Inside a cluster of windowless tents, detainees describe losing their sense of time as they spend weeks and even months beneath the flicker of industrial lightbulbs.
Camp East Montana—the largest immigrant detention facility in the country—has quickly become a symbol of the second Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. Located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, the 5,000-bed center began receiving detainees last August. Since then, immigrant detention levels have surged to over 65,000 individuals nationwide, with thousands of people held in Camp East Montana in an environment where frequent beatings and severe neglect have been documented by a leading humanitarian organization.
