When Cruelty is the Point, Build Camps to Enable It
Recent news about using Fort Bliss as a migrant detention center has sparked outrage, adding to human rights concerns for immigrants
Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, has a long and problematic legacy when it comes to caring for refugees, migrants, and prisoners of war. It was used as a refugee camp as early as 1912 to house Mormons and in 1914 to house Mexican refugees during the Mexican Revolutionary War. It’s also been used for Japanese internment camps during World War 2, to hold prisoners of war, and to house unaccompanied migrant children under Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies.
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Despite President Trump closing the facility in 2017 due to lower numbers of unaccompanied migrant children, it was back in use to house children in 2021. Fort Bliss had since been used as a mixed-use facility housing Afghan refugees in 2021 after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, alongside being an emergency intake facility and an influx care facility for migrant children. It was shut down by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in 2023.
“HHS [Health and Human Services] activated property on Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, on March 30, 2021, to serve as an emergency intake site (EIS) for unaccompanied children,” reads a fact sheet provided by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2024. “On May 30, 2022, the site transitioned to an influx care facility (ICF), which provided shelter for boys and girls, 13 to 17 years old. On June 30, 2023, the facility was placed in warm status. In September 2023, ORR began the wind-down process, and the ORR ICF at Fort Bliss is now closed.”
Now, the White House wants to build on that legacy of oppression through yet another private company, Acquisition Logistics LLC, a contractor with no experience in the detention industry and whose business is registered to a home address in Tuckahoe, Virginia. Also listed as potential and likely subcontractors are Disaster Management Group and Amentum. Both have problematic histories.
Disaster Management Group (DMG) was found to have violated federal law by failing to pay $16 million in wages involving labor exploitation in the construction of an Afghan refugee camp, and DMG’s owner, Nathan Albers's former company, TentLogix, pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire and conceal noncitizen workers. DMG has since won over $500 million in government contracts, mostly from temporary facilities supporting the program to resettle Afghan refugees.
Albers is a prominent Republican donor who spent election night at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, co-chaired a charity fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club with Eric Trump, and was also present at the "Crypto Ball," a cryptocurrency event with tickets ranging from $2,500 to $1 million, sponsored by Trump supporters.
Amentum was indirectly brought up on charges of human trafficking related to two completed contracts in Kuwait. The military contracts were fulfilled by a joint venture of three companies, including Amentum. The two other companies, AECOM, a government services unit, and DynCorp International LLC, a defense contractor, are now owned by Amentum. Kuwaiti translators allege that the companies threatened them with deportation, confiscating their passports.
Culture
Given the mistreatment that is routinely reported out of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, including Guantanamo Bay, run by Akima, a company with a history of civil rights abuses and that participates in various joint ventures with Amentum, highlights a culture of profiting from the exploitation of people.
Other privately owned or operated facilities, such as the Krome detention center in Miami, among countless Border Patrol facilities with histories of human rights abuses, expose a systemic lack of humanity. This culture, which begins in the federal agencies themselves, reveals an attitude that has already dehumanized Black and Latino immigrants enough that the agents tearing families apart show no empathy or concern toward their fellow humans.
The culture is not much different than policing.
It’s an institutional issue, beginning at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and trickling down to its child agencies, such as CBP, ICE, and even the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). DHS was created at the height of white nationalism in the wake of 9/11, and it's a culture it has yet to outgrow. Child agencies like ICE fall in line quickly as each president takes things a step further, thanks in large part to the culture that’s ingrained in the agency.
"The administration should have taken that action earlier, and I think the career people in DHS would have liked that, all of us in DHS, quite frankly,” said outgoing ICE director P.J. Lechleitner about Biden’s June 2024 executive order creating strict limits on asylum claims. “I don't know if anybody in DHS wouldn't have wanted that earlier."
Therefore, the issues surrounding the agency's institutional culture and its trickle-down effect are having disastrous consequences and continue to go unaddressed. The inherent racism that was born into the agency is regularly dismissed by White House staff under each presidency, denying what we see with our own eyes. Racial profiling and the targeting of nonwhite immigrants have been standard operating procedure for DHS since its creation in 2002.
When a contractor is met with such callousness, the tone is set. While there seems to be plenty of oversight, DHS agencies lack accountability. CBP agents are routinely arrested for sexual assault, and detention officers are also often charged similarly. Yet, despite victims, including former agents, speaking out about this culture, no connection is ever made on a broader scale and is too often ignored.
Bipartisanship
As the White House continues to blur the line defining the separation of powers, and local law enforcement essentially becomes one with federal authorities, it’s only a matter of time before these techniques and tactics are more broadly used against U.S. citizens. We’ve seen what ICE and CBP agents are capable of after they snatched protesters off the streets during the Civil Rights protests in 2020. A move lawmakers were aware of, according to a leaked unofficial memo to then-Senator Kamala Harris.
The recent targeting of protesters by ICE in LA and the crimes the agency baselessly alleged they committed show a continuation of DHS’s willingness to target U.S. citizens on bogus charges that could have disastrous consequences for people. The White House has never had an issue arresting civilians as the so-called “cost of doing business,” evidenced by decades of it happening, and it appears that’s not ending anytime soon.
The suggested bipartisanship behind blindly supporting agencies like CBP and ICE and ignoring their highly problematic records of race-based human rights abuses highlights a broader issue with just how far the culture in the agency influences decisions. It all starts with the villanization and dehumanization of entire groups of people. In this case, Black and brown immigrants.
From there, atrocity soon follows.
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The detention facility at Fort Bliss, alongside the inhumane, overcrowded conditions in existing migrant detention facilities, and the creation of more intentionally inhumane facilities, only serve to show how easily these atrocities can happen. Building tents and the required infrastructure will cost taxpayers $1.26 billion to house as many as 5,000 migrants awaiting deportation in the sweltering West Texas heat for no other reason than to be cruel.
Acquisition Logitistics, LLC was given over $230 million up-front. The other private contractors working with them are likely to profit greatly from this overpriced and bloated endeavor, likely in violation of various federal and international laws. For the White House, it’s about building a legacy of oppression against nonwhite groups to try and go down in history as heroes, as they perceive themselves to have more support than they do.
Conclusion
For Trump, it’s about the quest to be an authoritarian like his favorite Latin American leaders, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Argentinian President Javier Milei, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, alongside his favorite Eastern European dictators, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
And let’s not forget Trump’s support for genocide, noted by his and his staff’s bloodthirst for the slaughter of Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people from Palestine, and the outright theft of Palestinian land. When taking all of this in concert with who is calling the shots in the White House, it makes what they are doing nothing short of an attempt to ethnically cleanse nonwhite people from the United States.
An unachievable goal in a nation that was never “white.”
Arturo is an independent journalist whose work can be found at Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, Latino Rebels, and more. Arturo is also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support his work, become a paid subscriber or donate via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.
A bigger and mo better Alligator Alcatraz.
And hide the data to boot, as Austin Kocher covered in his latest report on ICE data. Makes it easier to run concentration camps on U.S. soil.