Inside America's Largest ICE Camp

Built in a matter of weeks on the Fort Bliss military base in Texas, Camp East Montana has become the nation’s largest immigrant detention center, housing thousands of people within its sprawling tent complex. In a recent New Yorker investigation, Jonathan Blitzer documents inadequate medical care, prolonged isolation and families suddenly separated after routine ICE appointments or traffic stops. We talk to Blitzer about how Camp East Montana became the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s expanded detention system—and what it reveals about the human cost of mass immigration enforcement.

Guest:

• Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer, The New Yorker; author, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome back to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

California is home to eight ICE detention centers, but a lack of transparency and access to them have left many struggling to hold the federal government or private prison companies accountable for reports of dire conditions, inadequate medical care, and the high number of deaths of people in ICE custody.

The New Yorker‘s Jonathan Blitzer has been investigating the nation’s largest ICE detention center, called Camp East Montana, a sprawling site in Texas where detainees report abuses and where three people have died within the span of a little more than a month. He joins us now to talk about what his findings reflect about conditions at detention centers across the country.

Jonathan, welcome to Forum.

Jonathan Blitzer: Thanks so much for having me.

Mina Kim: Can you first describe Camp East Montana for us? How did it come to be?

Jonathan Blitzer: Yes. Camp East Montana sprang up last summer in West Texas on a military base called Fort Bliss.

The immediate context around the use of this facility was that the federal government under the current administration was making more and more arrests while conducting immigration operations across the country. They were increasingly trying to make it harder also for people to get bond to be released from custody if they had been arrested. And so there was an acute need on the part of the federal government to find places to put people who it was arresting en masse on the streets of American cities.

This particular facility sprang up in the summer of 2025 to begin to address that need. One of the things that was unique about Camp East Montana in particular — and this reflected that broader urgency of the government needing places to hold people it was arresting — was that this was not a typical brick-and-mortar detention center.

This was what’s known in government parlance as a soft-sided facility — in other words, tents, essentially — that went up on this existing military base. The idea very much was that it’s cheaper that way. It can go up faster.

One of the most striking things in August of last year was that the first people who arrived at this facility described essentially arriving at an open construction site. There were construction workers operating. There was dust everywhere. People inside these tents were coughing. They were having trouble breathing because dust was coming in from under the tents.

Basic elements of the facility itself hadn’t been finished. There wasn’t an outside recreation area. There weren’t visitation booths, so people couldn’t meet with lawyers or family members.

So you had a group of people basically being held incommunicado on a military base in West Texas where none of the most basic features of what should be standard at any sort of detention center were in evidence. From the very start, people described absolutely horrific conditions.

This is not an exception. This is very much a kind of prototype for the sorts of things we’ve seen nationwide.

Mina Kim: The other detail that I was struck by in your piece was just the fact that it was on the site of Fort Bliss originally, which held Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II, deemed U.S. citizens as enemy aliens, right, to justify their imprisonment for years on that site.

Jonathan Blitzer: As someone who covers this stuff, what we’re seeing now obviously is exceptional and, in many cases, unprecedented. We can talk about some of the ways in which it’s specifically unprecedented.

And yet, the very ugly reality of immigration detention writ large in American life is that, for decades, the treatment of immigrants in detention has been absolutely abominable. There is this dark history behind all of these facilities under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Now we’re seeing the current administration weaponize a lot of those existing problems, those longstanding problems, in ways that are truly horrific and scary. They’re having obvious results: record numbers of deaths in custody, record numbers of suicides in custody, record numbers of people basically tapping out and saying, “You know what? I’d rather be deported than try to survive here any longer.”

But all of that, in some ways, is built on the back of this long and, I think, blighted history of immigration detention in the United States.

Mina Kim: How were you able to get such detailed information about conditions at Camp East Montana? It’s not like you were offered a tour.

Jonathan Blitzer: That’s right.

Well, there were a few different ways of approaching it. The first was that people who had been held there at different times were, in some cases, open to speaking about the specifics of their experience.

The people who’d been held there, their experiences ran the gamut. Some of those people had agreed to be deported to third countries. One of the main figures in my story is a Cuban man who has lived in the United States since the mid-1990s, had a family, a wife, a kid, and after six weeks at Camp East Montana — where, as a diabetic, he was denied his basic medication — ultimately felt like, “Okay, I’m going to die here if I stay here any longer.” So he accepted deportation to a third country, Mexico, that he had basically spent no time in before.

He was someone I was able to sit down with and speak to at length.

There was a mother and grandmother from Minnesota who was arrested in the midst of that massive operation that we remember from December and January of last year and this year called Operation Metro Surge, who also described the conditions.

So I was able to piece together those experiences, speaking to a number of people on the record, on background, off the record, et cetera, to begin to cobble together a description.

