{"id":908,"date":"2026-07-13T10:07:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=908"},"modified":"2026-07-13T10:07:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:07:22","slug":"locked-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=908","title":{"rendered":"Locked Away"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In an office park in El Paso, Texas, across the street from the Nuevo Amanecer Church, is a one-story white stucco building with a scuffed metal door. A small sign decorated with a drawing of a globe hangs above the entrance, announcing the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. ISAP<\/em>, as it\u2019s known to roughly two hundred thousand enrollees, is an initiative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement\u2014an alternative to detention which allows immigrants with open or unresolved legal cases to live freely while checking in with officials a few times a year. It began, in 2004, with a simple premise: the federal government cannot jail everyone it might want to deport.<\/p>\n

Read more The Remaking of Lindsey Graham<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the program\u2019s participants, Rey, is a Cuban in his mid-fifties who came to the U.S. in 1994. Shortly after arriving, he was involved in a robbery in Florida. He served a five-year prison sentence, but, because Cuba didn\u2019t co\u00f6perate with American authorities, he could not be deported. Instead, he was authorized to remain in the country. In 2014, Rey moved to El Paso, where he worked as a truck driver and began making regular visits to the local ISAP<\/em> office. \u201cMy friends would tell me, \u2018Are you crazy? One day they\u2019re going to arrest you,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said recently. \u201cI would tell them, \u2018If, when we were young, we did things wrong, now we have to do things the right way.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

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Rey, who is tall, heavyset, and bald, with a baritone voice, is a laid-back optimist. He and his wife, a U.S. citizen whom I\u2019ll call Sara, met at a weekly salsa night at an El Paso bar. She was struck by his unhesitating generosity. \u201cRey is the kind of person who, if he has something, he\u2019ll give it to you,\u201d she said. In El Paso, Rey went on to open a Cuban pizzeria, a night club, and trash-collection and furniture-restoration businesses. \u201cMy wife calls me a dreamer,\u201d he told me. They got married a decade ago, when Sara\u2019s son was a year old. \u201cWe eventually told him that Rey wasn\u2019t his biological father, but he didn\u2019t care,\u201d Sara said. \u201cAs far as he was concerned, Rey was always his dad and always would be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last October, Rey\u2019s case manager at ISAP<\/em> called and asked him to stop by for an appointment. He arrived between errands, having just taken his son to school and carrying two thousand dollars in his pocket, a payment for a new pizza oven. \u201cI was running around like crazy,\u201d he said. It was also Sara\u2019s birthday; they were supposed to meet for lunch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Rey spent a few minutes in the waiting room of the ISAP<\/em> office\u2014a drab space with bare blue-and-white walls and two rows of chairs\u2014before an official summoned him inside. \u201cWalk down that hallway,\u201d he told him. A group of ICE<\/em> agents was waiting. \u201cNo one explained what was happening,\u201d Rey told me. They put him in handcuffs and led him to a van that was loaded with people. A woman inside was sobbing as she told the agents that her three children were currently in school. \u201cWhat are they going to do?\u201d she asked. \u201cWho\u2019s going to pick them up?\u201d<\/p>\n

By two o\u2019clock that afternoon, Sara hadn\u2019t heard from Rey and decided to drive to the ISAP<\/em> office. His car was still in the parking lot. Inside, an official gave Sara the address of a detention center. When she got there, another official told her that family visits were conducted alphabetically, by detainees\u2019 last names; she\u2019d have to come a different day for Rey\u2019s turn. Sara, a college graduate who works for the State of Texas, is pragmatic and personable. \u201cYou have a computer,\u201d she replied. \u201cCan you just do me the favor of telling me if my husband is being held here?\u201d The official refused. Sara went to another detention center in the area, where she was told that Rey was at the place she\u2019d just left. When she returned to the first jail, an official directed her to a side door of the building. A man in a khaki uniform emerged and handed her a ziplock bag containing Rey\u2019s wallet, which was empty, and the shoelaces from his sneakers.<\/p>\n

A few hours later, Rey and more than a dozen other detainees were driven ten minutes east, to a facility where he would spend the next six weeks. It was down a long, barren drive, almost a mile from the main road, and sealed off behind a metal gate. Four large white tents stood in an imposing line, flanked by a few small buildings. The desolate surroundings scared some of the others, but Rey, whose pizzeria was nearby, recognized where they were\u2014at a military base called Fort Bliss.<\/p>\n

Last summer, the Trump Administration picked Fort Bliss to be the site of the largest immigrant-detention center in the country. ICE<\/em> was ramping up arrests nationwide, and the government, in search of more space to hold people, opted to erect tents\u2014known in government parlance as \u201csoft-sided facilities\u201d\u2014at military installations and close to existing ICE<\/em> jails. \u201cThe idea seemed to be: How can we do this as cheaply and brutally as possible?\u201d Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE<\/em> official, told me. Fort Bliss\u2019s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, and its considerable size, made it an obvious place to start. (It also has a loaded history: during the Second World War, fifty-six U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were interned on the premises as \u201cenemy aliens.\u201d) ICE<\/em> already had a detention center nearby, on Montana Avenue. The agency called the new installation, a sprawling tent complex that could hold up to five thousand people, Camp East Montana.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The contract for running Camp East Montana was worth more than a billion dollars. Initially, the Department of Defense awarded it to Deployed Resources, a logistics contractor that had operated tent facilities during the Biden Administration. But the decision was almost immediately reversed. The Trump Administration claimed that it had cancelled the contract for technical reasons. Current and former ICE<\/em> officials, however, told me that Deployed Resources had landed on a \u201cno-contract list,\u201d because of its past association with the Biden White House. Among other things, one of the company\u2019s board members was married to a former chief of staff to Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris\u2019s husband.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, the contract went out a second time, and eleven companies placed bids. On July 18th, the Army announced the winner: a Virginia-based firm called Acquisition Logistics, which had no prior detention experience. The largest federal contract it had previously received\u2014a sixteen-million-dollar commission for program management at a California naval base\u2014was a fraction of the new project. Public databases listed between eight and fifty employees at the company, and the firm\u2019s official address was a modest gray house with red shutters in the suburbs of Richmond, which belonged to the company\u2019s founder and C.E.O., Kenneth Wagner, a seventy-eight-year-old Navy veteran.<\/p>\n

