Profiting in Nowhereland

In March, Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll stepped off a jet on the El Paso International Airport tarmac for a planned visit to Fort Bliss, the vast Army post located at the edge of Texas’s border with Mexico. After spending a couple days lunching with soldiers and posing for photo ops in front of tanks, Driscoll held a news conference at the airport to make an announcement: the federal government had “greenlighted” plans for the construction of a massive immigration detention camp in Fort Bliss. It would be located east of airport property, just four miles from the barracks of an existing ICE facility, the El Paso Service Processing Center—hailed as “the largest of the three” detention facilities on the border and “the most modern” after a Border Patrol headquarters opened there in 1967. Once completed, Camp East Montana will be, as Texas governor Greg Abbott put it triumphantly in August, “the largest ICE detention center in U.S. history.” 

When the first ICE detainees were transferred there, Camp East Montana was still under construction. An obscure small business called Acquisition Logistics LLC had won a $232 million bid with the Defense Department to build its first 1,000 beds—a contract that will reportedly be worth up to $1.24 billion as the facility expands to 5,000. The Camp, an “active construction site” about eleven miles northeast of the El Paso city center off Montana Avenue, has functioned as “a tent city of sorts,” as Congresswoman Veronica Escobar alarmedly described it after visiting in September. 

Much about the place remains opaque. When a subcontractor employee died there in July, the Army’s announcement identified the location with the generic name “Site Monitor.” When family members of the first people transferred to Camp East Montana attempted to search for their relatives’ locations, they found no facility name listed in the ICE system—just a phone number that, when dialed, was only intermittently answered by a human being. The camp’s champions have given it a set of monikers—among them, “Lone Star Lockup”—that seem almost designed to imbue the camp with a quasi-mythical air of unreality. Breathless media reports on the site use words like “desolate” and “untouched” when describing the area of desert it sits amid. Naturally, the idea that Camp East Montana is in an abstract place devoid of context and history—is, in a sense, nowhere—has been of great service to those wishing to evade accountability for what they do there. 

Look at historical maps of the area and you will see a starkly different story: one in which the supposed emptiness of this desert space has been deliberately constructed over time. In 1948, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) maps showed what is now Camp East Montana as a hog ranch with a windmill, down a dirt track off Montana Avenue. By 1955, a cluster of permanent structures there adjoined a dig site and a loop of four-wheel-drive tracks, at the end of an improved road. Over the second half of the twentieth century, the site’s infrastructure gradually accumulated: a 1994 map shows the sites of eight buildings, surrounded with water wells and crossed by power lines, in close vicinity to three radio towers, with vehicle tracks meandering through dune hummocks. But in 2012, the maps’ depiction of the road that once led to the hog ranch seems to lead nowhere, the tracks, buildings, towers, wells, and dunes replaced by blank white space. By 2016 the map contained only green shading and graduated topographic lines, suggesting the site had vanished entirely into an expanse comprised only of low desert scrub and undulating dunes. 

The use of military bases for immigrant detention is nothing new. In fact, parts of Fort Bliss itself were appropriated to incarcerate refugees during the Mexican Revolution and Japanese Americans during World War II. But the land Camp East Montana sits on has its own sordid histories of occupation, dispossession, and militarization backed by corporate interests—all of which have made the site into prime real estate for the nation’s latest exercise in industrial-scale detention for profit.

When settlers in Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836, they envisioned forming a slaveholding empire to rival that of the United States. An 1841 map of Texas depicted the Republic’s landholdings as far northwest as the headwaters of the Rio Grande and Arkansas River, in what is now Colorado, with some settlers imagining Texas stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean. To finance its indebted government, the Republic of Texas sold bonds, pledging spuriously claimed Indigenous lands as security. The suggestion that the lands were part of something called “Texas” upheld the bonds’ value, giving lenders the confidence to keep lending so long as they were convinced that the Republic they were investing in either already existed or invariably would. 

Texas’s independence had never been recognized by Mexico, so after the United States admitted the still-indebted Republic to the nation in 1845, President Polk launched—and won—a war of territorial conquest with Mexico in the name of securing its new possession. Integrating the Republic of Texas into the United States required the two parties to negotiate the new state’s western boundaries. The result: in exchange for 67 million acres of Indigenous land claimed by Texas, the United States agreed, in the 1850 Compromise, to pay off the war debt from the 1836 Texas “Revolution.” 

