A teenage boy regained consciousness in an ambulance one October morning in 2025. He would later tell investigators that officers blocked a security camera and attacked him, chipping a tooth, crushing his testicles with their hands and sticking their fingers so far into his ears that permanent damage remains.
The young man’s “crime” that landed him in the Camp East Montana ICE Detention Facility at Fort Bliss in El Paso was that he wasn’t born in the United States. The offense that prompted the beating, the boy told representatives with the ACLU of Texas and other civil rights groups, was turning off an overhead light so he could sleep.
It sounds almost unbelievable. However, the interview with “Samuel” was one of four dozen outlined in a report filed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December, in which the advocates called for the El Paso ICE facility to shut down due to inhumane conditions. Other detainees told similar stories about having their testicles crushed and being punched in the face. Several said they were put on a bus and ordered to “jump” a border wall to Mexico, even though that was not their home country.
Houston Press calls and emails sent to ICE in Washington, D.C. and the El Paso field office were not immediately returned last week. Federal authorities denied allegations of beatings, sexual abuse and coercion to The Guardian late last year, saying detainees receive “constitutional protections,” medical care and access to legal representation.
Houston immigration attorney Raed Gonzalez, who currently represents at least 20 clients imprisoned at the Joe Corley ICE Detention Center in Conroe, said he’s heard the stories of violence and forced deportation, but many who claim to have been abused sign away their rights and leave the facility because they don’t want to deal with the inhumane conditions. What he hears most, the lawyer says, is that people are confused as to why they’re locked up. They’re bored. They’re scared. They don’t have enough to eat and their medical issues are largely untreated.
“I have no more tears to cry,” says Gonzalez, who has practiced immigration law for 27 years. “This is unprecedented.”
Deporting undocumented immigrants isn’t unprecedented. Trump-supporting Republicans are quick to deliver statistics on border security and deportation that happened under the Obama and Biden administrations. Many of the detention centers have been around for decades. It’s the number of people being detained and their history — about 70 percent have no criminal record — that has people outraged.
Protesters gathered Saturday at an intersection near Spring Creek Barbeque along Interstate 10 in Katy, holding signs emblazoned with the words, “Communities Not Cages.” The location is an hour’s drive from the detention center in Conroe, where the average daily population is about 962 people ages 18 and older.
The facility website refers to its residents as detainees, but they’re actually prisoners, says Jennifer Lorenz, president of the Cypress-Tomball Democrats. “They can’t come and go as they please. Bright fluorescent lights are on 24/7. The Joe Corley ICE facility is windowless, and detainees are not allowed outside. Dogs in pounds have better conditions than that.”
Most of the detainees can’t afford an attorney and their loved ones don’t want to file a lawsuit or raise their profile with the federal government, Gonzalez says, adding that the government, it seems, wants to make it as difficult as possible for the undocumented to stay in the United States.
Savannah Kumar, an attorney with ACLU of Texas who conducted the interviews with Samuel and others at the El Paso facility, says it’s evident not just from her agency’s report but an internal ICE inspection that Camp East Montana is failing, and those failures constitute violations of the law.
“It’s deeply concerning, and the things we learned about are shocking experiences that no human being should have to endure,” she says.
The federal Office of Professional Responsibility found 49 “deficiencies” in its investigation of Camp East Montana, referenced in a report released earlier this month. Twenty-two issues related to the use of force, including failures to properly document incidents, lack of required medical checks after physical altercations, and failures to record or preserve video.
Additionally, a detainee suspected of having tuberculosis was not properly quarantined and the incident was not reported to ICE. The investigation found that staff did not accurately document required checks to prevent self-harm and suicide after high-profile deaths occurred in January.
Kumar said she couldn’t answer whether Samuel is still at Camp East Montana. The ACLU report mentions that, in addition to the October attack by guards, the teenager waited weeks for a response to a medical call about molar pain, migraines, stomach issues, depression and anxiety. The medical staff “gave him a Tylenol and sent him away,” according to the report.
