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TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Over the past year, we've watched ICE agents arrest immigrants at traffic stops, outside schools, even at the routine check-ins people attend to stay in compliance. And in the past week, two of these attempted detentions turned deadly. Agents shot and killed two men in their vehicles - a construction worker in Houston and, on Monday, a man in Biddeford, Maine. ICE agents are reportedly now arresting some 2,000 people a day. But the arrests are only part of what we've seen.
My guest, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, takes us inside what happens next. Some spend weeks or months in detention, and others are deported to countries they've never set foot in. His latest reporting is from the country's largest immigrant detention center, a sprawling complex of tents built on a military base in El Paso, designed to hold up to 5,000 people. Through the stories of families separated and the detainees themselves, Blitzer documents how the conditions at these centers have become a form of enforcement - detention not as a place where people wait for their cases to be decided, but as a tool to pressure them to abandon those cases and accept deportation. Jonathan Blitzer covers immigration, politics and foreign affairs for The New Yorker. He is also the author of "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, And The Making Of A Crisis." His new article is titled "Locked Away."
Jonathan Blitzer, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
JONATHAN BLITZER: Thanks again so much for having me.
MOSLEY: OK, so before we get into what you found, please orient us on the scale of this. With ICE arresting thousands of people a day, how many people do you estimate might be in detention right now?
BLITZER: At this point, there are more than 60,000 people being held in ICE detention centers across the country. A few months ago, it was as high as 70,000. To give listeners a sense just of an immediate context for that, when Trump first took office in January of 2025, that detention population was around 39,000, so it's exploded in the last year and a half. And it's, you know, coincided with, unsurprisingly, a whole host of horrors that have been reported from inside these detention centers and all kinds of statistics that demonstrate just how dangerous the conditions inside have become, the most obvious of which is that deaths in ICE detention are way up. There have been 52 since Trump took office a second time. You know, the comparable numbers that we've seen are things that haven't - you know, haven't emerged in decades. And then when you look even more specifically at those deaths, a significant number of them are suicides, to give you a sense, of course, of just how utterly desperate and horrified people are inside detention.
MOSLEY: You were able to get a lens into this detention center in El Paso - the largest so far - through some of those who have spent time in there. And your piece opens with a man named Rey, who is originally from Cuba. Tell us about him. Who is he, and why had he been checking in with ICE for years as a condition of staying in this country?
BLITZER: Yeah. Rey came to the United States in 1994, along with 30,000 other Cubans who fled the country that year alone and came on makeshift rafts. It was known as the rafters crisis. And he spent - when he was first interdicted by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1994, he spent about 11 months on the U.S. naval base Guantanamo Bay in Cuba before he was eventually released to live with his father, who had emigrated to the United States in 1980. His father lived in El Paso. And the conditions there with his father grew tense. He had arrived with his half brother, who wasn't his father's biological son. There was tension between the two of them. And eventually, Rey and his brother leave his father's house, live in a church in El Paso for a very brief period, then relocate to Austin. And before long, Rey finds himself back in Miami, where a number of people he knew from Havana had begun to start an American life for themselves.
And for those years - I mean, you're talking about someone who, in Rey's case, is in his early 20s, has been overwhelmed by everything that's happened to him. He got into trouble and eventually got arrested for his involvement in a robbery, served a five-year prison term in Florida and then was released. And after his release, because the Cuban government didn't have any sort of relationship with the United States, it didn't accept Cuban immigrants whom the United States would have wanted maybe to deport. And so as a result, he was authorized to continue to live in the United States on the condition that eventually he start to check in with a local ICE office as part of a program that ICE had, which essentially recognized that it was impossible for ICE to detain and deport everyone who might be in some sort of complicated standing with immigration law. And so for years, including after he relocated to El Paso in 2014, he would, every several months, check in with his local ICE officer and, you know, more or less live an ordinary life.
