The Public Face of ICE Is Bad Enough
"You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter. Historical context for present-day events.
The public face of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a brutal, paramilitary force of masked men who hunt immigrants and terrorize American cities on behalf of the president of the United States.
The not-so-public face is somehow even worse.
ICE operates detention facilities across the country, holding tens of thousands of people arrested on immigration charges. President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill included $45 billion for the construction of new detention space, including facilities with tent-like structures meant to house a growing influx of people seized by ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents.
These facilities, human rights researchers and former detainees report, are cramped, squalid and dangerous. “The food they gave us was not edible,” according to one womaninitially detained at a Chicago airport along with her 5-year-old daughter. “We didn’t eat anything for days. They didn’t even give us water to drink.” Eventually, the woman and her daughter were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, which the woman “described as a living hell.”
“Sometimes my daughter doesn’t want to leave our room because she is so sad and just wants to leave this prison so badly. She cries and cries about all of this. I am so worried that I barely eat,” the woman said.
After conducting two oversight visits to Camp East Montana — an ICE detention facility on the grounds of Fort Bliss in El Paso, which served as an internment camp during World War II — Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas warned of “dangerous and inhumane” conditions in a letter to the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem:
It is increasingly clear that it is not a safe nor professionally managed facility. Continuing to detain people at Camp East Montana means continually exposing people to risks from bad water, unhygienic conditions, poorly built facilities and a general lack of security and reliable management.
A separate letter to Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, sent by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, described hellish abuse at the facility: “Detained immigrants are held for weeks at a time with no access to the outdoors in cramped, squalid soft-sided tents with 72 people per unit, where toilets and showers flood eating areas with raw sewage.” Detainees allege that they were threatened, beaten or sexually abused as punishment for conduct ranging from simple requests for basic necessities to refusing to sign deportation orders. Based on interviews with more than 45 detained immigrants, the groups wrote that “Officers have beaten detainees and used threats of violence, criminal charges and imprisonment in attempts to coerce people held at Fort Bliss to leave the United States and cross the border into Mexico, even if they are not subject to a removal order to Mexico.”
One Cuban man detained at Fort Bliss reported that officers crushed his testicles with their fingers, slammed him against a wall and beat him such that he couldn’t touch the left side of his head without pain for about a month, all because he wouldn’t accept deportation to Mexico.
Officers at the same facility beat one detainee, a teenager, so badly that he “sustained injuries across his body, lost consciousness and had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance.” His offense? He had switched off the overhead light in a housing unit.
At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the agency’s deadliest year since 2004. In just the first ten days of 2026, four people died in ICE custody. One of these deaths — of a Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at Camp East Montana — was ruled a homicide.
It is worth remembering that immigration enforcement is a civil procedure and that most people detained by ICE do not have criminal records. In the main, these are not violent people threatening the safety and integrity of the nation; they are ordinary men, women and children who have been caught in an authoritarian dragnet. Their treatment is less a necessary part of immigration detention than it is a punishment — deliberate pain inflicted on migrants in order to force them out of the country, whether or not they have a legal right to be here. (And it should go without saying that people found guilty of criminal offenses have an absolute right to fair and humane treatment.)
Back in 2024, I argued that Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation was an atrocity in the making.
Imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.
I also noted that any mass deportation effort would involve a “mass campaign of racial and ethnic profiling” that would almost certainly stoke “strife and pervasive civil conflict.”
There is an idea, among those sympathetic to the president’s efforts to reduce illegal immigration, that you could have a more humane program of mass deportation and accomplish the overall goal of increased removals without a surfeit of brutality. This is a fantasy. Mass removal is itself inhumane. There is no way to accomplish it without subjecting countless people to the treatment we are seeing now in the streets and in the jails. And when the architects of mass deportation are themselves motivated by racial contempt for their targets, then — as my friend Adam Serwer once wrote — the cruelty will inevitably be the point."
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