Outside the Beltway

Inside an ICE Detention Camp

A report on a concentration of detainees.

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, March 8, 2026 · 1 comment

Via the AP: Attempted suicides, fights, pain: 911 calls reveal misery at ICE’s largest detention facility.

The camp is intended for short-term stays before detainees are transferred or deported. The average stay there is only nine days, according to ICE data, but some detainees have been kept for months amid court cases or logistical issues related to deportation.

[…]

The Washington Post reported in September that a required ICE inspection found conditions at the facility violated at least 60 federal standards for immigration detention, but that report has never been released publicly.

The DHS spokesperson did not explain why but called claims in the Post story false. The spokesperson said ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight recently completed an inspection at Camp East Montana, but that report also has not been released.

The camp was hastily constructed last summer after the administration awarded a contract now worth up to $1.3 billion to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a Virginia contractor that had previously not operated an ICE facility.

Whenever I hear or read that a DHS spokesperson has made an assertion, I remember that DHS also said that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists” and made any number of claims that were easily contradicted by publicly available video. Their willingness to tell us to ignore our lying eyes makes me disinclined to believe them about things that we aren’t allowed to see.

Further, stories like this put the lie to the notion that this is all about the “worst of the worst” or that the targets are only people who aren’t following the rules.

Ramsingh was a legal permanent resident brought to the U.S. at age 5, when his Dutch mom married a U.S. service member. He married a U.S. citizen in 2015.

But at the age of 45, immigration authorities detained him at Chicago O’Hare airport in September after he flew home from a trip to visit family in the Netherlands. They cited a drug conviction from when he was 16 years old, for which he served prison time decades ago. He was among the first detainees sent to Camp East Montana.

He described his detention as follows:

“Every day felt like a week. Every week felt like a month. Every month felt like a year,” said Owen Ramsingh, a former property manager in Columbia, Missouri, who spent several weeks in the camp before his deportation in February to the Netherlands. “Camp East Montana was 1,000% worse than a prison.”

[…]

Ramsingh said he got stuck there for weeks after his deportation was ordered because ICE lost his Dutch passport. His personal belongings, including gold jewelry, also went missing.

So, a legal resident who has been in the US since age 5 has been deported because of a drug conviction when he was a teenager, for which he served his time.

Can anyone tell me how that is just? Or how it makes anyone safer?

And there there’s this:

At one point he said he overheard a security guard talking about bets made among the staff over which detainee would be next to die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into a pool, with the total pot riding on the outcome. The talk was particularly jarring, he said, because he had contemplated suicide himself.

The DHS spokesperson said Ramsingh’s account was false, though provided no indication of how the agency had sought to verify that.

Ramsingh said he heard of the betting pool after Jan. 3, when ICE said security guards responded after a 55-year-old Cuban man tried to harm himself and then used handcuffs and force to restrain him.

I recognize that this is one man’s uncorroborated allegations, but the sad truth is that what we know in general about American prisoners, coupled with the way in which ICE and other DHS officials have behaved, the account is quite plausible.

But, you know, don’t call them fascists.