He was shackled at the wrist and ankles as he boarded a plane to Lima, Peru, wearing swimming trunks, a tank top and swimming shoes – the clothes he wore when he was arrested while selling ceviche in Miami Beach more than 50 days earlier.
Aboard the plane, the shackles around his ankles were removed, but the ones on his wrists remained for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removal flight from Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas.
“I had mixed, complicated feelings. I was sad that I didn’t get to say goodbye to my daughters, to my dog, to the life I had lived in the United States,” Ricardo Quintana Chávez, 57, told El Paso Matters in Spanish. The Peruvian journalist had been in the United States for four years – arriving on a visitor’s visa then applying for asylum and authorized to remain in the country to await his immigration hearing that never came. “But I had a sense of relief not to be jailed anymore – though I still felt like a prisoner – and to be headed to see my mother.”
Quintana was detained by Miami Beach police for selling food without a permit, transferred to ICE custody and taken to Alligator Alcatraz nearly 60 miles west of Miami. He was later transferred to a tent facility in Northeast El Paso and then taken to the East Montana Detention Facility on Fort Bliss in East El Paso. From there, he was sent to Port Isabel Service Processing Center in South Texas near Harlingen.
From Port Isabel, he was bused to the Harlingen airport near midnight on Sept. 10 and flown to Peru. Quintana said he had hoped to be granted voluntary departure – leave the country by a certain date and at his own expense to allow him to gather some of his belongings and say goodbye to his loved ones in Miami. He opted not to contest his removal and “just signed papers to go home.”
Of the four ICE detention centers where he stayed, he doesn’t hesitate to say which was the worst: Alligator Alcatraz. The facility in the Florida Everglades was ordered closed by a federal judge in August before a federal appeals court in early September blocked the shutdown. The rulings stemming from a lawsuit claiming a required environmental review was not conducted.
By comparison, Quintana said, the El Paso facilities were “cleaner, nicer” – including the East Montana tent facility that the Washington Post on Sept. 16 reported had 60 federal standard violations in 50 days. The news organization said it obtained a copy of an ICE inspection report, which said the facility failed to provide proper medical care to detainees, lacked basic safety procedures and didn’t provide a way for detainees to contact their attorneys or learn about their cases.
The Department of Homeland Security in a news release last week called the Washington Post report “false” and “misleading.” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement said that all detainees are provided with proper meals and medical treatment and “have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members.”
Quintana, who was also quoted in the Washington Post story, disputes the DHS claims, calling the Fort Bliss center’s operation disorganized and chaotic at best. He told El Paso Matters that like him, the majority of detainees were in the dark about their cases and what was to become of them. He said the center only offered Tylenol and ibuprofen and many detainees’ medical records were delayed or lost in the shuffle. While meals and snacks were served, he says they were inadequate and poorly made.
“Pero lo más lo más lamentable de todo esto es el grado de incertidumbre en que te pueden tener porque no sabes qué va a pasar contigo,” he said. “But the most unfortunate thing of all this is the level of uncertainty in which they hold you because you never know what’s going to happen to you.”
Quintana said he and most other detainees never met or knew the name of their deportation officers and that messages left by attorneys, who had to schedule calls or visits, rarely reached them. He said different ICE personnel told detainees conflicting information about their cases, and where they were being transferred to at any given time.
“I don’t know if they truly didn’t know or if it was part of the psychological abuse they used against us,” he said. “We were told (the detention center) was a prison, not a hotel.”
The $1.2 billion ICE detention complex at Fort Bliss opened Aug. 1 and is slated to become the largest federal detention center for civil detainees in the country when it expands to accommodate 5,000 people by year’s end. It’s one of about 10 tent detention camps planned to open in military bases.
“I had the misfortune of inaugurating Alligator Alcatraz, and I had the misfortune of inaugurating the East Montana facility,” Quintana said.
The Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, which had denounced the camp’s opening, said the Washington Post’s report confirmed “its worst fears.”
“We warned that such facilities would lead to abuse, neglect, and systemic violations of civil and human rights — abuses we have seen time and again,” the organization said in a Sept. 16 statement. Today’s report confirms our worst fears and what border communities have long known: these are not isolated incidents but part of a repeating cycle in which migrants are treated as disposable in the name of enforcement.”
