‘Shameful’: Democrats join call for closure of Texas immigration jail | US immigration

The eminent Democratic legislators and legal defenders have called the new immigration detention camp at the Fort Bliss military base to be closed in the midst of accusations of lack of external surveillance and concerns about access to legal services.

Camp East Montana began its full operation last weekend as a sprawling tent instlation on hectares of military land in the eastern part of El Paso, on the American-Mexican border in western Texas, in the midst of rapid expansion plans and great controversy.

Nicknamed the “Lone Star Lockup” by Les Républicains, the new installation is currently hosting around 1,000 men’s beds. It is expected to extend to 5,000 beds at a cost of approximately $ 1.24 billion in private contracts, making it the largest among the ranks of immigration detention facilities that already have overtime in the United States.

With an integrated operation to execute expulsion flights, the Texas Military Complex should transform part of itself into the deportation center it should become for the right anti-immigration program of Donald Trump.

After a brief visit to the site on Thursday, the Democrat Congress of Texas, Jasmine Crockett, said: “What I saw today was an improper use of land and military resources to cager human beings. This attempt does not make our country safer, it waste the dollars of taxpayers, tears families and makes us go back as a nation. ”

The Democrat deputy of El Paso, Veronica Escobar, described the new “massive” camp and decried the price of $ 1.2 billion when such a sum could raise public services in a city like El Paso. She told local media that it would be a pressure on city resources.

With the thermometer tirelessly in the fahrenheit of the 90s or more in summer, and the sandstorms a regular event, it is not clear how the conditions of the prisoners will be managed.

“We demand the immediate closure of the East Montana camp,” said Samantha Singleton, director of the Border Network for Human Rights.

She said: “The opening of the country’s largest ice detention site was treated as a ribbon cup ceremony by the Trump administration, an event to celebrate, when it should have been an alarm, a moment of reflection and a call to change the course of Fort Bliss.”

She added: “The shameful use of a military base for the detention of immigration is a shame on the values ​​of our city and our country” and called for “rigorous surveillance”, committing to “we will document each abuse”.

Ice, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said that Camp East Montana will serve as a short -term treatment site to “decompress” other detention centers in the middle of acceleration of arrests and will manage deportations via iced air operations.

The camp was built as part of a contract from the Ministry of Defense. Acquisition logistics, based in the county of Henrico, Virginia, obtained an initial contract of 231.8 million dollars to establish and exploit the installation, which ice will manage and, according to the Federal Agency, in accordance with its standards of detention.

Tricia McLaughlin, Deputy Secretary of Public Affairs of the DHS, published a statement saying that the Trump administration works “Turbo Speed” on mass deportations.

“The installation of Fort Bliss will offer a whole traditional ice detention center, including access to legal representation and a law library, access to visits, recreational space, medical treatment space and nutritional balanced meals. It also provides necessary adaptations for disabilities, diet and religious beliefs,” said the press release.

Crockett said that she had informed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and several defenders of immigrants’ rights to El Paso and in the south of the New Mexico on his observations, because some legal defenders could not meet prisoners.

ACLU said Fort Bliss had been used during Trump’s first term to have children separated from their families and in 2021, as part of the Biden administration, government investigators reported that the basic children undergone emotional distress in the midst of inadequate staff and care. Children were detained under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, while adults detained are now owned by ice.

The base was used for internment during the Second World War and the detention of Mexican refugees before, under difficult conditions, the ACLU calling it “a staging field for policies motivated by cruelty and exclusion” and the East Montana camp “another dark chapter”.

Friday, Florida called on the closure ordered by the court of another recent and very controversial detention camp in the Everglades called Alligator Alcatraz.

Osvaldo Grimaldo, a strategist for politics and defense of the rights of borders and immigrants to the ACLU of Texas, said that Camp East Montana “is part of a broader effort at the levels of the state and federal to instill fear and accelerate mass deportations, whatever the human cost, and too often without any regular procedure”.

Ice is committed to ensuring a legal representation. But Grimaldo said there was no guarantee.

“When people are locked up in remote facilities, far from the courts and far from their family, the right to legal representation becomes an empty promise,” he said.

Melissa Lopez, the executive director of Estrella del Paso, an organization of social services, said that she feared that, as the camp fills him, the medical services and the care of the prisoners “will quickly fall by the way”, adding that the base camp in rapid construction was “a shock, a shock to a regular procedure and a shock for … the basic human decency”.

The member of the Texas Republican Congress John Cornyn said that the installation would be used for those who have final expulsion orders and those who have criminal convictions as a short-term place of treatment before the expulsion of the United States. He undertook that there would be conventional monitoring of the congress.

Fort Bliss has already been used to pilot deportees in military planes in Guantánamo Bay and Central America and South America under the second Trump administration.

“We already know that the use of military bases for mass detention is useless, intentionally cruel and useless. However, we are there, “said Marisa Limón Garza, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

“It is really about targeting people, racial profiling and rounding up the figures to meet quotas, which ignores humanity and any type of right to be a worthy person,” she said.