Migrants being held at a $1.26 billion detention center at the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas were reportedly subject to numerous violations of federal standards, including medical neglect, poor access to legal counsel, and dysfunctional plumbing, according to detainees and federal inspectors.
The soft-sided, tent-like detention complex, which became operational last month, had at least 60 violations of federal detention standards, according to a non-public report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention oversight unit, obtained by The Washington Post.
The records, as well as a former detainee at the Texas facility, described the compound as a hastily built, in-progress construction site, where medical providers failed to provide intake screenings and fill out charts, and a detainee was allegedly given psychotropic medication, despite a lack of records indicating they provided consent to the treatment, according to the outlet.
The Independent has contacted the Department of Homeland Security and Loyal Source, the facility’s medical contractor, for comment.
The detention center, known as Camp East Montana, was rapidly erected in less than two months, and now often holds over 1,000 migrants at a time, with a goal of expanding capacity to 5,000 detainees by the end of the year.
Camp East Montana is one of 10 such facilities the administration reportedly plans to build to accommodate its mass deportation push.
Under the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” domestic spending legislation that passed earlier this year, ICE will receive $45 billion in additional funding over the next four years to spend on detaining undocumented immigrants.
Federal officials plan to use the ICE windfall to roughly double the nation’s immigration detention capacity, bringing the total to between 80,000 and 100,000 detention beds.
Mass immigration arrests and rapidly built facilities such as Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” have created a crisis of poor conditions inside detention centers, according to detainees and advocates.
In July, a leaked video from inside a detention facility at a federal building in New York City showed roughly two dozen people lying on a cement floor with nothing but emergency blankets, steps away from a toilet.
“Look how they have us like dogs in here,” the person filming the videos can be heard saying in Spanish.
Detainees at the Florida facility also alleged they were cut off from access to their legal counsel.
At least 12 people have died in ICE custody this calendar year, putting the administration on pace for one of the deadliest years in federal immigration detention in decades.