Wagner\u2019s sixty-page bid offered little more than a rhetorical embrace of the Administration\u2019s immigration policies. \u201cAny misstep by inexperienced contractors can be detrimental,\u201d creating political \u201cfodder\u201d that \u201cdetracts from, challenges, and slows down the exceptional work\u201d of ICE<\/em>, the proposal stated. Later, another government contractor filed a lawsuit claiming that Acquisition Logistics had failed to meet at least two of the bid\u2019s \u201csolicitation requirements.\u201d The Army responded, in writing, that the contract was consistent with a recent executive order titled \u201cProtecting the American People Against Invasion,\u201d and that any further delay would \u201cdirectly exacerbate the existing detention capacity crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scramble to ready the facility led to a string of other irregularities and mishaps. Flouting state legal requirements, Acquisition Logistics failed to register to operate in Texas, according to research by the nonprofit group Public Citizen. On July 21st, a thirty-eight-year-old construction worker named Hector Gonz\u00e1lez was crushed to death by falling building materials. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration later found three subcontractors responsible. One of them was owned by Nathan Albers, a Trump campaign donor who spent Election Night in 2024 at Mar-a-Lago. His companies had a raft of prior infractions, according to ProPublica<\/em>, ranging from employing undocumented workers to violating minimum-wage and overtime laws.<\/p>\n

The first detainees who were taken to Camp East Montana, in early August, arrived at an active construction site. They were kept awake at night by the sounds of trucks and jackhammers. During the day, plumes of dust blanketed the facility. \u201cThis place does not seem to be designed for humans to be here,\u201d a Venezuelan father of two from Dallas told the American Civil Liberties Union in a sworn declaration.<\/p>\n

On August 4th, Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, made a formal request to visit the facility. \u201cWe tried to get in as soon as we learned that they were already holding detainees,\u201d she told me. Although members of Congress are, by law, allowed to inspect detention facilities, ICE<\/em> denied Escobar\u2019s request. In an e-mail, officials told her that the site was \u201cstill under construction and will not be operational\u201d until August 17th. But, as the Washington Post<\/em> later reported, fifteen people were already being held there. \u201cIt was definitely earlier than anticipated, including by the contractors,\u201d an Administration official told me. \u201cThe seventeenth is what we were expecting internally. Then ICE<\/em> just brought some people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lack of preparation made the conditions intolerable. Toilets wouldn\u2019t flush. Running water came sporadically. The detainees ate and slept next to the bathrooms; fetid water leaked into the dining area and under the beds. \u201cSince we are not given anything to mop up the dirty water, we have to use our own underwear and socks,\u201d a Cuban detainee said. He had pleaded with the guards to let him and the others go outside for recreation. Fifteen days passed before the men were allowed to leave the tent, and then only at night. \u201cI have not seen the sun for approximately one month,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The outdoor spaces hadn\u2019t been finished. Neither had the areas for visitation. Phone booths for making calls weren\u2019t yet set up, and tablets that detainees were given to call their lawyers didn\u2019t work. Most of the people inside had been transferred from the South Florida Detention Facility, another tent complex, which the government proudly called Alligator Alcatraz. But, for most of August, they were effectively off the grid. ICE<\/em>\u2019s detainee locator, which allows family members and lawyers to see where someone is being held, issued an error message for those who were now at Camp East Montana. This was seemingly by design, the Administration official told me. The system was generally supposed to show where a person was being held within seventy-two hours of his arrival at a new facility. Someone at ICE,<\/em> the official said, \u201cwent in and changed the settings and made it say, \u2018Call ICE<\/em> for details.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Rey arrived, in October, there had been so many complaints about conditions at Camp East Montana that both ICE<\/em> and the Government Accountability Office sent teams to conduct site visits. \u201cThe physical layout was a disaster,\u201d one of the officials who visited told me. A tent that was supposed to provide space for a barbershop, a law library, and religious services was closed because workers were using it as a staging area while they erected another tent to house more detainees. According to a G.A.O. report, ICE<\/em> officials were unaware of many of these problems, because the agency hadn\u2019t inspected the facility before it started sending detainees there. This itself was a breach of ICE<\/em> policy.<\/p>\n

The cells in the so-called Special Housing Unit, or SHU<\/em>, which were used for solitary confinement, had features that, the official said, would make it easier for someone in distress to commit suicide\u2014a handle on the door, a beam within reach of the bed. The cameras in that area still didn\u2019t work. \u201cYou\u2019re just putting people who are depressed and being kept alone in a room, and who, by the way, have nothing to do\u2014there was zero activity, the tablets didn\u2019t work, they never got to go outside, no books, no games, no TV\u2014you\u2019re leaving them in there and you\u2019re not watching them,\u201d the official said. \u201cWhen we left, we told our leadership that someone was going to kill himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Sara learned that Rey had been sent to Camp East Montana, she tried to comfort herself with the thought that her husband was a survivor. In 1994, at the age of twenty-one, he was one of some thirty-five thousand Cubans who fled the island for the United States on makeshift rafts; hundreds drowned attempting the trip. It was the peak of a decade-long crisis, which Fidel Castro, the country\u2019s leader, called the per\u00edodo especial<\/em>, a bald euphemism for the economic collapse that occurred in Cuba after the fall of its patron, the Soviet Union. Ten people from Rey\u2019s neighborhood in Havana, including his older half brother, were on his raft, which they had fashioned from a tractor tire. \u201cThere were moments when you really didn\u2019t know if you were going north or if you were going the wrong way, back to Cuba,\u201d he told me. At one point on the open sea, a smaller raft that had started to leak floated over, and a mother begged them to take her ten-year-old son. Rey and the others agreed, though they had to threaten the adults on the other raft not to jump aboard theirs, since the added weight would sink them all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The U.S. Coast Guard eventually intercepted Rey\u2019s raft, and he was taken to the American naval base in Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, where he spent the next eleven months. For much of that time, he couldn\u2019t communicate with his mother, who had stayed behind in Havana, or with his father, who lived in El Paso. Guant\u00e1namo, he told me, \u201cturned into a city where you had to make your own way.\u201d He and his friends banded together to fend off attacks from other internees. The men in Rey\u2019s group would chaperon the women around the base, watching the door when they used the bathroom. The biggest challenge, he said, was that \u201cyou didn\u2019t know when you\u2019d be able to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, Rey was sent to live with his father in El Paso. But their relationship became tense, and he moved to Miami, where he had friends from Havana. These were wayward years: he took odd jobs and lived in a cramped apartment with roommates. He got arrested while driving a car full of stolen goods. After half a decade in prison, he returned to El Paso, where he briefly lived with a half sister before striking out on his own.<\/p>\n

