Of 71 people interviewed at a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement camp in Texas, 64 said they had been beaten by staff or had watched staff beat someone else. That is about 90%, and it is the central number in an 84-page report issued jointly Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, which the two groups compiled from interviews conducted over five months, some as recently as last month [1].
The facility is Camp East Montana, a sprawling detention site on the U.S. Army's Fort Bliss in El Paso. According to The Associated Press, detainees told researchers they were denied necessary medical care, held in bathrooms covered in feces and flooded housing units, given no soap, fed inedible meals, and kept indoors for weeks without sunlight or fresh air [1]. Guards, detainees said, beat people in response to hunger strikes, requests for medical attention, and complaints about conditions, and sometimes imposed collective punishment — striking multiple people after accusing one of breaking a rule [1].
"ICE's Camp East Montana is a human rights disaster," said Angelica Cesar, a Human Rights Watch and ACLU fellow who led the research. She called on the government to shut it down and open independent investigations into abuses and deaths in custody [1]. The Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, did not immediately respond to AP's request for comment [1].
This is where the social feed and the wire report split, and the split has a cost. On X, a report like this arrives as a credibility fight: enforcement accounts note that HRW and the ACLU oppose mass detention on principle and treat the whole document as advocacy, while critics lift the most visceral details — the feces, the beatings — and present the camp as an outright torture site. Both moves skip the report's actual spine, which is not a single anecdote but a count: 64 of 71 people, across a five-month window. A number that size is harder to wave away than any one quote, which is why the frame-fight avoids it.
The AP account also carries the context that makes the beatings less surprising. A Government Accountability Office report last month found that DHS mismanagement created unsafe conditions contributing to detainee deaths, even as wasted tax dollars enriched contractors; in one death later ruled a homicide, the GAO said evidence was "missing or destroyed" [1]. In March, ICE replaced the camp's prime contractor, Acquisition Logistics LLC — a Virginia firm awarded a deal worth up to $1.3 billion despite never having run an ICE facility — after an internal review documented 49 deficiencies in areas including use of force [1].
The report says the change fixed little; interviews from last month found the problems persisting [1]. Its gravest finding is legal: researchers concluded some detentions could amount to enforced disappearances, a potential violation of international human rights law, and described detainees pressured to abandon asylum claims and accept deportation to third countries under threat of violence and indefinite detention [1]. That is the charge the feeds bury under the credibility fight, and the one the reader most needs to see.
-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington