Locked Away: Inside ICE's Largest Detention Center

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/20/locked-away

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https://archive.md/20260716012607/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/20/locked-away

In an office park in El Paso, Texas, across the street from the Nuevo Amanecer Church, is a one-story white stucco building with a scuffed metal door. A small sign decorated with a drawing of a globe hangs above the entrance, announcing the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. isap, as it’s known to roughly two hundred thousand enrollees, is an initiative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—an alternative to detention which allows immigrants with open or unresolved legal cases to live freely while checking in with officials a few times a year. It began, in 2004, with a simple premise: the federal government cannot jail everyone it might want to deport.

One of the program’s participants, Rey, is a Cuban in his mid-fifties who came to the U.S. in 1994. Shortly after arriving, he was involved in a robbery in Florida. He served a five-year prison sentence, but, because Cuba didn’t coöperate with American authorities, he could not be deported. Instead, he was authorized to remain in the country. In 2014, Rey moved to El Paso, where he worked as a truck driver and began making regular visits to the local isap office. “My friends would tell me, ‘Are you crazy? One day they’re going to arrest you,’ ” he said recently. “I would tell them, ‘If, when we were young, we did things wrong, now we have to do things the right way.’ ”

Rey, who is tall, heavyset, and bald, with a baritone voice, is a laid-back optimist. He and his wife, a U.S. citizen whom I’ll call Sara, met at a weekly salsa night at an El Paso bar. She was struck by his unhesitating generosity. “Rey is the kind of person who, if he has something, he’ll give it to you,” she said. In El Paso, Rey went on to open a Cuban pizzeria, a night club, and trash-collection and furniture-restoration businesses. “My wife calls me a dreamer,” he told me. They got married a decade ago, when Sara’s son was a year old. “We eventually told him that Rey wasn’t his biological father, but he didn’t care,” Sara said. “As far as he was concerned, Rey was always his dad and always would be.”

Last October, Rey’s case manager at isap called and asked him to stop by for an appointment. He arrived between errands, having just taken his son to school and carrying two thousand dollars in his pocket, a payment for a new pizza oven. “I was running around like crazy,” he said. It was also Sara’s birthday; they were supposed to meet for lunch.

*snip*