As a former internee at Guant\u00e1namo and a onetime federal inmate, Rey had enough experience to be immediately alarmed by the chaos at Camp East Montana. There was no formal intake process for new arrivals and no orientation to explain how things worked. When the guards took Rey\u2019s cash, he asked them for an official receipt listing the amount. They told him not to worry. \u201cOf course I\u2019m worried,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s two thousand dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rey has diabetes and high blood pressure. He took a battery of medications, including two separate pills for diabetes and an antibiotic to address an earlier infection, all of which were at home with Sara. He tried to tell a guard about his medical conditions. \u201cHere\u2019s my wife\u2019s number,\u201d he said. \u201cPlease call her.\u201d The guard replied, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be doing that.\u201d Rey spent his first night sleeping on the floor of a holding cell with twenty other men. \u201cYou didn\u2019t have a blanket\u2014it was cold. And you were hungry,\u201d he said. \u201cI could begin to feel the coldness of a prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every tent at Camp East Montana was divided into a dozen units, each containing about thirty-five bunk beds topped with thin pallets. When Rey was transferred from the holding cell to Tent C, he asked which bed was his. \u201cWhatever one you find empty,\u201d he was told. Rey knew more about his rights than the average detainee, and he tended to ask pointed questions. How could he make his first phone call? \u201cIt\u2019s with a tablet,\u201d the guard replied. But to access the tablet each detainee needed a pin<\/em>, and it could take up to a week for a pin<\/em> to be issued. \u201cDuring that time, my family won\u2019t know where I am?\u201d Rey asked. \u201cExactly,\u201d the guard replied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the ironies of the facility was that, for an ICE<\/em> jail, actual ICE<\/em> officers were scarce. Instead, the detainees interacted with private contractors from multiple companies. Loyal Source was responsible for medical care; Amentum managed logistics, from I.T. to housing. The security guards, who were employed by Akima Global Services, were distinguishable by the color of their shirts.<\/p>\n

One night, Rey was lying in bed when an older man in a wheelchair entered the tent. The unit was nearly full, and the only empty spaces were on the top bunks. Rey walked over to a guard to say that the man in the wheelchair needed help finding a place to sleep. The guard shrugged. \u201cIt always came back to the same thing,\u201d Rey told me. \u201cThey weren\u2019t prepared.\u201d Someone eventually tossed the man a mattress pad, and he slept on the floor.<\/p>\n

Without his medication, Rey often felt dizzy and weak. The guards told him to submit a formal request to see a doctor. He did so, but days passed without a response. He began to have trouble urinating, which was especially concerning: three months earlier, he\u2019d been hospitalized with a similar problem that had led to sepsis, and doctors had inserted a catheter. \u201cSincerely, these are simple things,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut the system turned them into something grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

One morning in early November, after Rey had been in detention for about a week, the guards ordered everyone in his unit to go outside to the yard while the staff cleaned the tent. Rey refused to leave his bed. A higher-ranking official came over and demanded to know what the problem was. \u201cMy reason is very simple,\u201d Rey said. \u201cI am diabetic. I need my medicine.\u201d The guard replied, \u201cI understand, but tomorrow we\u2019ll resolve your problem. Right now, you need to leave the unit.\u201d Rey complied, but the next day nothing happened. The following week, he once more refused to leave his bed during the cleaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou again?\u201d the guard said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it\u2019s you again,\u201d Rey replied. \u201cYou told me one thing, and nada. Don\u2019t waste your time with me. If you want to send me to the hole, do it. But I need my medicine. My wife is outside, very worried. And all I\u2019m asking for is my medicine.\u201d Rey spent the next eight hours in the SHU<\/em>; afterward, he was sent back to his tent without any medication. \u201cLook,\u201d one of the guards told him. \u201cWe now understand what type of medicine you need, but we don\u2019t have it here. We have to order it. And it\u2019s a whole process.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a warm evening this April, I drove to the El Paso Service Processing Center, one of the city\u2019s main immigration jails, for visiting hours. The person I\u2019d come to see\u2014Antonio Asc\u00f3n Frometa\u2014had much in common with Rey. Frometa had also come to the U.S. from Cuba in 1994, during the rafter crisis. Like Rey, he had spent time at Guant\u00e1namo before ending up in Florida, where, during the next three decades, he started a family and worked as a landscaper. He is sixty-four years old and trim, with bushy eyebrows, a full head of gray hair, and a lined face. Dressed in a loose-fitting red uniform, he picked up the phone in the visitation booth and looked at me through a Plexiglas divider with an expression of distrust. I hadn\u2019t told him that I was coming.<\/p>\n

Frometa had been detained for the previous eight months, following his arrest, last August, in an immigration raid in West Palm Beach. \u201cI didn\u2019t try to run,\u201d he told me. \u201cI wasn\u2019t even arrested by ICE<\/em>. It was by someone from the Florida Highway Patrol.\u201d He was promptly transferred to the South Florida Detention Facility\u2014Alligator Alcatraz\u2014where a guard punched him so hard in his right ear that he can no longer hear out of it. He was still nursing the injury when ICE<\/em> sent him to Camp East Montana. He arrived in late August. \u201cEverything was covered in dust,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were building more tents.\u201d The nights were cold, and his ear throbbed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A few weeks later, he bumped into someone he\u2019d met decades earlier, at Guant\u00e1namo. The man\u2019s name was Geraldo Lunas Campos. \u201cHe didn\u2019t recognize me at first, but I recognized him,\u201d Frometa told me.<\/p>\n

Lunas Campos had been living in Rochester, New York, with his three children. He had served prison time in the U.S.\u2014five years for attempting to sell drugs and one year for having \u201csexual contact with an individual under eleven,\u201d which Kary Lunas, one of his daughters, has said was the result of an unfounded claim made during an acrimonious divorce. His criminal record led ICE<\/em> to arrest him last July. Lunas Campos arrived at Camp Montana East in September, about a month after Frometa. The two struck up their old friendship. \u201cI know members of Geraldo\u2019s family,\u201d Frometa said.<\/p>\n

Lunas Campos was asthmatic and used an inhaler. He also suffered from bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety; a report obtained by ProPublica<\/em> stated that during his time at Camp East Montana he had complained at least eight times about missing doses of antipsychotic drugs that he took for his conditions. At one point, he\u2019d given\u00a0himself a black eye, the result of banging his head against a wall. In October, guards found him with a bedsheet tied around his neck, threatening suicide.<\/p>\n

