Prominent Democratic lawmakers and legal advocates have called for the new immigration detention camp at Fort Bliss military base to be shut down amid accusations of lack of external oversight and concerns over access to legal services.
Camp East Montana began full operation last weekend as a sprawling tent facility across acres of military land in the eastern part of El Paso, on the US-Mexico border in west Texas, amid rapid expansion plans and much controversy.
Dubbed the “Lone Star Lockup” by Republicans, the new facility currently accommodates around 1,000 beds for men. It is set to expand to 5,000 beds at a cost of around $1.24bn in private contracts, making it the largest among the ranks of immigration detention facilities already working overtime across the US.
With an integrated operation to run deportation flights, the Texas military complex is set to transform part of itself into the deportation hub it was forecast to become for Donald Trump’s hard-right anti-immigration agenda.
After a brief tour of the site on Thursday, Texas Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett said: “What I saw today was a dangerous misuse of military land and resources to cage human beings. This attempt doesn’t make our country safer, it wastes taxpayer dollars, rips families apart, and takes us backwards as a nation.”
El Paso Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar called the new camp “massive” and decried the $1.2bn price tag when such a sum could elevate public services in such a city as El Paso. She told local media it would be a strain on the city’s resources.
With the thermometer relentlessly in the 90s Fahrenheit or higher in the summer, and sandstorms a regular occurrence, it is unclear how conditions for detainees will be managed.
“We demand the immediate closure of Camp East Montana,” said Samantha Singleton, policy director of the Border Network for Human Rights.
She said: “The opening of the country’s largest Ice detention site has been treated like a ribbon-cutting ceremony by the Trump administration, an event to celebrate, when it should have been an alarm, a moment for reflection and a call to change the course of Fort Bliss.”
She added: “The shameful use of a military base for immigration detention is a disgrace to the values of our city and our country” and called for “rigorous oversight”, pledging that “we will document every abuse”.
Ice, part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has said Camp East Montana will serve as a short-term processing site to “decompress” other detention centers amid accelerating arrests and will handle deportations via Ice air operations.
The camp has been constructed under a Department of Defense contract. Acquisition Logistics, based in Henrico county, Virginia was awarded a $231.8m initial contract to establish and operate the facility, which Ice will manage and, the federal agency said, be in line with its detention standards.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS issued a statement saying the Trump administration is working “at turbo speed” on mass deportations.
“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 said.
Crockett said she briefed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and several immigrant rights advocates in El Paso and southern New Mexico on her observations, as some legal advocates have been unable to meet with detainees.
The ACLU said Fort Bliss was used during Trump’s first term to detain children who were separated from their families and in 2021, under the Biden administration, government investigators reported children detained at the base suffered emotional distress amid inadequate staffing and care. Children were under held under the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services, while the adults detained now are held by Ice.
The base was used for internment during the second world war and detention of Mexican refugees previously, in harsh conditions, with the ACLU calling it “a staging ground for policies driven by cruelty and exclusion” and Camp East Montana “another dark chapter”.
Florida on Friday appealed the court-ordered closure of another recent and highly controversial detention camp in the Everglades called Alligator Alcatraz.
Osvaldo Grimaldo, a policy and advocacy strategist for border and immigrants’ rights at the ACLU of Texas, said Camp East Montana “is part of a broader effort at both the state and federal levels to instill fear and accelerate mass deportations, no matter the human cost, and far too often without any due process”.
Ice has pledged to provide legal representation. But Grimaldo said there was no guarantee.
“When people are locked away in remote facilities, far from courts and far from their families, the right to legal representation becomes an empty promise,” he said.
Melissa Lopez, the executive director of Estrella del Paso, a social services organization, said she worried that as the camp fills, medical services and care of detainees will “quickly fall to the wayside”, adding that the rapidly constructed camp was “a shock to us, a shock to due process and a shock to … basic human decency”.
Texas Republican congressman John Cornyn said the facility would be used for those with final deportation orders and those with criminal convictions as a short term processing location before expulsion from the US. He pledged there would be conventional congressional oversight.
Fort Bliss has already been used to fly deportees on military aircraft to Guantánamo Bay and Central and South America under the second Trump administration.
“We already know that the use of military bases for mass detention is wasteful, intentionally cruel and unnecessary. Yet here we are,” said Marisa Limón Garza, the executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.
“It’s really just about targeting people, racial profiling and rounding up of numbers to meet quotas, which is ignoring humanity and any kind of right to being a dignified person,” she said.