By Becca Sheff, Senior Staff Attorney
Editor’s note: This blog is based on remarks Sheff gave at a press conference on August 21 with our national office and local partners condemning Trump’s plan to turn Fort Bliss into the nation’s largest immigration detention center.
We are living through a shameful moment in this country's history. The opening of the Fort Bliss detention camp on a military base that spans Texas and New Mexico is the latest escalation in the Trump administration's agenda of mass detention and deportation.
For generations, El Paso and the New Mexican borderlands have been used as a testing ground for some of the government's most dehumanizing policies.
During World War I, migrants from Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico were forced to strip at the border and sprayed with kerosene, sulfuric acid, and even Zyklon B. Their clothes were fumigated with toxic chemicals. This so-called "disinfection" program in El Paso directly inspired the architects of the Holocaust. When Carmelita Torres and others resisted in what became known as the Bath Riots, soldiers from Fort Bliss were sent to crush the protest.
Fort Bliss has been here for all of it. During World War II, it was one of several military bases used as internment camps for Japanese Americans and German and Italian immigrants. In the 1950s, during the bracero program, Mexican workers were sprayed with DDT at the border before being allowed into the United States.
The experiments on our communities have never really stopped. Today, both New Mexico and Texas live with mass militarization of the borderlands. During the first Trump administration, officials piloted the family separation program here, ripping children from their parents. The first military flights transferring migrants to Guantánamo began here as well. Some of our clients narrowly escaped being loaded onto those planes, watching in horror as others were shackled and taken away. Their suffering was staged as political theater.
We will not allow our neighbors and loved ones to be warehoused and disappeared behind barbed wire on a military base.
And now Fort Bliss has become the site of the first detention camp on a military base in the U.S., one poised to be the largest immigration detention center in the nation.
This story is not abstract. It is the story of real people. It is the story of Luis Manuel Rivas Velasquez.
Luis is 38, from Venezuela. He is a prominent social media influencer who posts about cars and events. He entered the United States a year ago and was paroled in through the CBP One app. Just two weeks ago, he was found unconscious in a cell at the Everglades facility, known as "Alligator Alcatraz." He had been struggling with respiratory problems. Guards reportedly didn't even know how to check his pulse. It was other detained people who came to his aid, including a Cuban nurse who administered CPR. Guards took half an hour to respond.
His family had no idea if he was alive or dead. His attorneys couldn't reach him.
Today, Luis is at Fort Bliss. His attorneys have still not been allowed a confidential, unmonitored call with him. ICE has refused in-person legal visits. When Luis managed a monitored call with his lawyers two days ago, he was panicked. He said he was being denied medication and had been unable to change clothes in five days. The call was cut off.
This week, Representative Jasmine Crockett specifically requested to meet Luis during her visit to the camp. ICE refused. They misled her, claiming attorneys had access to confidential visits and private communication tablets. Neither is true. As of this morning, ICE is still blocking a legal call between Luis and his attorney.
Luis is so desperate he has said he would rather be deported than remain locked in detention.
This is no longer "civil" detention. It is militarized, and it is illegitimate.
We know where this path leads. When the number of people in ICE detention goes up, so do the number of preventable deaths. Too many have already died in detention in Texas and New Mexico, including children. The borderlands community knows far too well how deadly hateful and xenophobic targeting can become.
There is no emergency here, other than the one being manufactured for political gain. There is no justification for using the military in immigration detention. This is no longer "civil" detention. It is militarized, and it is illegitimate.