On January 2nd, as Frometa later stated in a sworn declaration, he \u201csaw Geraldo ask the guards the whole day for his asthma medicine.\u201d The guards ignored him, but Lunas Campos pleaded with them again the following day, knocking on the door of the guard station to get their attention. \u201cWe\u2019ll take you to the hole,\u201d one of the guards threatened, to which Lunas Campos replied, \u201cYou can take me to the hole, but just give me my medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the last time Frometa saw him. The next morning, he called Lunas Campos\u2019s wife to check in. Frometa was the only other detainee at Camp East Montana who had her phone number. She told him that ICE<\/em> had just called her to say that her husband \u201cwoke up dead.\u201d Frometa told me, \u201cShe said they wanted to cremate the body, and I told her to wait, to investigate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Six days after Lunas Campos died, ICE<\/em> issued a statement saying that guards had \u201cobserved him in distress\u201d and that his death was under investigation. A week later, the Washington Post<\/em> reported that El Paso County\u2019s Office of the Medical Examiner, which had performed an autopsy, was planning to classify the incident as a homicide, citing, as the cause of death, \u201casphyxia due to neck and chest compression.\u201d At this point, ICE<\/em> revised its previous statement. It now claimed that Lunas Campos had \u201cviolently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life.\u201d The Government Accountability Office later found that \u201cevidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

To date, at least five other witnesses have contradicted the government\u2019s version of events. The Special Housing Unit, where Lunas Campos had been taken that night, was in a smaller tent on the south side of the facility. Inside, each cell had a toilet and a bed and was covered by wire netting, presumably to prevent escape. About twenty-five men were held there at a time, most because they\u2019d complained about conditions at the facility. The other inmates could easily hear what was happening in Lunas Campos\u2019s cell. Santos Jes\u00fas Flores, a Salvadoran who was in the SHU<\/em> that night, said in a declaration that Lunas Campos\u2019s hands and feet had been cuffed. He\u2019d heard Lunas Campos begging for his medicine, followed soon afterward by \u201cthe sounds of the guards punching Geraldo, the clanking of Geraldo\u2019s handcuffs, the sounds of shoes scraping against the floor. Then I heard Geraldo saying, \u2018I have asthma. I can\u2019t breathe.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Flores\u2019s account is consistent with that of Ricardo Andrade Mosquera, a twenty-nine-year-old from Venezuela, who was in another nearby cell. \u201cThey were on top of him,\u201d he told the El Paso Times<\/em>. \u201cHe screamed horribly as they hit him.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Lunas Campos\u2019s death was the second of three that occurred at the facility between December 3, 2025, and January 14, 2026. Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a forty-eight-year-old from Guatemala, had received medical treatment at Camp East Montana for nearly two months before he was transferred to a local hospital, where he died of liver and kidney failure. Victor Manuel D\u00edaz, a thirty-six-year-old Nicaraguan, who was arrested while working at a Korean-barbecue restaurant in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, died seven days after being transferred to Camp East Montana, on January 7th, in what ICE<\/em> said was a \u201cpresumed suicide.\u201d D\u00edaz had previously got sick while working on a dairy farm and spent two months in a hospital, with tuberculosis. \u201cHe\u2019d been fighting hard in the hospital to get better,\u201d his ex-wife, who lives in the U.S., told me. \u201cHe was finally out and working. It doesn\u2019t make sense that he would have committed suicide.\u201d This time, unlike with Lunas Campos\u2019s death, the autopsy was conducted at Fort Bliss.<\/p>\n

The deaths were accompanied by a growing number of reports about abuse inside Camp East Montana. Between August, 2025, and January, 2026, a hundred and thirty calls to 911 were made from the facility, according to the Associated Press; in at least six of them, detainees said that they were considering suicide. Omar Ramsingh, a Dutch-born green-card holder who was detained at Camp East Montana before being deported to the Netherlands this year, told the A.P. that he overheard guards betting up to five hundred dollars on which detainee would next kill himself. (The Department of Homeland Security denied Ramsingh\u2019s account.) \u201cEvery day felt like a week. Every week felt like a month. Every month felt like a year,\u201d he said. \u201cCamp East Montana was one thousand per cent worse than a prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lunas Campos\u2019s children, who are U.S. citizens, have filed a lawsuit in federal court. Many of the witnesses, including Frometa and Flores, have said that ICE<\/em> has tried to punish them for speaking out. Flores lost his ability to make phone calls, after his PIN<\/em> was abruptly suspended. The government deported Mosquera to Mexico, where he was arrested by Mexican authorities, because he didn\u2019t have legal papers to be in the country. Guards had already been pressuring Frometa to agree to be deported to Mexico. After he spoke with a journalist from the Washington Post<\/em>, one guard told him that, unless he went to Mexico, he would \u201cbe locked up in this facility for my entire life.\u201d Still, Frometa refused. \u201cI\u2019m Cuban, not Mexican,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

In February, Frometa was transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center. When I visited him there two months later, a battered manila folder, containing a stack of legal documents that he\u2019d filed for himself, sat on his side of the divider. ICE<\/em> had refused to release him on bond. Afterward, we continued to speak on the phone; by July, he was still being detained, which both angered and baffled him. \u201cI\u2019ve lived in the U.S. for thirty-two years,\u201d he told me. \u201cWhat is the danger I pose to society? Why am I still here?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sara and Rey\u2019s house is about forty-five minutes away from Camp East Montana. Visiting the facility, which Sara did every day, took hours, but the commute was the least of her travails. \u201cWalking through the door was like entering a different dimension,\u201d she told me. Outside, the guards were often genial and chatty; inside, visitors were treated as objects of suspicion, barked at and insulted. \u201cThe gate was like a portal, like something out of Narnia,\u201d she went on. \u201cIt\u2019s a different world that you enter. It transforms you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Stellar New Restaurant That\u2019s Put a Museum on the Map<\/a><\/p>\n

