Camp East Montana migrant detention facility
EL PASO, Texas — In an op-ed published in El Paso Matters, two Fordham Law School leaders describe troubling conditions inside the nation’s largest immigrant detention center, portraying a facility they suggest reflects a country increasingly unrecognizable to its own communities.
The op-ed was authored by Lisa Landau, executive director of Fordham Law School’s Feerick Center for Social Justice, and Emerson Argueta, the center’s associate director, and appeared in El Paso Matters.
Landau and Argueta wrote that Fordham Law School’s Center for Social Justice sponsored a group of law students and volunteer attorneys to travel to El Paso to work at the largest immigrant detention center in the United States. Historically, the Feerick Center has brought students, faculty, alumni and volunteers to witness border activities and provide legal support.
Landau and Argueta disclosed what they described as shocking discoveries and experiences. They wrote that the facility was opened in August 2025 and built at a cost of $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. It was constructed on a secluded Army base, is run by a private company and houses 5,000 people.
They wrote that advocates were alarmed by what detainees described about the conditions inside the facility. They described how each barrack had only five toilets for 72 people that were consistently unclean or nonfunctioning.
They reported that the food was often spoiled, subsequently resulting in people going hungry. They also wrote that calls for medical care go unattended.
Landau and Argueta described how guards would pick fights with detainees, instilling fear or even instigating fights between detainees. Detainees would miss court dates when guards delayed or refused to facilitate their attendance.
They wrote that detainees reported that exercise was significantly limited. The “multi purpose room,” where detainees were interviewed, was also intended to function as a law library, recreation room and chapel, which possessed no legal resources, only a few puzzles, some prayer books and six computer stations meant for the current population of about 3,000.
They explained that detainees who faced prolonged detention would voluntarily deport because of these dire circumstances. They also wrote that some detainees who were initially on screening lists were no longer able to be interviewed due to being moved to other facilities or because they disappeared from the ICE locator website.
Landau and Argueta wrote that the detainees they interviewed had been working steady jobs, paying taxes for decades and had minimal criminal records. They reported that the detainees had been moved to Texas from far-off places in the nation such as Miami, Richmond, New York City and Chicago.
They wrote that the detainees were taken while on the way to work, in street raids or at court hearings. They described how working people, who are peacefully contributing to their communities, are disappearing to places far from their homes, with masked ICE agents concealing their badges and detaining individuals from the streets indiscriminately as they went about their daily lives.
They wrote that an endorsement by the Supreme Court has allowed individuals to be stopped and taken based on biased factors such as skin color. They highlighted the distinction between what the Trump administration is claiming — that individuals being deported are a threat to the safety of Americans — versus what was discovered in the Camp East Montana detention facility.
Landau and Argueta emphasized that communities are losing neighbors and individuals with jobs contributing back to their communities.
They wrote that “we are losing our humanity, paying to imprison people from our communities to a place where basic standards of food, medical care and sanitation are not being met and violence abounds.”
They also reported that three individuals have died in custody in just the past two months.
Landau and Argueta wrote that the country is pouring billions of dollars to private companies for operationalizing, with the additional cost of losing integrity as a nation and as human beings. They urged that Congress take action, that representatives need to witness the conditions at Camp East Montana for themselves, and that Congress needs to lessen additional funding for ICE.
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Categories: Breaking News Immigration National Issues Tags: detention conditions El Paso federal spending Fordam Law School ICE Detention Immigrant Rights immigration enforcement