Lawmakers Continue Questioning Immigration Detention Site Safety

With the Trump administration’s expansion of immigration enforcement efforts, the living conditions of immigration detention centers are still being questioned by lawmakers, raising concerns about the lack of proper oversight.

Several members of the House of Representatives are increasing regular oversight visits to detention centers in their districts to speak to detainees about their experiences.

Representative Veronica Escobar (D-TX) has continued to do so with detention centers across the country, sounding the alarm on the Dilley Immigration Processing Center for its “inhumane” conditions, and now Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas.

“When I sound the alarm about issues that I'm seeing in my oversight visits, it's not to play gotcha, it's not to one-up anyone, it's to uphold the standards that I know we all agree should be upheld,” Rep. Escobar said.

Rep. Escobar said she had spoken with a detainee who said he had been there for weeks, expressing severe pain he had been complaining of for weeks. According to Rep. Escobar, he said his arm had been broken during an arrest in Minneapolis.

“I could see like a letter ‘S'; his bone was so broken, and medical had only given him aspirin,” Rep. Escobar said. “These are the things that I'm sounding the alarm about that I will continue to share with you, because I know we want to hold these contractors to federal standards.”

Not only are these conditions concerning, but the location and nature of these warehouse facilities are also alarming, she said.

“Whoever made the decision to buy those warehouses, which I know was before your time, picked the worst possible place with the least amount of infrastructure,” Rep. Escobar said, pointing to one center in Socorro, Texas.

Ultimately, Rep. Escobar said these are not places for any human to live.

“It truly is not feasible to convert those warehouses into spaces that will hold human beings, whether for training or staffing or detention,” she said.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin agreed.

“We do have issues with detention centers, [there is] just not enough bed space,” Mullin said. “So there's some that we're trying to make work.”

Mullin said he knows there was some “due diligence that maybe wasn’t actually checked off” by these contractors.

“We're going through and reevaluating every one of them to be the best possible outcome for our mission inside of DHS,” Mullin said.