If a visitor arrived during the detainee roll call, which happened in the mornings and evenings but at no set times, it could be two or three hours before visitation resumed. \u201cI live here, at least,\u201d Sara told me. \u201cBut there were people from New York, Minnesota, Boston, Florida, and other parts of Texas.\u201d There was nowhere comfortable to wait at the facility, so the families of detainees often gathered at a nearby McDonald\u2019s. Sara showed other visitors how to download an app called GettingOut, which allowed relatives to communicate with people on the inside. The app charged both the person sending a message and the one receiving it. There was also a limited number of characters allowed in each message. Rey and Sara developed a shorthand to save space and money. \u201cTQM\u201d meant \u201cTe quiero mucho<\/em>\u201d; \u201cTXME9\u201d was an abbreviation for \u201cText me at 9.\u201d Every tablet was shared among five detainees, and the men inside Rey\u2019s unit created a rough schedule for themselves. Rey reserved two slots a day to align with his son\u2019s routine\u2014one in the morning, to talk to him before school, and the other at night, before bedtime.<\/p>\n

On two occasions, his son came with Sara for an in-person visit. They were separated by a tall divider. Conversations at the booths blended together. \u201cWe are not a family that speaks softly,\u201d Sara said. \u201cBut even we couldn\u2019t hear each other.\u201d A small circle in the divider was meant to allow the voices to carry across it, but it was so hard to hear that Sara had to put her ear against the Plexiglas to make out the words. The effect was a bizarre choreography in which it was virtually impossible to look at Rey when he was speaking: either she heard him or she saw him, but never both at the same time. In the background, electronic timers, meant to enforce a one-hour limit for visits in each booth, went off cacophonously, adding to the general din.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Rey was haggard and unshaven, and he was losing weight rapidly. \u201cThe deterioration was steady,\u201d Sara told me. She\u2019d got a doctor to write a note to the facility\u2019s authorities specifying the medications he needed. With the help of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, a local legal-services group, she eventually recovered Rey\u2019s two thousand dollars. But ICE<\/em> was immovable when it came to his medical care. \u201cThe problem wasn\u2019t just the lack of a response\u2014it was that they denied he was sick,\u201d she told me. \u201cThey told him his blood pressure was fine, but they made no record. I can\u2019t tell you if they did any of what they said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rey hid his growing distress from their son. There wasn\u2019t enough room in the visitation booth for both Sara and their son to sit in chairs facing him, so they alternated, with one crouching on the floor. Rey invented elaborate stories for the boy, often describing soccer games that he and the other detainees played in the yard. \u201cHe left happy as long as he knew that his father was O.K.,\u201d Sara told me.<\/p>\n

The ICE<\/em> officials who regularly appeared at Camp East Montana are called deportation officers. Officially, their job is to make sure that detainees with final orders of removal are deported; unofficially, they often pressured those without orders to agree to be deported anyway. The officers were aided, in the second task, by the conditions at the camp. Many detainees with valid or pending legal claims simply couldn\u2019t stand to be held there any longer. But the deportation officers also had other means of persuading the holdouts. According to testimony given to the A.C.L.U. by multiple detainees from Cuba, the officers would periodically handcuff those who refused to be deported and drive them to remote stretches along the Mexican border. Buses with masked men, presumably agents from Mexico, waited on the other side. \u201cI started yelling and screaming at the immigration guard in Mexico that this is a kidnapping,\u201d a fifty-one-year-old Cuban man from Florida said. \u201cOut of the thirteen people who came with me on the bus, only four people returned with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every few days, an officer showed up in Rey\u2019s tent to ask if he was ready to sign a document acceding to his deportation. \u201cAre you staying or are you leaving?\u201d he\u2019d ask Rey flatly. For weeks, Rey waved the officer away, but he was spending hours each day in bed with debilitating headaches. He could barely urinate, and he had lost about thirty pounds. \u201cI couldn\u2019t even tell you if there was a medical tent at the facility,\u201d he said. \u201cI just didn\u2019t understand how, in an immigration detention center, they can\u2019t give you medicine. Not only that, how is it that I can\u2019t see a doctor?\u201d<\/p>\n

One day in December, the deportation officer made his regular visit, asking his customary questions. \u201cWhat about my medicine?\u201d Rey asked him. The officer replied, \u201cI didn\u2019t come to talk about your medicine. I\u2019m not interested in your medicine. I\u2019m with ICE<\/em>. Either you\u2019re leaving or you\u2019re staying.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By then, Rey had met other detainees who\u2019d been at Camp East Montana for even longer than he had\u2014three, four, five months. What would happen, he asked Sara later that day, if his blood pressure dropped and he needed to be hospitalized? Would the same people who refused to give him medicine call an ambulance? \u201cI could last a couple of weeks without medicine,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t want to die here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Afterward, he told the guard that he was ready to sign the papers. \u201cIn less than seventy-two hours, I was already in Mexico,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou realize that, when they want to do something quickly, they do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At around 5:45 A<\/em>.M<\/em>. on January 12th, Lidia, a forty-nine-year-old mother and grandmother from Mexico, was driving to work in Minnesota when she noticed a dark car in the rearview mirror. On her phone, she was connected, via Zoom, to a daily prayer session that she and her husband held with a group of nuns. The car behind her suddenly flashed its lights and signalled for her to pull over. Looking again, Lidia saw that it wasn\u2019t a single car but two. Men emerged in ICE<\/em> vests. Lidia told the others on Zoom, \u201cHermanitas<\/em>, I\u2019m getting snatched.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lidia and her husband came to Minnesota in 2003, with their one-year-old daughter, Ariadna. They were undocumented and took cleaning jobs, working night shifts. The couple eventually had two boys, now ages twelve and twenty-one. Lidia, her husband, and their sons lived in a tidy mobile home about thirty miles northwest of Minneapolis. A few houses down, Ariadna, who\u2019d obtained a form of legal protection through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA<\/em>, lived with her partner and their two boys, an infant and a toddler.<\/p>\n