And I should say that, you know, for years, even before the second Trump administration comes into office, Rey's friends would always give him a hard time and say, you are the most naive person on, you know, the planet to think that, you know, you just keep checking in and nothing's going to happen, they're never going to try to arrest you. And he was always really principled in his response to them. He said, look, we made mistakes in our past, and the only way to kind of outrun those mistakes is to try to do things t`he right way. And so that was what was happening in his life when, you know, in 2016, he gets married to someone who he meets in El Paso. That woman had then a 1-year-old son who Rey adopts as his own. He and the son become very, very close, and they have a life together as a family until October of 2025, when, at one of these routine check-ins that he'd been doing for decades at this point, he gets detained and from there gets sent to Camp East Montana. And that's really where the nightmare begins for him.
MOSLEY: So - OK, so Rey is detained. He's in this tent city, almost, at Fort Bliss, and he is immediately alarmed at what he saw. I mean, this is a man, as you said, had been at Guantanamo after - you know, after fleeing Cuba, so he has seen the inside of one of these places. What did he see in those first hours that really worried him?
BLITZER: Yeah. He's a really - he has a really interesting perspective on all of this because - both because of the experience he had at Guantanamo and because of the experience he had in federal prison. And so he is used to a general sense of order. I mean, this is a guy who's a survivor. This is a guy who's tough, who's been through a lot. He's not expecting to be kind of treated in a - you know, an overly sensitive way, but he's expecting there to be a certain baseline sense of order and regulation to the experience in detention. And that, from the very start, is clearly not the case at Camp East Montana. And so it immediately sets off kind of an alarm in his head that there's something off here.
So, for instance, you know, he arrives there, he spends his first night with 20 other guys, sleeping essentially on the floor of what is a kind of de facto holding cell before they're then transferred to these individual tents. Each tent has maybe a dozen or so units in it.
And, you know, the first thing he says to the guards when he's taken into custody is, listen, I've got a medical condition. I've got diabetes, I've got high blood pressure. I was recently hospitalized, like, a couple of months before in New Mexico. I had sepsis. Doctors had to insert a catheter.
You know, my health situation is very delicate. And all I ask is that you check in with my wife, who has access to my medication at home. And the first thing they said to him in response to that very straightforward expression of concern about his own medical situation was, yeah, we're not going to do that. And so he's already beginning to become uneasy.
And then, you know, over the next couple of weeks, not only is he systematically denied his medication, even as he starts to feel increasingly sick, but he also sees other people in his tent being mistreated. Someone, for example, who comes in in a wheelchair who can't sit in a top - who can't make it to a top bunk but at the time that this man comes wheeling in, doesn't - you know, the beds are all - all the bottom bunks are occupied. And someone just throws him a mattress and the guy sleeps on the floor because the guards don't bother to try to, you know, improve the situation. You know, Rey is seeing all of this stuff and is most alarmed by the level of chaos. And that, I think, you know, above all, for him, given his experience, was, I think, the indicator that something here was awry.
MOSLEY: Abnormal, but would he go so far to say that the conditions were inhumane?
BLITZER: Well, I mean, we haven't even spoken about the conditions themselves, which, yes, I think, objectively speaking, are inhumane. By the time Rey gets there, it's October of 2025. It should be said about the facility before Rey gets there that a large number of detainees who were held at Camp East Montana were being held there while construction was going on at the facility itself.
And so, you know, in August, September, there are people - and we have a - thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which took a bunch of declarations early on, we have testimony from detainees who describe, essentially, there being dust coming into the tents, people coughing, people not being able to breathe, people getting sick, the water working sporadically, toilet and sewage water leaking into the living area. You know, the toilets and the eating and sleeping area are all in a small, confined space inside these tents, and so, you know, leaks from the bathroom are seeping into where detainees are eating and sleeping. In the early days, the outside recreation area isn't set up yet, so people aren't allowed outside at all.
MOSLEY: For weeks.