Kumar says detainees are frequently transferred between facilities, though some have been in El Paso for several months, and many are ultimately deported.
Samuel never received an apology for the attack that occurred at Camp East Montana. According to the ACLU report, when he returned to his bunk on the night that officers beat him, he found a medical bill charging him for his emergency visit to the hospital.
Texas ICE Facilities
About 30 ICE detention or processing centers exist in Texas, and many county jails house undocumented immigrants awaiting transport. As of this month, Texas led the nation in ICE detainees, with more than 18,000 people in custody.
About 3,000 of those prisoners are at Camp East Montana, which opened last year and is the largest ICE detention center in the United States. The compound’s “buildings” are soft-sided, according to news reports. Houston-based civil rights attorney Randall Kallinen says that’s because they’re tents.
Kallinen is currently representing the family members of Victor Diaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man who was living and working as kitchen staff at a Minneapolis restaurant when he was picked up by ICE in January and sent to El Paso.
Less than two weeks after his transport to El Paso, Diaz, who had no known pre-existing medical conditions and no criminal record, was dead.
He was found unconscious and unresponsive in his room, and ICE ruled the death a suicide, although Diaz’s family has questioned that conclusion and called for further investigation.
Kallinen says that days prior to Diaz’s death, another prisoner, Geraldo Lunas Campos, died in custody, and ICE officials ruled it a suicide. An autopsy issued by the El Paso County coroner later found that Campos’ death was a homicide. “Witnesses say he was killed by guards,” Kallinen says. “They said suicide; the medical examiner said homicide. Some people might call it a conflict of interest. I call it the fox guarding the henhouse. The United States government did the autopsy report of a death that they caused.”
So when Diaz died at the same facility and federal authorities called it a suicide, Kallinen says there was reason to be suspicious. He has the results of an autopsy conducted by the federal government, which he declined to share, and says he’s still waiting on an independent report from a third party.
In addition to the alleged abuse, detainees say Camp East Montana is also unsanitary. According to the ACLU report, “detained people are held in tent units with bunk beds for 72 people positioned closely together and a bathroom area with toilets and showers, shared by everyone in the unit. Detainees note that the toilets are particularly unsanitary, with urine and fecal matter lining the bowls and the surrounding walls. The area stinks of urine and feces.”
“In some units, individuals are given only one roll of toilet paper per day for all 72 people. Often, across housing units, the excrement blackens the water from the bathroom area, which pools with the water that collects from the shower area, and floods into the area where meals are served each day.”
When a reporter suggests that it sounds like a prison, Kallinen says most prisons he’s visited have better conditions. “This is purely anecdotal and maybe it’s a little dramatic but when I visited Camp East Montana, I was reminded of Sobibór,” he says, referencing a Nazi extermination camp built and operated in Poland during World War II as part of the Holocaust.
The Guardian reports that the El Paso center has industrial cooling systems, including generators, but prisoners have complained about climate control, and Kallinen emphasizes that the compound is in the middle of the desert.
“These detention centers are horrible,” he says. “You can die. They don’t have medical care and people are dying because excessive force is being used on them. This is an extremely serious matter.”
Gonzalez says the Conroe facility, which opened in 2008, houses some violent criminals who are in a segregated area and wear jumpsuits of a different color than the general population. Some have minor violations like trespassing, misdemeanor theft or illegal dumping, but the vast majority do not have a criminal record, he says.
Retaliation for Speaking Out
Kallinen says he’s heard musings that if a detainee tells a lawyer or the media about bad conditions, they could be punished by the guards. He says he doesn’t have absolute proof that such retaliation has occurred but the fear of it is real.
Sometimes the retaliation isn’t abuse; it’s just swift deportation. Mauro Henriquez, a Houston high school senior, was deported to Honduras after four months in custody and widespread publicity. Kallinen, who was not involved in Henriquez’s case, says sometimes people reach a point where they don’t want to be imprisoned any longer and are willing to just go back to their home country.