The evening before Lidia was pulled over, the whole family had met at Ariadna\u2019s house with a notary public. The Trump Administration had recently launched Operation Metro Surge, in which more than three thousand federal agents were deployed in roving patrols across Minnesota to make immigration arrests. Lidia and her husband gave power of attorney to their older son, Alexis, as did Ariadna and her partner, an undocumented immigrant from Jalisco. Alexis was the only one in the family who was both a U.S. citizen and a legal adult. \u201cIt scares me that something might happen,\u201d Lidia\u2019s husband had told her; the prospect of getting separated made him cry. Lidia replied, \u201cWe have to be strong. If something happens to you, I\u2019ll have to get you out. If something happens to me, I want you to be strong with our kids.\u201d They took an inventory of assets to liquidate\u2014cars, TVs, furniture. Relatives in Mexico were put on alert in case a member of the family was deported. None of them expected that their plans would be tested quite so soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Lidia\u2019s husband had logged on to the prayer Zoom from work. He immediately called Alexis, who rushed over in his car to try to intercede; Lidia had been stopped just a few miles from their home. \u201cI\u2019m a member of the National Guard,\u201d Alexis told the agents when he arrived. He didn\u2019t have time to explain that, about a year earlier, his mother had applied for a special type of legal parole tied to his service. Instead, he hugged her and said, \u201cDo not sign anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the next two hours, while the agents made more arrests, Lidia sat, cuffed at her wrists and ankles, in the back of a van that had been disguised to look like a construction vehicle, with ladders, fluorescent vests, and tools displayed in the front windows. The van was parked in the lot of a Lutheran church, across the street from where she\u2019d been pulled over. Eventually, Lidia was taken to an ICE<\/em> field office, where she was able to call Alexis. He told her that the family was contacting an immigration lawyer. Later that evening, Lidia and a group of other detainees were boarded onto a bus and driven to an airport tarmac. \u201cThey\u2019re bringing us to Mexico,\u201d someone said. Another person replied, \u201cBut I\u2019m not from Mexico.\u201d The plane touched down after dark, and everyone was ordered onto another bus. When they got out, about twenty minutes later, they could barely see anything. Lidia struggled to make out what looked like a row of enormous white tents. \u201cIs this prison?\u201d she asked an ICE<\/em> officer. \u201cWhere are we?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is El Paso, Texas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Seven other women arrived at Camp East Montana with Lidia, and together they were taken to Unit 4 of a tent called Eco. It was the last of the structures to go up at the facility, and ICE<\/em> used it primarily to house people arrested in Operation Metro Surge. Not everyone in Lidia\u2019s group was from Minnesota, however. One couple lived in Chicago and had been vacationing in the state when they were arrested. Another woman, from Wisconsin, had gone to Minnesota to watch her son\u2019s soccer team play a match.<\/p>\n

There were about eighty women in the unit that Lidia joined, some of whom had already spent weeks there. \u201cMost people had Hispanic last names,\u201d Lidia told me. It would be another three weeks before she was given a physical exam and formally registered as a detainee. During that time, she wore the clothes that she was arrested in; it was cold, and Lidia went everywhere in her jacket, including to bed each night.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The detainees were not permitted to leave their unit, even for recreation. They ate at communal tables or on their beds. Two TVs blared late into the night; those who could block out the noise slept in the glow. Lidia didn\u2019t pay much attention to several women with hacking coughs until she came down with COVID<\/em>. A sign had been placed outside their unit to alert guards of a COVID<\/em> outbreak, but Lidia and the others couldn\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n

Lidia\u2019s symptoms eased after a few days, and she began helping to clean the unit\u2019s bathroom, scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush, squares of toilet paper, and leftover bits of shampoo. The women worked in shifts because the staff never came to clean. Security guards sometimes offered the women cookies if they agreed to clean the dormitories themselves. This appeared to be one of the starker realities of the Eco tent: even by the low standards of Camp East Montana, detainees who\u2019d been arrested in Minnesota were subject to an exceptional level of neglect, as though the unbridled spirit of Operation Metro Surge had carried over to West Texas.<\/p>\n

At least once a day, however, an ICE<\/em> officer would peek in to ask who was ready to sign the papers authorizing their deportation. Lidia told me that at least half the women in her unit eventually acquiesced. She repeated Alexis\u2019s instruction like a mantra: \u201cI won\u2019t sign. I won\u2019t sign.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a week before she spoke to her family, who were facing their own struggles as a result of Operation Metro Surge. Ariadna\u2019s DACA<\/em> status no longer seemed to afford much protection. She and her partner were afraid to leave the house; they waited until one in the morning to take the trash out. Volunteers with an organization called Mobile Hope dropped off food, diapers, and other household items. Lidia\u2019s husband continued to go to work. He and Alexis woke up each morning just after three and left before sunrise, around four. Alexis would drive in a separate car ahead of him to make sure that the roads were clear of agents. During calls with Lidia, the family was careful not to burden her with these details. Lidia had told them, \u201cYou can\u2019t cry, because then I will cry, and then I won\u2019t be able to talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

One morning in January, Lidia and the other women in Unit 4 were told that a member of Congress was coming to visit. \u201cBe sure to look pretty,\u201d one of the guards told them. The visitor, it turned out, was a staffer for Veronica Escobar. The congresswoman had also been making regular visits to Camp East Montana, despite the agency\u2019s best efforts to stymie her. \u201cI\u2019ve had to sue twice in order to get in,\u201d Escobar told me. On one occasion, she gave the local ICE<\/em> office advance warning that she would be visiting, only to learn that her plans had been leaked. \u201cSure enough, the local G.O.P. and some of the extremists who live in El Paso had shared the notice of my oversight visit,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was only one way that they would have known the date and time of my visit, and that\u2019s if ICE<\/em> had shared that with them.\u201d (The El Paso County Republican Party denied this, saying that it had heard about the congresswoman\u2019s upcoming visit through \u201cthe grapevine.\u201d) Several weeks later, Escobar\u2019s staffer, who had previously entered the facility without incident, was identified by ICE<\/em> and pilloried on Fox News for, according to the agency, trying to gain entry by falsely claiming to be a lawyer. \u201cIt has become a political operation,\u201d Escobar said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Nevertheless, the conditions in the camp improved slightly after the staffer\u2019s visit. The women were given changes of clothes, and flip-flops to wear in the bathroom. In early February, they were transferred to a different tent, where contractors administered tuberculosis vaccines. Still, the indeterminacy of their detention had become its own form of torture. One of the women told Lidia and the others that she was contemplating suicide. They gathered around her and tried to talk her down. \u201cYou\u2019re going to leave at some point,\u201d Lidia said. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to be here for an eternity. You\u2019ll be here for three, four, or five months, and then you\u2019ll be out.\u201d Lidia, meanwhile, withdrew into herself. \u201cOf course it hurts me to be here,\u201d she told the other women. \u201cBut I think about my kids, and with that I try to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Typically, to be released on bond, a detainee needs to convince an immigration judge both that she isn\u2019t a public-safety threat and that she isn\u2019t a flight risk. Lidia, who had never been charged with a crime, wanted only to return to her family in Minnesota. The previous September, however, the Board of Immigration Appeals, an appellate body within the Justice Department that oversees the immigration courts, which the White House had overhauled to remove Biden-era appointees, had instructed immigration judges to deny bond to anyone in detention who had at some point entered the U.S. unlawfully. As a result, bond requests were being rejected en masse in immigration courts, forcing detainees to file habeas-corpus petitions, in which they asked a federal judge to rule directly on whether the government could continue to keep them in detention.<\/p>\n