Negotiators made sure that the land they won for Texas included the northern riverbanks of Paso del Norte, a settlement along the Rio Grande that had been made into an international border after the war with Mexico. Texans believed the low mountain pass was crucial to the Confederate fantasy of a transcontinental railroad to California through the Southern states. The 1850 Compromise gave shape to that instantly recognizable right-angled boundary between Texas and the federal territory of New Mexico, at the 32nd parallel and the 103rd meridian—and the triangular wedge of West Texas within which now sits Camp East Montana. 

Because Texas entered the United States as a Republic, the state retained all public lands. Those lands are still administered today by the Texas General Land Office, an agency of title registration and public land management currently helmed by Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. For decades, the Land Office has been a notorious promoter of border militarization, but the second Trump administration has turned it into all but an eager collaborator willing to hand out state land for detention camps. 

Ever since invading Mexico, the U.S. military has maintained a near-continuous occupation in El Paso—not to guard against an external threat, but to solidify tenuous settler control. Land tensions crystallized in the 1877 Salt War, when settlers attempted to privatize historically communal salt beds located east of El Paso, down the road that now passes Camp East Montana. Deprived of fair process in courts (Texas mandated for the first time that all court proceedings take place in English in 1874), residents of pueblos along the river had increasingly narrow recourse to claim public rights to the salt deposits. When a Congressional committee investigated the Salt War, their only response was to recommend that U.S. troops again be stationed at the briefly-abandoned Fort Bliss, to enforce the settlers’ privatization of once-communal resources. “There is danger of a renewal of the disturbances,” the committee warned, “as soon as the increasing cultivation of the country demands water from the Rio Grande . . . there not being enough for all who will require it.” (Water access has remained a battleground to this day. Meta plans to build a massive data center in northeast El Paso, which will be permitted to use up to 1.5 million gallons of water daily; OpenAI and Oracle are investing $165 billion into a center called Project Jupiter, which will lie west of the city in New Mexico. Both would operate in a desert region with pernicious inequities of access to clean water.)  

In a move toward privatization on an enormous scale, Texas granted a vast ribbon of land stretching across the northern and western portions of the state to the Texas and Pacific Railway in 1873. For the mileage of track and other railroad facilities constructed by 1880, the railway would earn certificates exchangeable for sections of state public land it was then tasked with surveying. But the location of the land granted had no correlation to the location of the railroad: while track was constructed for cotton export along the Red River, much of the fourteen million acres Texas placed in the T&P Railway’s reserve was in West Texas, hundreds of miles away.

Land in the T&P Reserve at the site where Camp East Montana stands today conflicted with the Rancho de Ysleta, a grant made by the Governor of Chihuahua, Mexico to the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in 1828 to formalize the longstanding use of that land as communal pasture. Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is one of only three federally recognized tribes in Texas, and Ysleta lands along the Rio Grande at Paso del Norte were among grants made by Spain following the 1680 Pueblo Revolt south of present-day Albuquerque. Due to the 1850 Compromise, Pueblo lands in Texas have not had the federal protections granted for Pueblo lands in the federal territory of New Mexico. After the T&P Railway went bankrupt in 1886 and three New York bondholders formed the Texas Pacific Land Trust to retain nearly 3.5 million acres possessed by the railway, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo entered a litany of lawsuits against the Land Trust over title to the lands granted by the state to the railway company. All were unsuccessful. 

The T&P’s chief engineer, Grenville M. Dodge, himself made the first grant of land in northeastern El Paso within the T&P Reserve to the United States federal government in 1883. As all public lands in Texas were state-owned, this was land that had never before been federal. Ten years later, the Army would relocate the Fort Bliss headquarters to that same area, moving it from its earlier site on the banks of the Rio Grande. A hateful anti-abolitionist, Dodge was a major campaigner for Southern support for the T&P Railway and conceived of the military role of railway construction, claiming that “experience proves the Railroad line through Indian Territory a Fortress as well as a highway.” Once the rail lines were completed, the Army then used the railroad for Apache deportations from Arizona to prison camps in St. Augustine, Florida in 1886. It was not only the railway lines, but the land granted by Texas to finance those lines, that was used to construct a fortress.