“In all fairness, sometimes when people are in detention, they want to speed it up and get it over with,” Kallinen says. But under the current administration, some people aren’t going back to their home countries.
Mark Dow, author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons, told the Houston City Council last week that he recently witnessed the “abduction of two neighbors,” a Cuban man and a Venezuelan man, from the South Gessner Road Immigration Court.
“Like over 70 percent of immigration detainees, they had no criminal record,” he said. “But like thousands and thousands of others, they were separated from families, loved ones, jobs and their possessions. This is not about crime. It is about getting rid of citizens, and especially non-white non-citizens. Please ask your gardener or housekeeper whether they feel safe. Non-citizens are the public too. They were both here legally reporting for their court proceedings. Both of those men have since been deported. I believe the Cuban man was sent to a country that he is not from, which is also quite common now.”
The ACLU report says that detained immigrants report that “officers have handcuffed and rounded up large groups of non-Mexican detainees at Fort Bliss, loaded them onto vans, and transported them over an hour away to the U.S.-Mexico border at Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Once at the border, masked officers have instructed detainees to cross the border by ‘jumping’ into Mexico. In some instances, these masked officers have beaten detainees who have refused to cross into Mexico or threatened them with criminal charges and long-term imprisonment.”
Detainees are held for varying lengths of time before they’re deported, which is the most common outcome, or released. Gonzalez said he’s had clients in detention for eight to 10 months.
“The really sad part is that there are a lot of individuals right now who are eligible for forms of relief in the immigration courts that would grant them residency, and they would be able to stay in the U.S.,” he says. “They don’t want to be detained. They don’t want to be in prison while waiting for all of this so they renounce the whole process. Some of them accept the consequences and they sign the papers and they leave.”
Boredom is a problem, Kallinen and Gonzalez said. Both attorneys said they think the inmates have limited access to a TV and no library. When the Cypress-Tomball Democrats went to the Conroe facility, they spoke to two guards during a shift change and were told the prisoners never go outside. The Conroe facility is always cold, occasionally overcrowded and has a distinct smell, Gonzalez says.
“It smells like pee,” he says. “They shower, but I’m not sure how often. You feel uncomfortable as soon as you walk in. I feel like I need to run and shower and scrub really hard after I’ve visited someone. They don’t take them outside to exercise or see the sun. The main complaint we’ve been having is when someone is sick or needs to see a nurse. It takes a long time. There have been 17 deaths reported already this year in ICE facilities, so this is a concern for many individuals and their families. The treatment is not the best or the most friendly.”
A recent measles outbreak in El Paso kept that facility on lockdown for weeks, during which time in-person visits were prohibited. Kallinen says video visits are the most common way for people to communicate with their attorneys and families.
The Houston City Council recently attempted to limit HPD’s interactions with ICE, which would have reduced the number of non-criminals going into detention, but Gov. Greg Abbott said the ordinance was unlawful and violated a grant agreement. Under the threat of losing $114 million in public safety funding, the council amended the ordinance on April 22. It now essentially allows officers to wait for an ICE officer even after a traffic stop has ended if a supervisor deems it necessary based on “the totality of the situation,” according to Mayor John Whitmire.
Dozens of people spoke out against the amended ordinance. Elizabeth Ortiz said through a Spanish interpreter that her husband was arrested in October on a traffic stop and remains detained. She says she earns money by selling food and cannot afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to hire an attorney.
Cypress-Tomball Democrats and We Rise Up, a Montgomery County pro-democracy group, protested inhumane conditions at the Corley Detention Center in Conroe in late February. They couldn’t go on the grounds of the high-security facility but they stood on a nearby overpass at Loop 336 and Interstate 45 with signs. Gonzalez joined them.
