An Immigration and Customs Enforcement report revealed that officials at Camp East Montana, the new detention facility at Fort Bliss, have already violated dozens of federal standards for immigrant detention since welcoming detainees in August, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Construction began hastily in late July, after the government awarded a nearly $232 million contract to Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics to establish and operate a 5,000-bed short-term immigrant detention facility. The company specializes in supply chain management, and has no experience in detention—and it’s showing.
The first detainees arrived on August 1, only days after construction began. Just 50 days later, and with 1,400 detainees in its charge, the facility had racked up at least 60 violations, according to a recent ICE inspection.
Detainees at Camp East Montana were held in large tents on an active construction site without basic amenities, similarly to detainees at the now shuttered Alligator Alcatraz. Some toilets and sinks did not work for the first few weeks, according to an August memo obtained by the Post. Detainees were not given access to telephones, the Post reported, only tablet computers that sometimes didn’t work.
Ricardo Quintana Chavez, a 57-year-old asylum seeker who was held at Fort Bliss for 24 days before being deported to Peru, told the Post that water seeped into his cell when other people used the showers.
Chavez also told the Post that he was rarely allowed outside. ICE policy requires one hour of recreation a day, five days per week, but inspectors at Camp East Montana found that detainees were only given 40 minutes of recreation per session, and some only received three sessions over a two-week period. Chavez also said he was fed junk food, such as cookies, candies, and potato chips, instead of substantive meals.
Detainees were kept in the dark about their cases, and many said they didn’t know who their deportation officer was, in violation of ICE standards. Chavez told the Post that he received no information about the status of his asylum case over his three-week stay at Camp East Montana.
ICE inspectors also said that officials at the detention center failed to provide proper and mandatory medical care for detainees, failing to conduct intake screenings and complete medical charts that could be used to identify medical and mental conditions.
Detainees’ family members and legal representatives struggled to get a hold of them while at Camp East Montana, as their location was not available on ICE’s website. Legal representatives reported being turned away from the facility, as did Texas Representative Veronica Escobar. She said she’d complied with ICE’s demand for a week’s advance warning, but was still told she couldn’t visit until construction was completed.
Michelle Brané, a former Immigration Detention Ombudsman, said that the report was the one of the most concerning evaluations of an immigrant detention center she had ever seen. “There is no way that this facility should be operating with their current numbers, let alone expanding,” she told the Post.
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