Since Donald Trump took office last year, according to a database maintained by ProPublica<\/em>, close to sixty thousand immigration-related habeas petitions have been filed, which is more than in the previous sixteen years combined. The biggest spike in filings coincided with Operation Metro Surge. It wasn\u2019t just that ICE<\/em> was arresting more immigrants\u2014the Trump Administration was increasingly refusing to release those in custody.<\/p>\n

A habeas petition has to be filed in the federal jurisdiction where someone is being held. Lidia\u2019s immigration attorney, Terja Larsen, a veteran practitioner based in Anoka, Minnesota, had never had an occasion to file one before. What was more, she couldn\u2019t file a habeas petition in Lidia\u2019s case, because she wasn\u2019t admitted to the Texas bar. \u201cAll of a sudden, I have these clients who are popping up in Texas,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s never happened before.\u201d Lidia was one of eight clients who\u2019d been sent there in a matter of days.<\/p>\n

By sheer coincidence, at a meeting of a mutual-aid network, at a church in Anoka, Larsen ran into an attorney she knew, Brendan McBride, who had a legal practice in San Antonio. \u201cI normally sue insurance companies,\u201d he told me. On January 26th, he and Larsen filed a habeas petition on Lidia\u2019s behalf. Two weeks later, on February 10th, she was released. ICE<\/em> didn\u2019t fly Lidia back to Minnesota or pay for a bus ticket. Instead, officers dropped her off at a migrant shelter in El Paso. Alexis flew down to pick her up and take her home.<\/p>\n

Rey currently lives in a small peach-colored house next to a playground in Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, across the border from El Paso. When I arrived, one night in April, he smiled broadly and gestured to the street. \u201cIt\u2019s super quiet, which is how I like it,\u201d he said. Before his deportation, he\u2019d never been to Mexico. Sara, who was born in El Paso and raised in Ju\u00e1rez, had regularly visited her family in the city, but Rey could never join her on those trips, because of his immigration status. Now it was his new home, and he was there alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The house was empty\u2014no furniture, a bare fridge, a mattress on the floor. Two bicycles in a side room were aspirational; he hoped to use them when his son visited, but the tires needed air. On a counter in the kitchen was a laptop and a plastic bag full of medicine, which Sara had purchased at a Walgreens on the U.S. side of the border. She was paying the rent\u2014about five hundred dollars a month\u2014while Rey looked for a job. Neither of them, however, had any illusions about his prospects. He lacked legal status in Mexico, which meant that he didn\u2019t have work papers, and the Cuban consulate, as a matter of policy, did not provide any services to deportees from the U.S.<\/p>\n

That Rey had even made it to Ju\u00e1rez was a small miracle. The more common destination for deported Cubans is Villahermosa, a city fifteen hundred miles southeast of Ju\u00e1rez, in the state of Tabasco. Human Rights Watch recently published a report documenting the dire conditions faced by Cubans in Mexico. By early March, the Trump Administration had deported forty-three hundred Cubans to the country; more than a third of them had been arrested in Texas. Few had any ties to Mexico, and all were living in the country illegally. In Villahermosa, dozens slept on the streets or in shelters, left to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n

Rey, by contrast, had been sent to a town in Chihuahua, where a former Mexican employee of his, from the pizzeria in El Paso, picked him up and drove him to Sara\u2019s sister\u2019s house, in Ju\u00e1rez. He stayed there for two months, in tight quarters, before it became too uncomfortable for everyone. Yet finding housing for a displaced immigrant in Ju\u00e1rez had grown more difficult during the past decade, as hundreds of thousands of people, beginning in the first Trump Administration, tried to enter the U.S. and instead got shunted into northern Mexico by American authorities. There were also cultural stereotypes to contend with: among norte\u00f1os<\/em> in Mexico, Cubans and Venezuelans were often considered lazy and entitled. Landlords, Sara told me, were especially suspicious of deportees. Having an American spouse was hardly a guarantee of financial solvency, a landlord told her, because couples separated by deportation frequently got divorced.<\/p>\n

It had been a few weeks since Rey had seen Sara or his son in person. Their absence clearly tormented him, but his total dependence on Sara seemed to embarrass him, too. She was working excruciating hours to support their new binational situation, and their son\u2019s weekends were filled with sporting events and school functions. Driving across the border could take hours in traffic. Ju\u00e1rez and El Paso are sister cities, geographically and culturally entwined. But visits were complicated. The proximity of the two cities at times accentuated, rather than ameliorated, the family\u2019s sense of separation.<\/p>\n