BLITZER: There's - for weeks on end. The phone booths or visitation booths where people are supposed to be able to meet with lawyers and family members aren't set up, and so people are completely cut off from the outside world. The tablets that detainees are meant to use to communicate with lawyers and family members don't work. So people are essentially being held kind of incommunicado in conditions that are, you know, increasingly alarming. Medical care as a general matter doesn't exist. One after another person described to me, essentially, that anytime you had any sort of physical problem, if you complained loudly about it, they'd give you Advil, but that was the extent of it. No one got seen by a doctor. People with medical conditions who needed medication, with chronic conditions, were essentially ignored.
You know, there weren't - there was infrequent cleaning of the tents themselves. And so a lot of the detainees had to do it themselves, sometimes with their own clothes. So there's testimony from detainees who are wiping up, you know, sort of fetid bathroom water with their own underwear. I mean, every manner of horror. And, you know, we can get into this. But essentially, these problems kind of evolve or devolve, depending on how you look at it, over the course of several months.
By the time Rey gets there in October, four of the five tents at Camp East Montana have been built. And so there's still construction going on, but it's not as notable for him, say, as it was for someone who arrived there in August, when it...
MOSLEY: It was something (ph)...
BLITZER: ...Essentially was an open construction site.
MOSLEY: Right. Right. OK. So yeah. We're going to get into that, but I'm just thinking. Everything that you described - this isolation, this medical neglect - it really lands on, really, your argument in - of this entire piece that these conditions aren't incidental, because a former senior ICE official told you that the government's goal is to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave. It sounds like suffering is the strategy.
BLITZER: I think that's exactly right, and I think that's been the case all across the country. And it's actually had a demonstrable effect on the rate at which people abandon cases. And this is well beyond, say, Camp East Montana, although it's obviously especially true in Camp East Montana. You know, there was a - there's a woman who - whom I'm sure we'll talk about who - named Lidia who was also detained at Camp East Montana, who basically described that half of the women in her unit eventually agreed to their own deportation because they just couldn't stand the conditions anymore. And that, of course, is true all across the country.
And, you know, different groups - Human Rights Watch has a - an excellent report documenting the rates at which people in the New York tristate area, for instance, have abandoned their legal cases because the conditions where they're being held are so inhumane. But that's very much the idea.
And one of the interesting kind of trends that you hear in talking to people who've been held in ICE detention during the current administration is for all of the neglect, for all of the general mistreatment and for the general absence of, you know, ICE officers on the scene - so, for example, at Camp East Montana, one of the strangest realities of being there is you're actually interacting most commonly with independent contractors who have different jobs because there are all these subcontractors providing different services at the facility. So actually speaking to someone who is an ICE official who can give you information about your case is difficult. But the trend is that when those officials appear, they appear to do one thing. It's to say to people, OK. Who's ready to leave? Who's ready to end this? And it's very much part of the...
MOSLEY: The larger - yeah.
BLITZER: ...Design - yeah - of what the administration is doing.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article, "Locked Away," takes us inside the country's largest immigration detention center - a tent complex built on a military base at Fort Bliss in El Paso. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today, I am talking with New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer about his new article, "Locked Away." It's an inside account of Camp East Montana, the country's largest immigrant detention facility - a complex of tents on an army base in El Paso built to hold up to 5,000 people. Blitzer's reporting follows detainees and their families as they navigate a system where the conditions themselves - the lack of medical care, the isolation, the indefinite waiting - have become a tool to pressure people to accept deportation.
OK, Jonathan. Part of why Rey's account, and some of the others that you've spoken to, is important is that until you started reporting the story, very few people outside of El Paso even knew that this place existed. And this is the largest immigrant facility in America. How is that possible?
BLITZER: Well, you know, I think over the course of my reporting on this, there was more and more attention paid to the conditions there. And there was some great reporting from other outlets - The Washington Post above all, really - documenting how, for example, in the first, you know, 60 days of this facility's existence, there were 50 code violations related to all of the mismanagement that we've gotten into.