Sales in the railway reserve flooded the market with cheap land sold off to speculators who retained title for decades before selling and profiting from the steady increase in value. By 1931, Montana Avenue was designated the Carlsbad Highway amid tourism booster campaigns in El Paso and land sales along the newly improved road. The highway created convenient access to land for activities that lay beyond urban perception—exactly what hog farmer John Sherman was seeking in 1933, after he was driven off his ranch site in the rapidly populating Lower Valley of the Rio Grande by neighbors who objected to the stench. “The food given to the hogs is garbage from Ft. Bliss,” one reporter described. “Garbage seeps into cracks in the concrete forming a breeding place for flies.” The dirt track off Montana Avenue that appeared on a 1942 USGS map as leading to the site of Sherman’s Hog Ranch, then still seven miles east of the military base, is now the road that leads to Camp East Montana. 

Fort Bliss vastly expanded in population and acreage during World War II, and the territory comprising Fort Bliss was checkered together. The survey section in which Sherman’s Hog Ranch lay was claimed by the United States in a 1941 lawsuit, and was later repurposed as a radio site of transmission towers named Site Monitor. Today Fort Bliss is the second largest base in the country by acreage, followed only by White Sands Missile Range immediately to the north. Together, the installations cover over 3.6 million acres.

In 1951, the military unveiled a training course in Fort Bliss designed to prepare troops for a new epoch of urban warfare, using the vast tracts the government had acquired for military simulations that still go on to this day. North of Camp East Montana sits Zambraniyah Training Village (the name taken from a real town in Iraq), which provides a stage for twenty-first-century war exercises, exploded automobiles and other detritus scattered across the sand dunes. 

Meanwhile, the base emanates waste into the real city of El Paso to its southwest. By 2002, the Army recorded within Fort Bliss eighty contaminated sites, including eighteen landfills, twenty-seven sites of oil tanks buried underground, six unexploded ordinance detonation areas, ten illegal dump sites, and six wastewater ponds, altogether harboring a cocktail of volatile organic compounds, radioactive metals, asbestos, pesticides, and a slew of other toxins. 

As a 2019 report by the nonprofit law group Earthjustice made evident, one of the illegal dump sites most accessible by public road is just off the Carlsbad Highway and adjacent to what was once known as Site Monitor—the very site now called Camp East Montana. The illegal dumping ground is termed Rubble Dump Site; in the late 1990s the soil already had rates of carcinogenic chemicals 460 times the level determined by the EPA as a cancer risk. The Earthjustice report was published after the first Trump administration sought to use Site Monitor for an immigration detention camp in 2018; seven years later, as that plan comes to fruition, the perils of contamination persist. 

It was not the first time that immigration administrators knowingly discharged toxic chemicals on caged immigrants in El Paso. In delousing baths at El Paso border bridges framed as typhus control measures in the 1910s, immigration agents sprayed gasoline and kerosene, massacring twenty-seven people when the jail went up in flames in 1916. Immigration agents then sprayed pesticides: asphyxiating sodium cyanide, an almond-scented rocket propellant called cyanogen, DDT, and eventually Zyklon B. 

The first ICE inspection report on Camp East Montana revealed a litany of abuses: makeshift construction, broken sinks and toilets, flooded cells, insufficient food, lost medical records and negligent medical treatment, and the impossibility of communication with legal representatives and deportation officers. Escobar reported “dishonest and opaque communication from ICE” ever since the Camp opened; as of late September the congresswoman’s office had twenty-one pending and unanswered inquiries about it. After people detained reported being unable to access legal counsel and becoming sick from the drinking water, Escobar’s office requested another visit. ICE canceled it with only one day’s notice. Per the most recent count, Camp East Montana incarcerates 1,860 men and 159 women.

Immigration detention, of course, is not an inevitable form of land use. Amid the expansion of Fort Bliss, gas pipeline diggers in the 1950s found Sherman’s hog ranch to be the site of a six-room adobe townsite, with circular fire hearths dating back to 1300 A.D. Far from the interchangeable section of land John Sherman settled for when he hauled his hogs there, or the desolate patch now depicted as the backdrop of a detention facility, Camp East Montana is a specific place; before its subjection to colonial occupations and military-industrial appropriations, the land had a long past. 

Arriving in El Paso from Santa Fe by stagecoach in 1877, German immigrant Ernst Kohlberg wrote home to his parents: “When you read about trouble on the border always discount the stories by one half. The demand for war in many of the American newspapers and especially in Texas is caused by speculators who want to make fortunes furnishing war supplies.” He could have been writing those words today. After Driscoll’s March announcement, tent contractor Deployed Resources vied to win a bid to supply tents for Camp East Montana. The contractor had pivoted from providing port-a-potties for massive music festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella to soft-sided tents for ICE detention—without regard for the lawless, needless harm through which they would be extracting their profits. 

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