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, in a Sept. 2 thread on X posted her takeaways after a visit to the East Montana facility, saying she didn’t believe the center was ready when it was declared fully operational Aug. 17 and wasn’t ready when she visited 10 days later.
“One of the biggest issues for me: not enough federal personnel for strong oversight,” she posted. She relayed stories of some of the detainees she and her staff talked to, including men who had had their work permits canceled or were in legal proceedings to adjust their status when they were apprehended. Many, like the Peruvian journalist, had been transferred from Alligator Alcatraz, Escobar noted.
“Construction had just been completed for the family and legal visitation that had been unavailable for the first 11 days of being ‘operational,’” she posted. “Legal organizations couldn’t meet in person with their clients for nearly two weeks and had difficulty connecting by phone.”
50 days in detention ‘an eternity’
Quintana, who sought asylum in the United States after receiving death threats over his reporting of the government in his home country, said he’s one of countless people who got “lost in the system.”
He left the Port Isabel detention center for the Harlingen airport at 11 p.m. Sept. 10. He arrived in Peru the next day.
“Cuando ella me vio, ya te imaginaras el abrazo,” he said about his seeing ailing 81-year-old mother. “When she saw me, you could only imagine the hugging.”
He arrived with just the clothes on his back and had to buy everything from undergarments to a tooth brush to shoes and a cellphone on his first days back in Peru. He was fortunate, he said, that he had a place to live as his mother had been living in his old house. He next has to find a job and buy a car, and his list of things to do to restart his life keeps growing.
He’s getting reacquainted with his family and his friends, he said, and is getting acclimated to Peru’s food and culture – and weather that’s more than 20 degrees cooler than in El Paso. In his first days home, his family celebrated his return with a dinner featuring one of his favorite dishes – pollo a la brasa, a Peruvian rotisserie-style chicken.
Quintana said he’s considering starting a podcast and has a book about his experience in mind, meeting with editors and possible publishers in the coming weeks. Writing has long been an outlet, he said, though he had never before considered writing a memoir or personal story.
“It was just over 50 days, but for me it was an eternity,” he said about his detention. “I have to make something of my experience for my own good, for my mental health, to remain resilient.”
ICE detention, removal flights
The detention and deportation of immigrants has been a priority for President Donald Trump and his administration, who often state they’re working to arrest and deport “criminals” illegally in the country.
Critics argue the effort is meant to enrich private companies who donate millions to Trump, while human rights and policy groups express concern that the rush to build detention facilities operated by private contractors creates an environment for civil rights violations.
The reconciliation bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill and approved this summer, provided for $45 billion in supplemental funding for migrant detention alone.
The funding package focuses on deportations rather than creating a “fair and workable immigration system,” the Brennan Center for Justice stated in an Aug. 13 report. The center – a nonpartisan law and policy organization at New York University School of Law – stated that the detention contracts, rapid hiring for enforcement and other factors have created a “deportation-industrial complex – an enforcement machine with financial and political constituencies that will outlast this administration.”
The Department of Homeland Security in a news release Tuesday said it was “turbocharging the arrests and deportations of illegal aliens” thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, stating that deportation capacity continues to ramp as new detention facilities are negotiated and additional ICE personnel are hired.
As of Sept. 7, nearly 58,770 people were in ICE detention, according to TRAC, about 13,300 of them in Texas. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a nonpartisan organization that tracks immigration enforcement data, about 71% of those in detention have no criminal record.
More than 1,500 detainees were being held at the East Montana facility in late August, the Washington Post reported, citing an internal ICE document.
Although El Paso is one of several ICE deportation hubs, others include Harlingen, Houston, Los Angeles, as well as Alexandria, Louisiana, and Seattle.
The Trump administration has conducted about 1,280 removal flights and just over 4,430 shuffle flights – those between detention facilities or staging areas for deportations – from Jan. 20 to Aug. 31, according to an ICE flight monitor run by Human Rights First. The removal flights represent a 20% increase over the same time the previous year under former President Joe Biden, while shuffle flights increased 43%.
In its Tuesday news release, the DHS claimed that 2 million “illegal aliens have been removed or have self-deported” since Trump took office Jan. 20 – including 1.6 million who have voluntarily self-deported – but didn’t offer any details to back up that statement. Independent policy and civil rights organizations have said those figures don’t add up.
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