And then there was a period in between December of 2025 and January of 2026 when, in a span of, you know, maybe 40-plus days, there were three deaths at Camp East Montana. And I think there was one of those three deaths, which ICE claimed initially had been a suicide or an - kind of an aborted suicide - caused, I think, the most national attention because the El Paso County medical examiner revealed in an autopsy that the cause of death had been homicide - had been, you know, chest compression and, you know, asphyxiation.
MOSLEY: This person that you're talking about, of the three people who died there - this is Geraldo Lunas Campos, right? His story actually is...
BLITZER: Exactly.
MOSLEY: He had asthma. He repeatedly asked for medication. Walk us through what happened the night that he died in particular.
BLITZER: Yeah. He had a bunch of different medical conditions. You know, first of all, he had asthma and needed an inhaler. But he also suffered from bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, so he also took medication for that. And we now know that he was being denied his medicine across all of these different conditions.
And, you know, I should just say, too, that in September of 2025, there were so many complaints that were emerging about the conditions at Camp East Montana that two government bodies sent officials to conduct a site visit and see for themselves what was going on. One of them came from the Government Accountability Office, and the other came from ICE itself. And I spoke to one of the officials who visited the facility back in September to conduct this site visit. And this official said to me that when they came back, their kind of No. 1 warning that they tried to relay up the chain was, someone is going to die here. Someone is going to commit suicide here. None of the cells that are meant to hold people who are at risk of committing suicide or who have threatened to commit suicide are sort of proofed against their doing so.
And then you have - you fast-forward a couple of months to the case of Geraldo Lunas Campos, who, you know, again, has been complaining consistently about how they've denied him his psychiatric medication. But then in early January, on January 2, a number of other detainees hear him complaining about the fact that the guards are not giving him his inhaler for asthma. And the guards threaten to throw him into solitary, which, by the way, is something that - an experience that Rey had, too. You know, when he repeatedly said, look, I need medication for my diabetes, they said, if you keep giving us problems, we're going to throw you in solitary. And he would say - as Lunas Campos did - fine. Throw me in solitary. Just give me my medication.
And so people heard Lunas Campos saying as much, and that was essentially the last that the general population saw or heard from him. And the testimony of at least five other detainees who were being held in this row of cells for solitary confinement either heard or even saw what happened next, which was essentially that a bunch of guards, in trying to restrain Geraldo Lunas Campos, essentially choked him to death. And - though his last words were, I can't breathe. You're choking me. You know, begging - basically begging for his life.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Jonathan Blitzer from The New Yorker. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer for The New Yorker who covers immigration. We're talking about his new article, "Locked Away," an inside account of the largest immigrant detention facility in the country, a complex of tents on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base in El Paso that the government calls Camp East Montana. Blitzer's reporting follows the people held there and the families on the outside trying to reach them. Three men died at the facility this past winter in a span of six weeks. Blitzer is also the author of "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here," which examines the origins of the immigration crisis in Central America and the United States.
I think one of the astounding aspects of your reporting is that ICE, these representatives who came to look at conditions, they were unaware of many of these problems because the agency never inspected the facility before sending people there. I mean, that's a violation of their own policy, right?
BLITZER: That's right. And that came out in this government accountability report that was published earlier this summer. Exactly as you say, I mean, that is a straightforward violation of ICE's own policy.
MOSLEY: I guess I'm just also trying to understand - it sounds like the government has violated its own rules about the building of these detention centers, the steps that are supposed to be taken. I mean, Congress has the authority to inspect these facilities, right? You write about Representative Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, basically fighting to get inside. She couldn't even get inside to do her job at first. Why did that happen? And what actually happened in her case?
