Lawmaker Blocked From Interviewing Detainees at Largest ICE Camp
Rep. Veronica Escobar says federal immigration officials prevented her from fully carrying out congressional oversight at Camp East Montana, the ICE tent facility at Fort Bliss. She said she was not allowed to speak with any detained immigrants during the visit. She described the limits in an interview with The Guardian.
Escobar is a Democrat who represents El Paso and surrounding areas on the U.S.-Mexico border in west Texas. The facility she visited is the largest ICE detention center in the country. It is a sprawling "soft-sided" tent camp built last summer at the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, with capacity for up to 5,000 people. Congressional oversight, in this case, means the legal power lawmakers have to inspect federal sites and ask questions on the public's behalf.
The visit followed two "disturbances" reported by the Department of Homeland Security within one week in early September. On Sept. 1, DHS alleged detained immigrants assaulted security staff by striking, kicking and throwing tablets at them. On Sept. 7, DHS said around 130 detained immigrants threw items, flipped furniture and disabled security cameras. It said detainees knocked down partitions between tented living quarters known as pods.
Escobar said she requested surveillance footage of the reported incidents and has not received it. An ICE official at the camp called 911 during the incident, according to El Paso Times reporting cited in the Guardian account. No interviews with detainees took place. The footage has not arrived.
Access to the facility has been contested for months. Escobar and other federal lawmakers sued the Trump administration last year for blocking oversight access, and a federal judge ruled in favor of the lawmakers last December. Escobar conducted an unannounced visit to the East Montana camp after that ruling, according to Spectrum News. She said congressional oversight during the second Trump administration has been significantly more difficult than during the first Trump administration.
Her office has kept a detailed paper trail at the site. Escobar made an oversight visit on Nov. 24. Staff followed up with ICE liaisons with a list of questions on Sept. 3. During the office's first visit, officials said the camp had about 300 support staff made up of contractors, according to Rep. Escobar's office. ICE lists the site as an ERO El Paso detention facility in El Paso and includes it in its Detention Facility Appointment Scheduler, an online system for managing legal visits, according to ICE.
The camp has also drawn scrutiny over cost, conditions and deaths in custody. Escobar criticized the $1.2bn price tag for the facility. She and fellow Democrats later joined advocates and protesters in calling for its closure. ICE reported that Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old aggravated felon from Cuba, died in ICE custody on Jan. 3 at Camp East Montana. In a separate case, ICE reported that a Guatemalan national detained at the facility died at a local hospital of suspected natural causes after transfer from ERO Miami to ERO El Paso on Sept. 19, according to ICE.
The broader context here is scale meeting limits on checking. A 5,000-bed tent facility on a military base packs medical needs, legal access and use-of-force cases into one place that Congress can review mainly through visits and document requests. When interviews are denied and video is withheld, lawmakers must weigh DHS incident summaries against accounts from detainee advocates.
In my view, the next test is procedural rather than rhetorical. It turns on whether footage is produced, whether follow-up visits allow detainee interviews, and whether the December court ruling gives Escobar and her colleagues a workable tool to enforce access.
