Uncovering abuse inside America's largest ICE detention center
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This week on Newsmakers. I'm surprised you even had me on. Comedian Bill Maher on his Mark Twain Award and the lost art of political debate. Just engage with the argument. Tell me if I'm wrong about something and then we're going to be cool. But that's not what either extreme does in this country anymore. Bill Maher on this week's Newsmakers. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya 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 Bidford, 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's 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.
Thanks again so much for having me.
Okay, 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?
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 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.
The comparable numbers that we've seen are things that 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.
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 Ray, 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?
Yeah. Ray 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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–12:10
2
How many people are currently held in ICE detention and how has that number changed recently?
12:10–38:24
3
What conditions did Jonathan Blitzer document inside Camp East Montana’s tent city?
38:24–47:33
4
How did detainee Ray describe medical neglect and denial of medication at the facility?
47:33–50:24
Speakers
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