A sprawling migrant detention facility in Far East El Paso fades into the desert, appearing somewhat unassuming to passersby. Its distance from the highway diminishes its scale.
“The facility is really, really big and it will continue to grow,” U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said Monday after taking a two-and-half-hour tour of the tent structure on acres of military land north of Montana Avenue off George Dieter Drive.
“It is really massive. It is a huge facility that takes a lot of power – a lot of power – to run. And it takes a lot of people,” said Escobar, the first member of Congress to set foot inside the Department of Homeland Security’s East Montana Detention Facility.
The $1.24 billion, soft-sided Immigration and Customs Enforcement East Montana site on Fort Bliss land began taking in detainees Aug. 1 and now holds about 1,000 people – all men. Its capacity is expected to grow to about 5,000 detainees, including women, in the near future – set to become the largest federal detention center for civil detainees in the country.
Escobar said the facility is a reinforced tent with hard floors and walls that don’t extend to the ceiling but create some division and privacy. Cameras are everywhere, she added.
The funding comes from the Department of Defense budget under the reconciliation bill, known as the Big Beautiful Bill, that provided for $45 billion in supplemental funding to double migrant detention capacity to 100,000 beds.
“When you think about the amount of money that is being funneled into this facility … think about how much good that money would do if it were spent on the community, if it were spent on access to child care for El Paso kids, if it were spent on universal pre-K for El Paso kids, if it were spent on health care for El Pasoans,” Escobar said during a news conference just outside the facility.
The East Montana Detention Facility is the latest to open in recent months as part of the ramped up immigration enforcement and mass deportations efforts by the Trump administration, which is seeking to deport 1 million people a year.
At least three other detention centers have opened in recent months throughout the country, including what are being called “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Deportation Depot” in Florida and the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana.
While the square footage of the East Montana detention center is unclear, a similar tent facility in Northeast El Paso with a capacity of 1,000 people stands at about 153,000 square feet on 28 acres. The El Paso Service Processing Center on Montana Avenue near Hawkins Boulevard can also hold up to 1,000 detainees. Both will likely remain operational, Escobar said.
Nearly 59,400 people were in ICE detention as of Aug. 10 – 70% of them with no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, or TRAC.
In El Paso, TRAC reports an average daily number of detainees at the Montana Facility at just over 800 on Aug. 4, with another 180 at the Northeast facility. TRAC does not yet reflect any statistics from the East Montana facility.
Escobar praised what appeared to be a “highly sophisticated” medical facility at the site, and said the kitchen and open areas are large and clean.
Still, she expressed several concerns, including that the facility which is now running on generators will take a large amount of energy and water resources to maintain the facility. Aside from utility resources, Escobar said she feared the camp was “poaching” health care professionals from the region, offering temporary but high-paying jobs.
Escobar said she wasn’t able to talk with detainees as she has in past visits to other detention facilities, including under Trump’s previous administration. She said that the process for attorneys and families to access detainees is not yet clearly defined.
Escobar, who in early July was denied access to the facility near Hawkins, said her staff has since been able to visit the site and talk to detainees at that site. She said she was on the House floor in Washington, D.C., when her staff was granted access and left with “a lot of case work, which we cannot talk about.” She referred to assistance members of Congress provide to their constituents to help resolve problems related to federal agencies.
East Montana ICE facility to be privately run
While Escobar said that it doesn’t appear that any military personnel are involved in running the East Montana detention center, she said she has other staffing concerns. Most such centers are run by private staffing companies.
“I am very concerned that there are not enough ICE personnel who have been trained by the federal government and have done this for a living for their whole career,” she said. “I’m concerned that there are not as many federal personnel to provide oversight as we should have.”
Without the appropriate number of ICE or other federal employees, she said, it’s too easy for standards to slip “when there are private facilities that far too frequently are operating with a profit margin in mind as opposed to a governmental facility.”
Acquisition Logistics LLC, a Virginia-based company that specializes in providing logistics and supply chain management services primarily to Department of Defense agencies, was awarded nearly $232 million upfront to begin the work, with an estimated completion date of September 2027 for a total contract of $1.24 billion, according to the DoD.
About 10 other military sites are being considered for ICE detention facilities, with Fort Bliss serving as a model, the New York Times reported in February. The Fort Bliss site was selected after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited with troops at the base earlier this year, according to the news organization. Other sites being considered include Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado, and Hill Air Force Base in Utah.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, in a statement said the Trump administration is working “at turbo speed” to execute mass deportations, saying that the Big Beautiful Bill provided “historic funding” to secure 80,000 new ICE beds and capacity to detain up to 100,000 people daily.
“The Fort Bliss Facility will offer everything a traditional ICE detention facility offers, including access to legal representation and a law library, access to visitation, recreational space, medical treatment space and nutritionally balanced meals. It also provides necessary accommodations for disabilities, diet, and religious beliefs,” the statement reads.
Sen. John Cornyn, who visited the site but did not go into the facility last week, said during an Aug. 11 news conference that all detention facilities meet state or federal standards, including that detainees receive medical care, three meals a day, air conditioning and “a place to sleep.”
“These are humane, safe facilities and in many instances, a vast improvement over what many of these folks are used to,” Cornyn said, calling the facility “the lone star lockup.” He said the detention facilities are needed to address the “unmitigated disaster” of the past several years and the need to remove “illegal aliens who have no legal right to be here.”
The post $1.2B ICE detention complex opens at Fort Bliss in East El Paso under Trump’s mass deportation strategy appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More