BLITZER: I'm really glad you mentioned this because this is a major trend also nationwide where members of Congress by law have the right to make what are known as unannounced visits at these facilities. But essentially, when members of Congress, and in this case, when Congresswoman Veronica Escobar tries to gain access to this facility, she's just simply denied access, which is something that ICE legally can't do. And in fact, a federal judge in the lawsuit I just mentioned, a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs, with these Democratic lawmakers saying, no, the government has to allow members of Congress, who of course are in charge of appropriating money for exactly these detention centers, to visit said detention centers and have a look at the conditions.
So in the case of Congresswoman Escobar, it's particularly interesting because she gets wind of the fact in early August that there are people being held at this facility. And she contacts ICE and requests a site visit and, you know, is denied, but is specifically written an email, I believe it was August 8, in which ICE says, we haven't - this facility hasn't opened yet. It's not open for business yet, and so therefore, you can't come. You know, the official open date is August 17.
Now, we now know that at the time that ICE sent that email to her, there were already 15 people being held at Camp East Montana. And when I spoke to an administration official about this, the official said to me, yeah, as far as we all knew, the date that this facility was supposed to open was August 17. And then ICE just brought people there early.
MOSLEY: I want to go back to what happened to Rey, who we were talking about at the top of the hour. He ended up signing the papers for deportation, and very quickly after he signed those papers, he was in Mexico, which is a country he'd never - or he wasn't from because he's from Cuba originally. And you visited him a few months ago. Describe what you found.
BLITZER: Yeah, Rey and I met in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, right across the border from El Paso. And, you know, the first thing I want to say is the reason he agreed to be removed was because they continually denied him his diabetes medication, and he actually feared for his life.
MOSLEY: He thought he was going to die, he might die there.
BLITZER: Yeah. He said to me, you know, look, I could survive a couple of weeks without my meds. But I'm not seeing any indication that this is changing. I'm meeting people in my unit who've been here for months on end. At that point, you know, the diabetes medication he was on, a number of other pills he needed to take for blood pressure and other things, he's just not getting. He's in bed. He's got these splitting headaches. He's not able to urinate, which has actually been a problem he's had before that's led to his hospitalization.
And there's a specific moment where he thinks, you know, if I were to collapse, if I were to go into shock of some sort, the same people right now who are not even letting me see a doctor or not even letting me have my own medication - and he had, you know, doctors write to the facility. I mean, basically, there was no question about what his needs were. He says, you know, if these people are treating me this way now, what would happen if I had suddenly a medical emergency and had to be taken to an emergency room or a hospital? Would they send me? And so, his feeling after six weeks was, I have to save myself and I am at - you know, I am at mortal risk staying here any longer.
And so when the ICE official who made these regular trips to his unit to ask who was ready to be deported made his, you know, visit in December to Rey's unit, Rey finally said - you know what? - I'm ready. I have to get out of here. I have to save myself. And as you mentioned, within 72 hours, he's gone. And, you know, he said to me when we met in person, he said, you know, it's incredible how when ICE actually wants to do something, you see how fast it happens.
He and I met in April. And I was fascinated by the dynamics of where he is in relation to his family because, you know, anyone who knows the region, you know, the west Texas-northern Mexico borderlands, knows that El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are sister cities. They're pressed together. They're sort of two parts of one whole. He's geographically not far from his family. But the strains are legion, really, because, you know, for one thing, crossing the border as a practical matter takes hours.
You also have the reality that Rey's wife, whom I call Sara in the story, who is an incredible person, is essentially having now to support two families. You know, she's got her son in El Paso and herself in El Paso. And she has to support Rey because Rey has just arrived in Mexico. He doesn't have legal papers to work in Mexico. There's, you know, really slim work prospects to begin with in northern Mexico.
So his wife, Sara, is paying for his rent. That's $500 a month right there. She's trying to pay for some of his basic living expenses, and she's also trying to keep her family afloat on the El Paso side of the border. So she's leading this double life. He feels - you know, this is someone who's not used to being kind of incapacitated in this way. He can't easily work. He's completely isolated. He basically knows no one in the city.
