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David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
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The conditions at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso were nightmarish. Tents had been hastily set up to house immigrant detainees, and much of the facility, which is known as Camp East Montana, was still under construction when the first people began to arrive. Dust blew in through holes in the tents, the toilets didn’t flush, fetid water flowed into the dining area and the sleeping quarters. “Since we are not given anything to mop up the dirty water, we have to use our own underwear and socks,” one detainee said. Another described being kept inside for weeks on end: “I have not seen the sun for approximately one month.”
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
In this week’s issue, Jonathan Blitzer documents the harsh conditions inside what would become the Trump Administration’s largest immigrant-detention complex. He interviews former detainees about their terrifying stories of suffering, confusion, and desolation. He also investigates why the contract for operating Camp East Montana, which was worth more than a billion dollars, was awarded to a small logistics firm based in Virginia that had no prior detention experience. Was the chaos in El Paso a matter of incompetence, impossible-to-meet deadlines, or something else entirely? “The idea seemed to be: How can we do this as cheaply and brutally as possible?” a former senior ICE official told Blitzer. The goal, the former official explained, was to make life in such a place so intolerable that detainees would be compelled to leave the country altogether.
At the center of Blitzer’s reporting is a man in his mid-fifties named Rey, who first came to the United States from Cuba on a makeshift raft, in 1994. He had served five years in prison in connection with a robbery in Florida, but, in the years since, he’d moved to El Paso and married an American citizen, acting as a father to her son, opening a series of small businesses, and remaining in contact with his ICE case manager. Then, one day last October, Rey was called in for what he was told was an insignificant administrative meeting with his case manager. Instead, he was promptly cuffed, loaded into a van, and taken to Camp East Montana. He hasn’t been home since.
Rey’s story is, in part, about the cruel mistreatment he experienced during detention, but it’s also about the sudden shattering of a family and a life. Blitzer spends time in El Paso with Rey’s wife, who works for the state of Texas, exploring how she has struggled to forge a life without her husband. During her visits to Camp East Montana, she realized that she and Rey were now living in separate realities. “The gate was like a portal, like something out of Narnia,” she says. “It’s a different world that you enter. It transforms you.”
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