilities designed to house thousands of migrants.

Scripps News spoke to detainees by phone that described undrinkable water, leaking bunk rooms and other alarming conditions at a camp still under construction when they arrived.

"I’ve been here for about three weeks with a great pain in my throat and my chest,” one detainee said.

Three detainees held at Camp East Montana died. A local autopsy said the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos was the result of homicide.

Exclusive photos of the scene, autopsy documents and 911 audio obtained by Scripps News revealed a possible cover-up by guards.

“He tried to hang himself and then we put him in cuffs and he kept going,” an employee at Camp East Montana tells a 911 dispatcher when calling in the emergency.

"Hung himself, okay,” the dispatcher says.

"I don't have the details, I have none of the details,” the caller at the detention center replies. "I don’t want to lie to you, you know what I mean?”

RELATED STORY | ICE now says immigrant detainee died after 'spontaneous use of force'

Scripps News broke the story of ICE publishing a document that said Campos' death was from a “spontaneous use of force.” Scripps News was also first to report about a government review finding 49 violations of national detention standards at Camp East Montana.

The Campos case and other deaths raised a broader question: When something goes wrong inside a private detention center, who is responsible — and who is held accountable?

In southwest Georgia, the ICE Inc. investigation found evidence to suggest detainees at CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center are not always able to get “timely access” to emergency medical care as required by law.

A 911 call revealed a dispatcher struggling to find a way to transport three detainees who needed emergency medical care.

“I know we can get one ambulance over there, so I don’t know, we’re going to have to get mutual aid for another one,” the dispatcher says. “We only have one ambulance in the county.”

Records showed Stewart County unable to provide one of their own ambulances for emergencies at Stewart Detention Center more than a dozen times.

MORE | The collected ICE Inc. investigations

The problems identified by the ICE Inc. investigation were not confined to a single facility or just one state.

Chinese immigrant Chaofeng Ge died by suicide at the Moshannon Valley ICE detention center in rural Pennsylvania owned by the GEO Group. In his first television interview, his brother said Chaofeng had clearly been in distress.

“He was suffering too much in there,” Yanfeng Ge said.

Guards turned away Scripps News journalists who traveled to Moshannon, but a tip led the team to look for habeas corpus filings available in person only inside a courthouse in rural Pennsylvania.

The filings and interviews revealed immigrants reporting inadequate mental health care in the weeks before Choafeng Ge completed suicide.

"Being here makes me feel more depressed,” a detainee said in a phone interview. “I'm far away from my two kids. I can't reach my children, I can’t see my children.”

RELATED STORY | Autopsy raises questions about death at private ICE detention center

Again and again, Scripps News found critical details about immigration not through routine disclosure but through court files and public records requests.

The Department of Homeland Security, CoreCivic and GEO Group consistently defend the level of care for all detainees they dispute all claims about inhumane conditions.

"We run the finest facilities everywhere in the world of their type,” President Trump told reporters during a Cabinet meeting in May. “But we have some horrible killers, killers, guys that have murdered numerous people in there. And these are the people they’re trying to protect. There’s nobody that runs a facility like we do.”

The Trump Administration has fought against alternatives to detention that would allow immigrants to stay in their homes while being monitored by ICE as their deportation cases play out in court.

Add to that overwhelmed immigration courts and people can spend months locked up unless they decide to voluntarily leave the country.

After a year of reporting, Scripps News continues to follow a central question: As private detention companies collect billions in taxpayer dollars, is there enough transparency and accountability for what happens behind their fences?