{"id":371026,"date":"2026-07-13T12:13:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T12:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/371026\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T12:13:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T12:13:12","slug":"inside-ices-largest-detention-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/371026\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside ICE\u2019s Largest Detention Center"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the ironies of the facility was that, for an ICE jail, actual ICE officers were scarce. Instead, the detainees interacted with private contractors from multiple companies. Loyal Source was responsible for medical care; Amentum managed logistics, from I.T. to housing. The security guards, who were employed by Akima Global Services, were distinguishable by the color of their shirts.<\/p>\n

One night, Rey was lying in bed when an older man in a wheelchair entered the tent. The unit was nearly full, and the only empty spaces were on the top bunks. Rey walked over to a guard to say that the man in the wheelchair needed help finding a place to sleep. The guard shrugged. \u201cIt always came back to the same thing,\u201d Rey told me. \u201cThey weren\u2019t prepared.\u201d Someone eventually tossed the man a mattress pad, and he slept on the floor.<\/p>\n

Without his medication, Rey often felt dizzy and weak. The guards told him to submit a formal request to see a doctor. He did so, but days passed without a response. He began to have trouble urinating, which was especially concerning: three months earlier, he\u2019d been hospitalized with a similar problem that had led to sepsis, and doctors had inserted a catheter. \u201cSincerely, these are simple things,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut the system turned them into something grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

One morning in early November, after Rey had been in detention for about a week, the guards ordered everyone in his unit to go outside to the yard while the staff cleaned the tent. Rey refused to leave his bed. A higher-ranking official came over and demanded to know what the problem was. \u201cMy reason is very simple,\u201d Rey said. \u201cI am diabetic. I need my medicine.\u201d The guard replied, \u201cI understand, but tomorrow we\u2019ll resolve your problem. Right now, you need to leave the unit.\u201d Rey complied, but the next day nothing happened. The following week, he once more refused to leave his bed during the cleaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou again?\u201d the guard said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it\u2019s you again,\u201d Rey replied. \u201cYou told me one thing, and nada. Don\u2019t waste your time with me. If you want to send me to the hole, do it. But I need my medicine. My wife is outside, very worried. And all I\u2019m asking for is my medicine.\u201d Rey spent the next eight hours in the SHU; afterward, he was sent back to his tent without any medication. \u201cLook,\u201d one of the guards told him. \u201cWe now understand what type of medicine you need, but we don\u2019t have it here. We have to order it. And it\u2019s a whole process.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a warm evening this April, I drove to the El Paso Service Processing Center, one of the city\u2019s main immigration jails, for visiting hours. The person I\u2019d come to see\u2014Antonio Asc\u00f3n Frometa\u2014had much in common with Rey. Frometa had also come to the U.S. from Cuba in 1994, during the rafter crisis. Like Rey, he had spent time at Guant\u00e1namo before ending up in Florida, where, during the next three decades, he started a family and worked as a landscaper. He is sixty-four years old and trim, with bushy eyebrows, a full head of gray hair, and a lined face. Dressed in a loose-fitting red uniform, he picked up the phone in the visitation booth and looked at me through a Plexiglas divider with an expression of distrust. I hadn\u2019t told him that I was coming.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost like they\u2019re posing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Michael Maslin<\/p>\n

Frometa had been detained for the previous eight months, following his arrest, last August, in an immigration raid in West Palm Beach. \u201cI didn\u2019t try to run,\u201d he told me. \u201cI wasn\u2019t even arrested by ICE. It was by someone from the Florida Highway Patrol.\u201d He was promptly transferred to the South Florida Detention Facility\u2014Alligator Alcatraz\u2014where a guard punched him so hard in his right ear that he can no longer hear out of it. He was still nursing the injury when ICE sent him to Camp East Montana. He arrived in late August. \u201cEverything was covered in dust,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were building more tents.\u201d The nights were cold, and his ear throbbed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the ironies of the facility was that, for an ICE jail, actual ICE officers were scarce.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[131453,138,140,139,95399,71360,131454],"class_list":["post-371026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-a-reporter-at-large","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-magazine","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}