“We cannot stay silent about the disturbing reports of inhumane conditions and medical neglect that have led to preventable tragedies and loss of life within those walls,” a We Rise Up representative said in a social media post about the protest. “From the lack of basic healthcare to allegations of physical abuse and mistreatment, the conditions in this facility are unacceptable, and we are out here to say that enough is enough. Human beings deserve dignity, and we demand transparency and accountability for every person held inside.”
Shelly Williams, a community organizer with Indivisible Katy, attended Saturday’s Communities Not Cages event and says she’s appalled at the number of people being warehoused in ICE detention facilities across the country. “It’s horrifying,” she says. “There’s been so many reports of torture, beatings and sexual assaults. They’re starving people, and the water is contaminated. They’re basically torturing people to coerce them to sign away their asylum claims.”
Protester Marsha Kamish says the Department of Homeland Security is quietly working behind the scenes to scale up its ability to detain and “disappear people” in massive numbers, noting that plans call for the conversion of 23 warehouses into detention and processing facilities. A detention center that could hold up to 8,000 people is already in the works in Socorro, a rural area near El Paso.
“We need to band together now to oppose the warehousing of humans in the U.S.,” Kamish said.
Of particular concern to the group is the case of 42-year-old Houston resident Luis Gustavo Nunez, who died January 5 at the Conroe facility, with the cause listed as congestive heart failure.
At the time, two honor roll students from Klein High School were also locked up in the Conroe facility. They have since been released and moved out of the Houston area. “Barely 18-year-old students should be finishing high school,” Lorenz says. “They have no criminal background and have lost their ability to graduate with their friends.”
High school students who have been detained can finish their coursework online and still get a diploma. A Connecticut school district reported last year that they gave a diploma and cap and gown to the aunt of a graduating senior who was detained after being picked up during a routine check-in.
Is There Hope for Change?
Critics of the current immigration detention policies blame Trump and don’t expect any significant change to occur while he remains in office. A presidential election will be held in November 2028, so there’s a long way to go. Gonzalez says he’s hopeful that the midterm elections in November will put some more “reasonable people” in Congress.
Among the changes Trump made were ensuring that there are no bonds for those who enter the country illegally, undoing an interpretation of federal law that’s been standard practice since at least 1997, Gonzalez says.
“They closed the border for asylum,” he says. “They’re revoking status for people legally in the United States. They’re arresting them in court when they’re doing something we asked them to do. There are so many violations to the Fourth Amendment. They have wiped their noses with the Constitution.”
Houston-based Congressional Democrats, including Christian Menefee, Sylvia Garcia and Christina Morales, have visited Texas ICE facilities and condemned the conditions.
Menefee visited the Houston Contract Detention Facility operated by CoreCivic in mid-March, after he says Trump tried to block Congressional tours. The center houses about 750 people, almost half of whom don’t have criminal convictions, Menefee says.
“Trump promised the American people he was going after violent criminals,” Menefee says. “But hundreds of people at this facility are simply not that. They are members of our community, being held in incarceration-type conditions for 20 hours a day. This cruelty makes no one safer.”
Harris County recently joined a lawsuit with Austin and El Paso County urging the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider a sweeping expansion of mandatory immigration detention, highlighting concerns about due process, community impact and the strain on local resources and economies across the region.
Gonzalez’s Houston law firm Gonzalez Olivieri LLC filed a federal class action suit against former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for due process violations, including a public statement that citizens must be able to prove they’re legal or face arrest. He’s also sued the government over a policy requiring undocumented people to sign paperwork admitting they committed a crime by entering the country. “It’s a violation of the Constitution, and you have a right not to incriminate yourself,” he says.
A third class action lawsuit involves the arrest of undocumented people without a court order. Gonzalez’s lawsuits are all pending in court, and the attorney says he’s received no response from the government. His priority, for now, is to protect the “human beings” incarcerated at the Conroe ICE facility.
“We can enforce immigration laws and still uphold the Constitution; those principles are not in conflict,” he says. “What we are asking for is humane treatment. If the government believes in the strength of its cases, it should also believe in fair hearings and humane conditions for detention.”