Then I will say there’s been a lot of really high-quality reporting from other news outlets — The Washington Post, the Associated Press, ProPublica, a mix of outlets — coupled with declarations that the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations have taken, using pseudonyms for people who have been detained at the facility and giving really granular accounts at different moments in time, like snapshots of what people were seeing and experiencing.

So you move between all of these sources and cobble together a fairly specific picture of what things are like on the inside.

Mina Kim: You mentioned Lydia and Ray. Tell us more about Ray. Can you start with how he was apprehended?

Jonathan Blitzer: Yes, that’s a very important part of the story, so I’m glad you asked about it.

Ray came to the United States in 1994 as part of what then was known as the Cuban rafter crisis, basically a humanitarian crisis in which some 30,000 Cubans, in the span of a couple of months, fled to the U.S. and literally came here on makeshift rafts.

Ray, who was in his early 20s at the time — now he’s in his early 50s — was apprehended by the U.S. Coast Guard and spent 11 months at Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. naval base, which was the reality for the vast majority of people from Cuba who came to the United States during that particular crisis.

So you’re already talking about someone who had experience with long-term, non-criminal detention.

After 11 months, he’s basically released to his father, who at the time was living in El Paso. He kind of bumps around a bit, winds up in Miami with a lot of his close friends from Havana, and gets in trouble with the law. He ends up getting arrested and serves a five-year prison sentence for his involvement in a robbery.

He serves his time in a Florida state prison. Then, because of the relationship between the United States and Cuba — then and now, frankly — the Cuban government would not accept deportation flights from the United States. So the United States didn’t have an immediate thing to do with Ray, even though his legal immigration application had been interrupted by this criminal conviction.

A very common practice was for immigration authorities to say to him, “Okay, look, we’re going to release you. You have legal authorization to live and work in the United States. Over time, you just need to check into a local ICE office so that you remain on our radar. We have a sense that you’re doing everything by the book.”

And that is exactly what Ray did.

In fact, I was very moved by how he described it because, for years — really from the time that he was released from prison up until last fall — he would go a couple of times a year to a local office to check in with essentially a caseworker and show that he was doing everything by the book.

His friends would say to him, “Ray, what are you, crazy? You’re going into these meetings. You don’t think they’re going to arrest you at any point? How naive could you be?”

And he said to each and every one of these friends, “Look, we did things the wrong way when we were younger. Now we have to do things the right way.”

That was the rhythm of his life.

He begins to build a life. He gets married. His wife had a 1-year-old child whom he really adopts as his own and has an incredibly close relationship with. He was basically living in El Paso since 2014 with these regular check-ins at a local ICE office.

In the fall of last year, in October 2025, he was called in for what seemed like a routine appointment. He shows up. He’s not trying to hide. He’s on everyone’s radar.

At that appointment, he was basically taken into custody and immediately transferred to Camp East Montana, where he spent the next six weeks.

Mina Kim: He reflects who is there, right? People who have old criminal convictions but had been living legally and served their sentence. But the vast majority are people with no criminal records and people also complying with immigration authorities and then being apprehended there.

The other thing that you mentioned about Ray is, as you said before, the fact that they would not provide him with his diabetes medication. There were also reports of how the conditions were so terrible there because it was so hastily constructed that sinks and toilets would malfunction. Then the detainees had to clean them with their own clothing — or their limited clothing — because it wasn’t being addressed.

Jonathan Blitzer: I don’t think most listeners even have the imagination to fathom how miserable these conditions were and are.

Ray comes into this facility in October, so it had been in operation for a couple of months. But around the time that he arrives, there had actually been two teams dispatched by the federal government to check out conditions inside because there were so many complaints.

One team came from ICE itself, and one team came from the Government Accountability Office. The idea was to actually have a look at the facility because ICE, violating its own policy, never bothered to have any officials inspect the premises before it started to receive people.

In fact, the federal government said that this facility was going to open on Aug. 17. That was the official line. But we now know that there had actually been a number of people held there for weeks before that.

At a time when members of Congress were basically clamoring to try to get inside to have some look at the basic conditions, you had the federal government and ICE specifically saying, “You’ll be able to come in, but not right now. The facility isn’t officially open.”

Meanwhile, there are people being held inside. If you looked up those people in ICE’s detainee locator — basically a search engine you can use online by plugging in very basic information to figure out whether someone’s in ICE custody — the people who were being held there did not appear in that database, which is highly unusual.

In fact, an administration source told me later that that was by design. If you searched the name of someone whom you knew was in that facility, the response you would get when you plugged that name into the system was, “Please contact the local ICE office.” That was the extent of it.

So people were essentially being held there incommunicado. They had effectively been disappeared into this federal facility.

