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There is a new report out today from Human Rights Watch. It says people held in the immigration detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base in Texas have experienced indiscriminate beatings and life-threatening medical neglect. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf reports.
KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: The 84-page report is titled "You're Only Getting Out Deported Or Dead." It's a quote from a man only referred to as Javier, who was detained in Boston and sent to Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas - the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S.
ANGELICA CESAR: The quote actually comes from his intake process at Camp East Montana.
LONSDORF: Angelica Cesar, a law fellow with Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, interviewed Javier. He told her he asked the guard why he had been taken from Boston all the way to Texas.
CESAR: The guard responded by telling him that he wasn't going to be going back to Boston anytime soon, that the only way that he would be getting out of Camp East Montana or El Paso was through deportation or death.
LONSDORF: Cesar conducted more than 70 interviews with people detained at Camp East Montana, a tent-like facility in the Texas heat, and found alarming patterns in their accounts of life there.
CESAR: Including life-threatening medical neglect, being forced to live in filth, beatings by masked guards and having their access to communication with the outside world being completely cut off.
LONSDORF: The report said the abuses, quote, "violate fundamental protections under U.S. and international human rights law." NPR reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment about the report. It denied all the allegations in the report and said that reports of, quote, "inhumane conditions at Camp East Montana are categorically false. No detainees are being beaten or abused."
But this report is just one of several in recent months that have documented abuse and poor conditions at Camp East Montana, including one by the Government Accountability Office in June. Last November, U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat, visited the facility and called the conditions, quote, "inhumane." In December, several human rights groups, including the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, sent a letter to ICE urging the agency to shut the facility down. Cesar notes it's not just about Camp East Montana.
CESAR: It's happening across the country.
LONSDORF: She says it's important to see this report in the larger context as the Trump administration has dramatically increased immigration arrests and announced plans to expand its immigration detention facilities at an unprecedented scale. And the situation has become increasingly violent too, including two people shot and killed by ICE officers during traffic stops just this week.
CESAR: The U.S., I think, is at a really pivotal moment.
LONSDORF: She says as immigration enforcement expands, so does the human cost.
Kat Lonsdorf, NPR News, Washington.
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