A Stain on Our City: Camp East Montana

About a year ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Why Immigration Detention Should Be Abolished.” Camp East Montana did not yet exist; this sprawling tent city with a capacity of 5,000, sitting on Fort Bliss land at the edge of El Paso, began operations on August 17, 2025. Yet it has been beset with allegations of abuse, neglect, and mismanagement from the beginning. Three individuals have died, including one by homicide. While the operating contractor recently changed, the medical contractor is the same, and conditions remain dire. DHS has since been granted many more billions to expand this shameful system.

Last Thursday, I joined a handful of religious leaders throughout the city, who led a prayer meeting in the Brio Parking Lot, on City property outside of the camp. A steady stream of pickup trucks and late-model cars moved in and out of the facility. We timed it to coincide with an evening prayer group that meets within.

In 2018, the first Trump Administration experimented with an emergency tent camp for unaccompanied minors – children – in Tornillo, Texas, on the outskirts of El Paso. This facility only lasted seven months, and was closed by January 2019 after public outcry, marches, and at least one documentary made about a Brooklyn man who camped outside for months.

While El Paso’s congresswoman has consistently visited the camp and called for its closure, there has been little outcry from other local or state leaders. Many El Pasoans remain unaware of this stain on our city.

I recently listened to a discussion between immigration scholar Austin Kocher and author John Washington, who is coming out with a book in July called “How to Close a Camp.” They spoke of whether or not it is appropriate or accurate to call these places concentration camps.

Kocher and Washington argued that Americans often misunderstand the term “concentration camp,” conflating it exclusively with extermination camps, when historically it has referred more broadly to systems of mass civilian detention based on identity or nationality. Their larger point was that acute confinement - refugee camps, reservations, ghettos, prisons - has often accompanied projects of nation-building.

And most crucially, they emphasized that people are detained because of who or where they are, not what they did.

The hundreds currently detained inside the camp are there indefinitely; they are not serving a sentence for a crime they have been convicted of. Immigration offenses are civil, administrative matters, like a traffic ticket or a divorce. You don’t have to be in the country unlawfully or have entered unlawfully to be detained. There have even been U.S. citizens held at Camp East Montana, including some from Minneapolis.

Kocher and Washington also discussed how Roosevelt administration officials themselves sometimes used the term “concentration camps” when describing Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Fort Bliss was actually part of that history as well, in a smaller and lesser-known camp called the Fort Bliss Enemy Alien Detention Station that interred Japanese, Italians, and Germans in 1942.

What if these detainees were instead children? Or white children from Europe? Would we be more upset?

Standing in groups of four or five, we offered up a variety of prayers – for those detained, for those working in the facility, for our leaders, and for the moral injury that this system inflicts on all of us. It seldom rains this time of year in El Paso, but the sky was a beautiful patchwork of clouds, and right before we began, the heavens briefly opened up. The smell of creosote from the dunes separating us permeated the service – the incense of our Chihuahuan Desert.

At the end of our gathering, the Lord’s Prayer was read aloud, broken into five parts read in different languages. During our weekly prayer vigils in front of the immigration courthouse, there is an elderly nun who helps lead us in song. She was not there that evening, but we sang her favorite song, even though we were too far from the camp for anyone to hear us.

Peace is flowing like a river,

Flowing out of you and me.

Flowing out into the desert,

Setting all the captives free.

We still had a babysitter, so my husband and I stopped for a drink at Track One, the iconic El Paso railcar restaurant/bar that is busy seven days a week, regulars and families speaking in two languages. The sky kept spitting rain. Splotchy clouds drifted overhead, and I carried that unresolved anger that comes from living in a world so at odds with your values. When we got home, it was finally dark, and I went to sleep before my children.

145,000 U.S.-citizen children have had at least one parent detained since January 2025.

When does suffering becomes visible enough for a country to finally call it intolerable?