By the time Ray gets there, some of the most immediate horrors were at least kept at bay. I’m talking about the outright construction, some of the immediate plumbing problems. But a lot of other things still hadn’t been addressed, and Ray dealt with that.

I appreciate your mentioning the medical neglect, and Senator Padilla also mentioned that in the context of California.

The through line in all of the testimony I got from my conversations with people who’d been held at Camp East Montana was that the medical care was nonexistent. That was specifically what scared people the most.

Not only were they ignored, but people with chronic conditions — Ray is a classic case. This is someone with diabetes. Imagine if you have diabetes. He also had high blood pressure. He has a battery of medications he has to take. There’s no mystery that he needs these medications. He’s explicit about it.

Actually, Ray, in a certain sense, was privileged, if you can say that, insofar as his family lived in El Paso. A lot of people at that facility had been arrested in other states — in Minnesota, New York, and New Jersey — and had been completely dislocated from their families and support systems.

Ray had his wife nearby, who could get a letter from the doctor and could visit the facility. Even with that daily pressure that she applied on guards at the facility, he still couldn’t get his medication.

Mina Kim: Right.

Jonathan Blitzer: So it’s just an absolute horror.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at The New Yorker. His recent article is called “Locked Away.”

Listeners, what’s your reaction to what you’re hearing? What are your questions about how ICE apprehends and detains people under conditions in detention centers? Do you, or does someone you know, fear being picked up by ICE or has been involved or taken into custody? If you want to share what happened, you can do that as well by emailing [email protected], finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786.

Jonathan, you write about how, amid all of this that Ray is experiencing — and other detainees — there was constant pressure from ICE officers to agree to deportation, even if they weren’t under deportation orders. Can you talk about what they were facing with this?

Jonathan Blitzer: Absolutely.

This is another highly common experience. Maybe even more so than reports of medical neglect, this is the kind of thing that, if you speak to anyone who’s been held in immigration detention — certainly in the last year and a half — they will undoubtedly describe.

ICE officers routinely came in asking people who was ready to tap out, who was ready to agree to deportation.

This has been a reality, to be clear, in the context of immigration detention always. There has always been pressure put on people who are being detained to basically abandon any legal case and agree to be removed.

But what the current administration is doing systematically is weaponizing the conditions inside these facilities to try to force people to abandon whatever legal cases they have.

This goes back to something you said earlier, which is critically important. The people who are being held in these facilities, their experiences and the legal disposition of their cases really run the gamut.

You have people who’ve been arrested at immigration court. There were people at Camp East Montana who were arrested by ICE officers in New York City when they showed up to an asylum hearing before a judge. They leave the courtroom and are immediately shoved into an elevator by masked agents and whisked away to this facility in Texas.

You had people who, in many cases, did have some form of work authorization and had pending immigration applications.

Lydia, this other central figure in my story from Minnesota, has a son who is a U.S. citizen and a member of the National Guard. She had an application for a form of parole tied to his military service. That application was pending when she was arrested.

So you have people who are in various stages of the legal process.

Typically, if we weren’t under the current administration, people who demonstrably did not pose a risk to public safety and who demonstrably were not a flight risk because they wanted to return to their families would be able to qualify for bond. As they continued to fight or deal with their case, they would be released because it’s senseless to hold them indefinitely, given that they’re not going to disappear and they’re not any sort of threat to public safety.

Now what we’re seeing is the government is holding everyone indefinitely. It’s denying people bond en masse.

While the government has people inside these detention centers, the conditions are so miserable that they can begin applying this sort of pressure and saying —

Really, ICE officials, who made themselves scarce at a facility like Camp East Montana — most of the people Ray and others saw at the facility were private contractors subcontracting different aspects of services there. So if you had a question about your immigration case, good luck getting answers.

The only time ICE officials showed up was when they would make these routine rounds to say, “All right, who’s ready to tap out today?”

That was the constant drumbeat of pressure people faced. People tried to withstand that pressure for as long as they could until the situation just became overwhelming.

In Ray’s case, it was that he feared he was actually going to die there. In the case of other people, it was a sense of fear, anxiety, and confusion about why they were being detained for months on end without any explanation.

That is very much the thinking behind this mass detention campaign: that it is a way of forcing people in large numbers to abandon pending legal claims and just agree to be removed because the reality of staying in detention is too grisly to contemplate.

Mina Kim: Yes. You mentioned the word “weaponization” before, and I definitely wanted to ask you more about that. I appreciate your clarifying it. You’re essentially saying that cruelty is the point.

Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. Sadly.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at The New Yorker. His recent piece is called “Locked Away,” piecing together a very detailed inside look at Camp East Montana, the largest ICE detention facility in the country.

More after the break. I’m Mina Kim.