One evening, a few hours after having lunch with Rey in Ju\u00e1rez, I went to his son\u2019s football game at a park in El Paso. The kids wore white-and-burnt-orange uniforms and did pre-game calisthenics with their coach. Sara, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, met me on the sidelines. She was outgoing and sharp, but she also had an air of harried, overcaffeinated exhaustion. The boiler at her house had just burst, which cost a few thousand dollars to fix\u2014money she didn\u2019t have. \u201cThere\u2019s a definition of the roles that each person has at home, and no one tells you how to fill that hole that someone leaves,\u201d she said. \u201cThere were all the things the person did that you didn\u2019t fully realize they were doing.\u201d Her son had recently told her that he\u2019d lost his father to la migra<\/em> and his mom to work. The stress and sleep deprivation had led her to see a doctor, who recommended that she go for early-morning walks to manage her cortisol. \u201cDid you listen to me before, about why my cortisol level is what it was in the first place?\u201d she\u2019d replied. \u201cWhat do I do at five in the morning? Do I wake up my son to go walk with me? You\u2019re talking to an adult who lives alone.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The worst part, she told me, was leading a kind of double life\u2014the one she had before Rey\u2019s deportation and the one she has now. She was working and paying for both, and had begun to feel as though she was caring for two children: her husband, in Mexico, and her son, in El Paso. Yet it was taboo to talk about her family\u2019s situation on either side of the border. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what you do\u2014it makes you feel shame to say, \u2018My husband, my uncle, my mother is detained,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Sara said. \u201cIt implies criminality, even though it shouldn\u2019t.\u201d She went on, \u201cThe question you get is \u2018Why?\u2019 Then you have to say, \u2018I don\u2019t know.\u2019 And the person thinks, \u2018Of course you know.\u2019 And then you just have one more problem to deal with.\u201d It didn\u2019t seem to matter that she was an American citizen. \u201cIt\u2019s like some sort of grime sticks to you,\u201d she said. \u201cYou married a criminal. You have a relationship with a criminal. You don\u2019t matter, either, now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other parents were arriving with coolers, pulling wagons that contained lawn chairs and food for the game. They\u2019d stop to give Sara a hug and make a joke about the rival team. After they passed, Sara continued, underscoring the need she felt to keep up appearances\u2014for her son\u2019s sake as much as for her own. She pointed to the coach, who was leading the kids through warmups. \u201cThe coach works for ICE<\/em>,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s an official there. A lot of people here work for la migra<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration\u2019s mass-detention campaign is unprecedented by virtually every official metric. Today, there are more than sixty thousand people in ICE<\/em> jails across the country, up from thirty-nine thousand in January, 2025. Seventy per cent of them have no criminal record. At least fifty-two people have died while in custody since the start of the President\u2019s second term, and, according to an A.P. investigation, nearly a fifth of those deaths have been suicides. When Trump returned to office, last year, the government had a hundred and thirty-four immigrant-detention centers nationwide; it now runs two hundred and thirty-nine. At facilities across the country, there have been hunger strikes and protests over inhumane conditions, including rotten and inedible food, physical abuse by guards, and insufficient medical care. Human Rights Watch found that, in the past year, migrants at detention centers in New York and New Jersey\u2014including Delaney Hall, in Newark, the first immigration jail to open under the current Administration\u2014were a thousand times more likely to agree to be deported compared with an equivalent period in 2024. The Administration\u2019s goal, Trickler-McNulty, the former ICE<\/em> official, told me, \u201cis to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early February, the Department of Homeland Security purchased, for a hundred and twenty-three million dollars, three warehouses in Socorro, just outside El Paso, which it hoped would house eighty-five hundred immigrants. It was part of an ambitious plan by the Administration to invest some thirty-eight billion dollars to convert two dozen warehouses across the country into immigration jails. The contracts for these projects have been opaque. According to the Administration source, they have been kept out of the main D.H.S. databases, just as the one for Camp East Montana had been. In June, the Times<\/em> reported that D.H.S. was planning to sell off seven of the warehouses, which had cost the department roughly seven hundred million dollars. The warehouses in Socorro, though, were not among the properties listed for sale.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I drove out to see them one afternoon. The buildings, which were designed as storage facilities for pecans, with a few scattered offices, were enormous and nondescript\u2014long, flat white-and-gray rectangles sitting in the middle of the desert, just off the interstate. They would have to be overhauled to accommodate people, but there were no obvious plans for basic necessities, such as water and sewage removal. Iliana Holguin, an El Paso County commissioner, told me that she\u2019d been at a meeting with the Socorro mayor and the Lower Valley Water District when the news of the D.H.S. purchase broke. \u201cAll of a sudden, I get an alert on my phone,\u201d she said. The topic of the meeting was how to manage the area\u2019s limited water supply\u2014which comes from the city of El Paso\u2014given recent commercial and residential development in the area. Holguin told me, \u201cWhoever the government folks are that were put in charge of this plan of converting these warehouses had no idea that the infrastructure wasn\u2019t there.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to say what these warehouses might look like, but Charlotte Weiss, a lawyer at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told me that Camp East Montana may be the closest analogue. As with the warehouses, the grounds at Fort Bliss were never designed to serve as the site of long-term detention. The tents weren\u2019t logical places to hold people who needed to eat, stay healthy, and be in contact with the outside world. The maximum detention capacity at Camp East Montana has never been met\u2014at its peak, in January, the facility held around three thousand people. But, even then, the consequences were disastrous. Weiss told me, \u201cCamp East Montana is a crystal ball into what the warehouses could look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

In March, D.H.S. announced that it was terminating its contract with Acquisition Logistics, the firm paid to manage the facility. Camp East Montana would instead be run by Amentum, one of the subcontractors, which has a well-documented history of safety, health, and regulatory violations. The guards at Camp East Montana switched their shirts and remained in their posts; their employer had changed, but little else did. For weeks, there was speculation that ICE<\/em> might begin relocating people from Camp East Montana to the new warehouses. By late April, owing in part to a measles outbreak, there were roughly seven hundred and fifty detainees left at Camp East Montana. The population began to creep up the following month, however, and would soon reach more than eighteen hundred detainees.<\/p>\n

On May 29th, a group of legal organizations, including the A.C.L.U. and the Texas Civil Rights Project, sued ICE<\/em> over the conditions at Camp East Montana. \u201cI have lived through the worst days and months of my life here,\u201d one of the plaintiffs said. D.H.S. issued a statement in response: \u201cThese claims that there are \u2018inhumane\u2019 conditions at Camp East Montana are categorically false. No detainees are being beaten or abused.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day of the football game, Sara had told me that many of her friends were shocked when they learned what Rey had gone through. \u201cThat is happening here in El Paso?\u201d one person asked her. She told me, \u201cThis doesn\u2019t come out in the news until someone dies. And, even then, it\u2019s like it\u2019s happening in another world. Far away, there\u2019s this encampment, and no one knows why it\u2019s there or who\u2019s there. People don\u2019t know that members of their own community are being held there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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She now goes long stretches without speaking to Rey, mostly because she is overwhelmed by the logistics of life in El Paso. But their son continues to speak to his father every day. Rey and Sara were explicit with him about what had happened, but he was still confused: why his<\/em> father and not someone else\u2019s? At one point, Sara said, her son told her, \u201cIt would have been better if he stayed here, at that place, because at least we would have seen him more.\u201d Sara often heard that having a family member deported was like experiencing a death. \u201cBut it\u2019s not like someone dies,\u201d she told me. \u201cWhen someone dies, you know that the person isn\u2019t going to come back. You know that the person cannot be in contact. You know that the person is gone. There\u2019s no way to see that person again. When they deport someone you love, and who loves you, you know that person continues to exist, and that you can\u2019t see them.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Human Cost of DOGE\u2019s War on U.S.A.I.D.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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