What's Happening Inside This ICE Facility in Texas Should Shock Your Conscience
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Last month 31 men at Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas , positioned their bodies in the shape of the letters “SOS,” a cry for help, as journalists flew overhead. Much has been written about the state of deportations under the Trump administration and the blurring of the Supreme Court's orders, as well as the court's temporary blocking of removals of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious prison complex in El Salvador. However, less has been said about how human rights violations are pervasive at detention centers all over the United States, including Bluebonnet.
Nearly nine years after its construction to house state prisoners, Bluebonnet Detention Center, operated by the Management and Training Corporation, signed a $145 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2019 to house a maximum of 1,000 detainees on any given day . Located approximately 200 miles west of Dallas-Fort Worth, Bluebonnet provides a strategic site for discreet detention, nestled in a remote area yet accessible for transport to the airport. Despite its newer status with ICE, Bluebonnet had one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks among ICE detention centers in the US in 2021, and the American Civil Liberties Union listed the facility among 38 recommended for shut down because of its dangerous operations.
It is no surprise that Bluebonnet's detention conditions continue the practices of gross human rights violations that plague the entirety of ICE operations. The conditions inside ICE detention centers are so untenable that people are self-deporting to avoid being detained. This is not an accident. ICE's poor conditions are adapted tactics of the “Prevention Through Deterrence” policy implemented in 1994 that makes it more difficult for immigrants to fight their deportation orders. This is exactly what the Trump administration wants.
At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bluebonnet was inspected at least seven times by ICE's Office of Detention Oversight and by Nakamoto Group, a private independent company that has since lost its contract with the federal government. Notably, inspections by Nakamoto Group relied heavily on telemonitoring and planned visits, asking detention facilities before monitoring them for a list of preapproved detained individuals to interview. This raised many ethical issues that were reported by the ACLU . Even despite offering this advance opportunity for detention officials to clean up their acts before inspection, our data (which we obtained via the Freedom of Information Act) shows Nakamoto still found dangerous environments at Bluebonnet.
All Bluebonnet detention inspections occurring between 2020 and 2024 documented recurring concerns regarding medical treatment, extended isolation, detailed reports of sexual violence, recorded instances of force, and problematic approaches to suicide prevention and interventions. Although 45 percent of detainees statements in Bluebonnet inspections reported issues with medical care, facility detention inspectors rarely found detainees trustworthy about their complaints. For example, in 2021, Bluebonnet detainees stated that medication requests were rarely followed up on, while another detainee who had received medical attention was placed in solitary confinement that had unsanitary conditions without explanation. The inspectors in each case failed to believe detainees because they were unable to verify their claims.
In our analysis of Bluebonnet inspections, we discovered dangerous practices that placed detainee well-being at risk. During February 2021, the Office of Detention Oversight found that Bluebonnet staff did not follow proper procedures to calculate use-of-force incidents and video documentation of incidents was not properly assessed by ICE. That same document also revealed hunger strikes and issues with medical care that captured a troubling environment at Bluebonnet for detainees. The most recent Bluebonnet inspections also harbor a similar sense of turmoil. In 2024, the Office of Detention Oversight revealed that detainees were exhibiting suicidal behavior because of long wait times and delays at Bluebonnet. These ruminations on suicide due to the escalating deportation procedures and extended court delays are not unplanned, but rather an indicator of how ICE operates as a whole.
For those in the know, violence is as synonymous with ICE as the Big Mac is with McDonald's. ICE provides financial backing and branding to correctional institutions—we would call them franchises—that are notoriously dangerous to incarcerated individuals. These prisons and jails lack motivation for reform because ICE rarely withdraws funds or ends contracts.
Make no mistake, the SOS is not an isolated event but a symptom of a greater problem. Right now, Cuban detainees at Krome detention center in the Miami-Dade area in Florida are protesting under similar conditions to those at the Bluebonnet ICE facility. Across these ICE detention centers, detainees are resisting prolonged detention, inadequate food, a lack of medical care, and recurring abuse.
The violence experienced in these facilities is slow violence, and slow violence leads to “undue process.” For example, at Bluebonnet, people's limited access to correspondence and other mail has inhibited their ability to correspond with their families and legal teams to defend themselves. Slow violence is intentional, diminishing individuals' ability to defend themselves and receive legal due process. It results—predictably and intentionally—in undue process and self-deportation.
Notably, the level of violence in ICE detention facilities is higher than in jails or prisons. US citizens who commit crimes and are convicted of them are protected by law from experiencing violence during their incarceration. That is not to say that violence doesn't still occur in prisons, but that there are constitutional protections to guard against it. These same protections do not seem to exist for individuals in immigrant detention.
Our collective level of outrage does not match the gross human rights violations happening daily to immigrant detainees—people who have not been convicted of a crime but who are in the process of being removed from the country. While we pretend that we are protecting the sanctity of America, we are undermining our core values by denigrating “the huddled masses” that have come to our shores seeking freedom. Instead, we place them in peril in our ICE detention centers. We know this is the America that some have fought hard to create. Is this the America that we will accept?
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