'Psychological torture': outcry over conditions at ICE desert detention camp

Dust was everywhere, covering people’s blankets and clogging their airways inside Camp East Montana, the huge tent facility for immigration detention in west Texas, said D, a young Venezuelan man who was held there.

The air conditioning blasted constantly, keeping the living areas inside tents the length of two football fields at what felt like near-freezing temperatures despite the balmy weather outside, and rain leaked through the tarps, so people awoke on wet mattresses, he recalled.

“Everyone was coughing a lot – and with the same problem to breathe,” said D, who has since been released and spoke with the Guardian via video interview.

Camp East Montana is the facility with the largest number of immigration-related detainees in the US, with a capacity of 5,000 and an estimated daily average of 2,505 locked up. After just nine months in operation it has become a health and human rights scandal – and also an environmental hazard that affects the inhabitants and the area, while fueling the climate crisis.

Reports of harsh conditions, abuse, sickness and death have accumulated since the camp was erected last summer on the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso. And flying thousands of people often hundreds of miles to be locked up in an encampment run on electricity generators in the desert gobbles energy and produces emissions that are heating the planet.

“I think the environmental impact is pretty apparent,” said Danielle Jefferis, associate professor of law at the University of Nebraska College of Law. “I don’t think it takes an expert to see that if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar building that is properly plumbed and has appropriate medical units and all of the basic infrastructure [relating to] human rights, you’re going to have a serious environmental impact.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/15/ice-desert-detention-camp-east-montana

The cruelty is the point.