And so when I saw him in April, all of these tensions were apparent, but they've actually grown much more acute since then. You know, there have been stretches where he's gone without food because he doesn't feel like he can impose any more on his wife to send money because she's maxed out north of the border. And so you basically have two people who are spun in totally different directions and who are consumed by their own respective traumas and tragedies.
MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer for The New Yorker. We're talking about his new article, "Locked Away," which takes us inside Camp East Montana - the largest immigrant detention center in the country, built on an army base at Fort Bliss in El Paso. We'll be back right after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today, we are talking about the Trump administration's mass detention campaign with New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer. His new article, "Locked Away," is an inside account of Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, that holds more people than any other immigration detention facility in the country.
I want to bring in another person from your piece - Lidia. She's a mother and a grandmother from Minnesota who was driving to work one morning in January when she was pulled over. Tell us what happened to her.
BLITZER: Yeah. It's a January morning, 5:45. Lidia works - or worked at the time - as a cleaner at a retirement home in a town in Minnesota, maybe about 30 miles outside of Minneapolis. And she realizes suddenly that there are two ICE cars behind her, and she gets pulled over. And she happens to be on a Zoom while she's driving. It's piping in through her car's speakers. You know, it's on Bluetooth or whatever. And it's a morning prayer session that she does with her husband and a number of other community members and a group of nuns. And actually, the way she informed her family that she was being arrested was she said on this Zoom, I'm being arrested. And her husband, who is already at his job, working - this is 5:45 in the morning - hears that and calls their son.
So Lidia has three kids. One has DACA. One - two are U.S. citizens, but one is a minor. And the oldest son, Alexis, who's 21 and a U.S. citizen - he is the family's, you know, kind of emissary to the outside world during moments like this. I mean, he is the only one, basically, who is on, you know, unquestioned legal footing.
MOSLEY: Right. He's solid legal footing, but he's also helping them navigate their way through what they had already been afraid might happen to them. So she's arrested. She's held in a van disguised to look like a construction vehicle. It has ladders. It has fluorescent vests displayed in the windows. And I bring that up because this detail stopped me. It stopped me because it means that these operations are happening around us, and many of us don't even know it.
BLITZER: I'm glad it called out to you, that detail, 'cause it's an incredibly striking detail. I mean, even before the current Trump administration, ICE has engaged in practices that are, you know, misleading - probably to put it most politely - to try to convince people, say, to open their doors and so on. But what we're seeing now, of course, is a level of unfettered behavior that certainly I haven't seen in my lifetime, which is, you know, not only plainclothes agents in - you know, wearing masks, driving, you know, unmarked cars...
MOSLEY: Right, which - we've seen...
BLITZER: ...Potentially abducting...
MOSLEY: ...Videos of those.
BLITZER: ...People on the...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
BLITZER: ...Streets.
MOSLEY: Yes.
BLITZER: That's right. That's right. In this case, you know, Lidia and this other man are being held in this van. And the idea is to try to cause as little outward disruption as possible while these agents continue to try to make more arrests. And Alexis, her son, you know, drives over to the site of where she was arrested immediately. He gets there while they're still taking her away. He says to them, listen. I'm a member of the National Guard. He's a member of the Minnesota National Guard. And in fact, last year, Lidia had put in a special application for a form of legal relief based on the fact that he was a member of the Minnesota National Guard.
MOSLEY: Do you have evidence - or have you in her case or others - that the application itself actually flagged ICE?
BLITZER: I don't know in this case. I have to say plainly, I don't know. I mean, I do think one of the scariest things for hundreds of thousands of people who are in this country actually lawfully - I mean, we're talking about people who have temporary protected status, people who entered under Biden-era parole programs, people who formally applied for asylum - is that these are all people who've interacted with the federal government who have willingly given their information to the federal government, which now is most certainly being weaponized against them.
