One of ICE’s biggest detention facilities is plagued by problems

0:00El Paso, Texas is home to Fort Bliss, a large U.S. Army facility that spills into nearby New Mexico. And within Fort Bliss, there's Camp East Montana, one of the facilities where the Trump administration is housing immigrants awaiting deportation. It could eventually hold as many as 5 ,000 people. It is not an actual building that's been constructed out of the ground, but it is like a tent city of sorts. Congresswoman Veronica Escobar is a Democrat representing that part of Texas. She told us detainees started arriving at Camp East Montana on August 1st. And when she asked to visit, she was told it was still a construction site and not yet operational.

0:45So that in and of itself was deeply alarming to me. The fact that there's an active construction site that is not operational by ICE's standard, and yet they are holding human beings in custody there. And they are not allowing members of Congress to go and see what's happening. Ultimately, Escobar was allowed to visit twice. And what she saw made her even more concerned. Understaffing. Immigrants who didn't have access to family or lawyers. And she said every detainee she met had been in the U.S. for decades. And it was just heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story. They also told me that the food that they had eaten and were being provided was bad.

1:35That was confirmed by an employee on site that the food was indeed bad that they had been given and that they were looking for a new vendor. They also told me that the water they were being given to drink was bad, tasted bad, smelled bad. The food and the water were making them sick. Representative Escobar thinks what's happening at this facility in Texas raises big questions about how the Trump administration is implementing its immigration policies. This one facility is costing the American taxpayer$1.24 billion. This is only one facility. There are going to be a number of other facilities like it that are going to spring up around the country.

2:19This will be the largest of all of them. But in total, Republicans appropriated$45 billion for facilities like this. Consider this. ICE's own inspectors confirmed that the immigration detention facility at Fort Bliss in Texas is plagued by problems. What does that tell us about the administration's larger deportation agenda?

2:52From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

3:03It's Consider This from NPR. We're about to get a rare look inside one of the facilities where the Trump administration is housing immigrants awaiting deportation. It's called Camp East Montana, and it's located inside the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas. Doug McMillan is one of the reporters on a Washington Post investigative team that looked into the conditions for immigrants held at this facility. He obtained a report where ICE inspectors say they found 60 violations of federal standards, ranging from safety problems to failure to treat medical conditions. Doug McMillan, welcome to All Things Considered.

3:45Thanks for having me. Help us understand what this report is and why it was created. Yeah, so to build and run these detention centers, they rely on private companies. And for this project, it was actually a contract awarded by the U.S. military, awarded this contract to a group of contractors. They are building the site, and they agree in their contract to meet all of ISIS standards around the living conditions. And this includes the quality of the food, recreation time that people get, measures around security. There's many different things that they have to fulfill as part of their contract.

4:15So ICE is now going in, sending inspectors in from its own local detention oversight unit and trying to make sure that they are fulfilling the terms of their contract. We heard about a few of the specific violations at this facility. What stood out to you among the dozens in this report? Yeah, one of the early concerns at the site that was substantiated by what the inspectors found in this report was that the people there who were sent to live there were held virtually incommunicado from the outside. One of the key things to understand about ICE detention is that it's not meant to be punitive.

4:47Right. It's not prison. Yeah. It's simply meant to be a place where you hold people while they're awaiting their court proceedings or deportation proceedings. So one of the parts of that is that these people have a right to speak to a legal representative, to meet with their family members. And what we understand and what was substantiated in this inspection report is that they were not being given that right. There were no telephones in the facility, and the detainees were instructed to use tablet computers to make calls outside, and a number of them reported that their PIN numbers they were given to access the tablet computers weren't working.

5:22So their line of communication outside was not available. There are a number of legal representatives we spoke to who were trying to get inside to meet with the detainees to help them understand their cases. They were, for several weeks, barred from entering. And then what we also learned is that these people were given no access to ICE deportation officers. In other words, they had no way of learning about their cases or asking questions about their cases. You spoke to a detainee who told you about this. His name is Ricardo Quintana Chavez, and you sent us some of the voice memos he shared with you.

5:53He was at the tent camp for 24 days before voluntarily deporting himself to Peru last week. And he describe the lack of access to these deportation officers.

6:07You never have the chance to speak with an ICE agent one-on-one about your case. Never, never, never. When one shows up every three or four days or once a week, he answers questions, but in a generic way. If you focus the questions on one person, he says, look, I don't know your case. I don't know what to tell you. So it's Basically, I don't know your case. I don't know your case. I don't know your case. Tell us more about what you learned from him. Yeah, so he was there for more than three weeks. He said that he lived in a small cell with a number of other men and that he was only fed junk food all day.

6:46They were giving him snacks like potato chips in lieu of meals. He also said that he had very little access to the outdoor recreation area. Apparently, because the site is still under construction, they have only completed one of the four recreation areas that they're supposed to be giving to detainees there. And so that one space has to be shared among hundreds and hundreds, over a thousand detainees who are being held there. Who's responsible for fixing these problems? Is it the private contractor? Is it the federal government or what? It's a combination that ultimately the private contractor agreed to these conditions.

7:19So it's ultimately on them. But it's also a role that ICE plays in overseeing the site and making sure that the contractor is complying with it. The Department of Homeland Security called your report false and misleading. In a statement, Assistant Secretary Trish McLaughlin said, quote, All detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members. How do you respond to that? Yeah, well, we stand by our reporting, which is primarily based on ICE's own inspection documents. documents. And DHS's statement to us, they didn't really grapple with the fact that our findings were primarily based on ISIS own statements.

7:54These facilities were built in a hurry. We heard that it was still under construction when the first detainees started to arrive. Do you think these problems are growing pains that will eventually get sorted out? Like, are they a bug or are they a feature? So this is the first of many large makeshift type holding facilities that the Trump administration plans to build. They call them soft-sided structures because they're not physical, hard buildings. They're just building large tents. And there's kind of a temporary nature of them. And there's also a question about whether it's appropriate to hold people in these kind of temporary structures for long periods of time.

8:33I think what we're seeing here is some serious kind of questions about this plan to hold people for two, three, four plus weeks in these facilities and whether the contractors are choosing to do this and put these together in a short period of time are able to actually meet ICE's own standards. You've said that these facilities are not meant to be punitive. We heard that the Department of Homeland Security rejects your characterizations. Do you think they're committed to solving these problems that their own inspectors have identified? Yeah, I want to know that. I want to know what happens next.

9:07I want to know if they fix these 60 violations that they have identified with this place. I think what happens at Fort Bliss could be a telling sign of what happens at the dozens of other ice facilities around the country that are holding larger and larger numbers of people. Doug McMillan is a reporter with The Washington Post. Thank you. Thanks, Harry.

9:32This episode was produced by Jeffrey Pierre. It was edited by William Troop and John Ketchum with audio engineering by Hannah Glovna. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

9:46It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.