Fort Bliss, the U.S. Army base that encompasses parts of West Texas and New Mexico near El Paso, has become the center for deploying a temporary “soft-sided” camp for detained migrants. The new camp is believed to hold about 1,000 people, with expansion to 5,000 in the near future.
According to official statements, the facilities there will be used as short-term processing centers for people in the process of removal, under the responsibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Defense only provides the land and logistics.
Funding contracts included $231.8 million, awarded to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a company with no prior experience in such work. The new camp, named Camp East Montana, is temporary on paper, offering even a prayer area for those inside — but in reality it is the largest immigration detainment facility in U.S. history.
Housing migrants on a military base entails a lack of transparency in detention. Fort Bliss is a restricted-access site where journalists, independent observers, and human rights advocates will not be admitted. This creates a “black zone” where those in custody are left without witnesses and without oversight.
For many, it brings back repeated trauma — people who fled wars and prison abuse now return to the sight of barracks, barbed wire, and military vehicles around them. Such placement erases the line between a civilian immigration system and a military prison, creating a model ready for scaling up.
But to house migrants on military bases fits perfectly into the Trump 2.0’s strategy on immigration enforcement. The point is that a show of strength and resolve at the border shifts the immigration issue from a civilian to a militarized domain.
This is first and foremost a signal to voters, especially Republican voters, of “uncompromising and tough control.” Republican governors, especially in Texas and Florida, support the idea, seeing it as a way to bypass restrictions and speed up deportations.
The danger is in making such measures the norm. When military infrastructure starts working for domestic politics, it stops being a crisis-response tool and becomes a permanent element of governance and intimidation. Its further development will only make it harder to return immigration control to civilian institutions.
All this is looking less and less like a tent camp in the desert and more like the birth of a new system. The lack of resistance to it will create a blueprint for national networks of military camps, where law and transparency give way to the discipline of the garrison.
Artem Kolisnichenko writes on crime, immigration, and border policy across the American South and Southwest.