And one of the trends that we have seen that I can speak to with authority is that people who have interacted with another agency at the Department of Homeland Security - it's called Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS is the full acronym. People who show up for routine appointments there - legal adjustment interviews, fingerprinting appointments, green card interviews, naturalization interviews, citizenship interviews - is that some people are actually getting arrested by ICE agents at those appointments. So there is some collusion between this other agency that administers the legal immigration system and ICE, which is, you know, enforcing immigration laws and making arrests.
So that is a definite reality across the board. I don't know, in Lidia's case specifically, if that's what happened or if she was flagged. I mean, the other reality in all of this - it's a darker reality in some ways - is there is also rampant racial profiling that is at the center of so much of the administration's enforcement agenda. And in fact, the U.S. Supreme Court basically gave ICE the green light to use race, to use the fact that someone speaks Spanish as one element of their decision to pull someone over. And so that's also a possibility in this case.
MOSLEY: Right. It's gone well beyond those who have criminal records. It is those who are visibly from other places.
BLITZER: That's right.
MOSLEY: In her story, she shares - her family shares with you that, I mean, she witnessed and she experienced within the detention center real pressure for her to sign to be deported, and to be deported where specifically?
BLITZER: Well, she's - Lidia's from Mexico. And so, you know, it's a - unlike, for example, someone from Cuba who faces this really grisly prospect of being deported to Mexico, which is something that's happened in large numbers - you know, of Cubans being sent to Mexico and basically now being stuck in a country where they don't have legal status, and they're back at square one only in Mexico. You know, for Lidia, the threat was that she would be worn down to such a point that she would just agree to be sent back to Mexico. And one of the things that Alexis said to her, her son said to her the moment that she was arrested was, like, Mom, don't sign anything. And she repeats that over and over in her head. And, you know, she is basically determined not to be pressured into leaving. And this at a time, of course, when half of the people in her unit agree to be deported.
You know, Lidia, as someone who was arrested in Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge, was basically shunted to Texas at a time when the administration was using Camp East Montana to deal with the high number of arrests that it was making in another state. And so the fifth and final tent that was constructed at Camp East Montana was used largely, if not entirely, for people who were arrested in Minnesota. And, you know, sure, there was already chaos, you know, raining at Camp East Montana, but they were going to - all of - whatever protocols, however meager they were, are out the window for this population.
And so it was three weeks before Lidia actually got the full health screening that you normally get when you enter a facility. So she, for three weeks, was essentially wearing the clothes that she was arrested in. She slept at night in the jacket that she was arrested in. At one point, she got COVID in her tent and only found out later that tent was full of people with COVID. And jail authorities put up signs outside the tent to warn contractors not to go in there because people had COVID, but the people inside the tent weren't told. So she has COVID. She's going through all of this.
And, you know, again, it just - it reinforces a point you made earlier that I can't stress enough, which is the administration is using immigration detention to try to effectuate this goal of forcing more deportations. Immigration detention, it cannot be said enough, is not supposed to be punitive. This is not like someone who's been arrested for a crime and who is serving a prison sentence that is part of that person's punishment. The idea of an immigration infraction is it is a civil infraction, and you can't use - I mean, it sounds almost quaint to say under the circumstances, but the government cannot weaponize detention. I mean, legally, morally cannot weaponize immigration detention as a way of trying to punish people and engineer outcomes.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Jonathan Blitzer from The New Yorker. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer for The New Yorker who covers immigration. We're talking about his new article, "Locked Away," an inside account of the largest immigrant detention facility in the country, a complex of tents on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base in El Paso, that the government calls Camp East Montana. Blitzer's reporting follows the people held there and the families on the outside trying to reach them. Three men died at the facility this past winter in a span of six weeks. Blitzer is also the author of "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here," which examines the origins of the immigration crisis in Central America and the United States.
I think that, you know, many Americans believe that immigration enforcement is broken. It's been broken for generations and - to a certain extent. And there are all of these different challenges that each administration seems to have a hard time trying to get a hold of. Now, this government's plan is bigger than Camp East Montana. It's - they're planning to spend billions of dollars to build even more warehouses across the country. A lawyer you spoke to said Camp East Montana is a crystal ball into what the warehouses will look like. So what should we understand about what is coming?
BLITZER: You know, I think one of the things - as someone who covers this stuff, I'm increasingly aware of the degree to which it sounds like a cliche to say, you know, for as long as the system is broken, these populations are unspeakably vulnerable and the country needs to have this reckoning. I think if I had to boil down what's happening now that's sort of most alarming and that I think is going to continue to get worse and worse in the months ahead, there are a few kind of categories that this administration has redefined.
The first is the current administration is actually trying to effectively delegalize people right now. So, you know, when you talk about someone like Lorenzo Salgado who was shot by an ICE agent in Houston recently, this is someone who's lived in the country for 30 years, who didn't have a criminal record, with a family, who was, like, doing basically everything someone could possibly do under the circumstances and who, you know, couldn't regularize his status because the system is broken beyond repair and the politics stand in the way of fixing the system. You have people who, you know, have applied for asylum and who are arrested at immigration court while they're actually appearing before a judge who wind up in a place like Camp East Montana, treated miserably and in many cases, agree to be deported, et cetera.
But then you have people who actually have some form of status, whether it's temporary protected status, whether it's, you know, any number of forms of status, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - DACA - that the current administration is trying to strip away from people. So the administration is actually not just preying on a population that's already undocumented, but it's actually trying to widen the population of people who can be targeted.
MOSLEY: You know, I mean, one other thing I was just thinking about, Jonathan - I mean, you brought it up briefly. But beyond the lawyers, there are people stepping in where the system seems to fall short. There are these organizations that help raise money. There are these church groups. Did you come away thinking that there is headway - there is progress being made to help, at least on the individual level, people who are being detained?
BLITZER: I'm actually glad you ask about that because one of the strange emotions you have reporting these stories is, on the one hand, you're confronting some of the most unimaginable things being done to people by the system, you know, by the government. But then you're also meeting people who are incredibly generous and committed in trying to fill this void left by the government.
And there are organizations - you know, in El Paso especially, I have to say, there's an organization called Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which was involved specifically in helping Rey and his family but has helped, you know, countless others that operate on a shoestring budget and that basically do every single thing within their power to try to bring human dignity to families who are put through this kind of churn.
There's another organization called La Estrella de El Paso, which interestingly - and I think this is also revealing of a general national trend. You know, they do a lot of work. You know, there are very few organizations or people who get into these facilities. I mean, what we know about what's happening inside these facilities is very limited. It's very hard to get information out.
And so La Estrella de El Paso is one of the organizations that has lawyers going in regularly. It does critical work. And a big part of its institutional program involves helping give legal representation to unaccompanied children. And the Trump administration has canceled that - its historic contracts, the federal government's contracts with an organization like this one and, in fact, owes this organization almost $1 million that it's refusing to pay. And there's an ongoing case in federal court in which a judge basically sided with this organization and the Trump administration's just ignoring them. And this organization is facing closure, essentially.
And when you think about what the knockdown effects of that would be, it's terrifying because, you know, an organization like that is, you know, helping so many families. And so I think about Las Americas. I think about La Estrella. And they do give me hope because of how fiercely they fight, and they fight, I should say, kind of away from the partisan fray. They're just dealing with the human reality of this. They're just trying to kind of thread the needle under the circumstances of providing the relief that they can and the advocacy they can. But they're in the crosshairs, too, right now.
MOSLEY: Jonathan Blitzer, thank you so much for your reporting and this conversation.
BLITZER: Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to talk to you.
MOSLEY: Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer with The New Yorker. His latest piece is called "Locked Away."
New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan conducted over a thousand interviews for their new book on Donald Trump's White House. On the next FRESH AIR, Jonathan Swan shares some of what they found, including the pointed warnings from his own staff that Trump ignored before going to war with Iran. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
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MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
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