After receiving a list of questions about the report and interviews on conditions at the facility, ICE spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa said the agency “had every intention to provide responses.” But after more than five days, ICE had not provided responses to any of The Post’s questions. Instead, Emily Covington, another spokeswoman, said Monday that “ICE is happy to provide a thorough response following publication, after it has had the time necessary to reply.”

Zamarripa declined a reporter’s request to tour Camp East Montana, saying she hoped to provide media tours “soon” but offering no other specifics.

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has led the push to build more large-scale facilities, which he said “create more efficiencies” and allow ICE agents to “arrest more bad people on the street,” he told a group of reporters last month. He said concerns raised about conditions at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention encampment in the Florida Everglades were “fake stories,” and said the facility was “just as good” as the temporary, makeshift facilities used by federal emergency responders in natural disasters.

There are few federal laws regarding conditions in immigrant detention centers. ICE sets the standards, and contractors agree to follow them. ICE can impose penalties, and facilities with too many violations can be closed.

Many of the deficiencies ICE found in its inspection of Camp East Montana in the first week of September appear to stem from the hasty construction and early opening of the makeshift facility. While the largest private prison firms say it can take up to three months just to hire and train enough staff to open a new ICE facility in an existing building, contractors at Fort Bliss have turned an empty patch of desert into one of the nation’s largest ICE holding sites in less than two months. The site is still not complete.

“You can’t build things quickly and expect them to be good,” said Imelda Maynard, legal director at Estrella del Paso, an El Paso-based nonprofit legal services provider for migrants.

As of early September, ICE held nearly 59,000 detainees in 187 facilities. More than 1,400 are at Fort Bliss.

The Fort Bliss facility is the first of at least 10 temporary, tentlike encampments that the Trump Administration plans to build at military bases and the sites of existing detention centers in the coming months, internal ICE documents show. ICE has said these “soft-sided” structures will provide temporary accommodations for migrants who are arrested and targeted for deportation.

Camp East Montana’s contract states that the facility is meant to hold people “for periods of approximately two weeks or less.” One former detainee, asylum-seeker Ricardo Quintana Chavez, was held there 24 days before being voluntarily deported to Peru last week, according to internal ICE records. A nonprofit representing migrants said several others have been there for more than two weeks.

In an interview with The Post, Chavez, 57, said it was obvious to him that Camp East Montana was brand new and poorly managed. He said he was fed cookies, candies and potato chips in lieu of meals, was allowed only infrequent outdoor recreation and problems with the building caused water to seep into his cell when people used the showers.

“You have to keep drying it,” he said via a recorded voice memo in Spanish.

This account of Camp East Montana’s first 50 days — from when the contract was awarded to the final day of the ICE inspection, on Sept. 5 —is based on internal ICE documents, the interview with Chavez, interviews with people who have visited the site and satellite photos showing its construction.

No telephones

The scramble to build the massive new detention facility in a remote stretch of desert northeast of El Paso was already underway on July 19, a day after the government announced it had awarded the contract, satellite photos show.

Acquisition Logistics LLC was selected to oversee the $1.2 billion contract for the construction and operation of the facility. The small business is registered to the Virginia home of Ken Wagner, the company’s 77-year-old owner.

An archived version of Wagner’s website says he is a retired senior Naval flight officer who has led a variety of technical projects for the federal government, including developing a classified data communications system for an intelligence agency.

Acquisition Logistics did not respond to requests for comment, nor did any of the five subcontractors listed on contract documents.

ICE documented its first detainees at Fort Bliss on Aug. 1. They weregiven little opportunity to communicate with the outside world,inspectors later found, noting this would violate ICE rules requiring immigrant detainees be permitted to contact lawyers and family members.

For much of August, when relatives or others searched ICE’s public-facing website for the names or identification numbers of people they now know were held there, the site did not show any facility name. Instead, it displayed an ICE phone number that was rarely answered by a human being, according to attorneys and advocates who tried calling many times.

Rather than telephones, the facility had a batch of tablet computers that detainees were told to use to make calls, according to ICE inspection documents. Several reported that the pin numbers they were given to access the tablets weren’t working. The report said detainees were told it could take up to a week to fix the problem. It’s unclear whether it continues.

For the first three weeks of August, when legal representatives and Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso, tried to meet with detainees in person, they were turned away.

On Aug. 4, ICE officials declined a request from Escobar to tour the detention facility, saying in a follow-up email on Aug. 8 that the site was “still under construction and will not be operational until” Aug. 17. At the time of the email, internal ICE records obtained by The Post show the facility held 15 detainees.

Federal law permits members of Congress to enter “any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.” Escobar noted she was following the agency’s own guidelines, which require seven days notice for such visits. ICE confirmed her request met that requirement, but said it was not allowing visits until “construction is complete” and did not admit her until two weeks after her initial request.

Crystal Sandoval, a legal representative with Las Americas, an El Paso-based nonprofit, said she was also turned away, on Aug. 25, but allowed into the facility on Aug. 29. After passing through security, she was brought to a white tent on the west side of the fenced compound. Inside, six detainees were waiting in a pod outfitted with slots that she likened to money changing windows.

“One of my biggest concerns was the privacy,” she recalled.

The room was hot and noisy, and she had trouble hearing the men. More than 110 HVAC units were visible adjacent to detention tents, satellite images taken on Aug. 31 show.

Sandoval was told a “contact room,” where legal representatives could speak directly with detainees one-on-one, wasn’t yet complete.

Inspectors later found that detainees were in the dark about their cases because they didn’t even know who their assigned deportation officer was, in violation of ICE standards, which say facilities must provide contact information and scheduled hours for ICE staff.

This is a serious problem but is not uncommon in ICE detention centers, Denise L. Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said in an interview.

“One of the very worst things about immigration detention is just not even understanding why you’re there, how long you’re going to be there, what you can do to further your case,” Gilman said. “Whether that’s to just ask to be sent back home or to claim asylum or to fight for your case in some other way.”

Chavez, a journalist who says he fled Peru after receiving death threats for his coverage, was living in Miami this summer when he was arrested for selling ceviche on the street without a permit. The misdemeanor landed him in jail before he was transferred to a series of ICE detention facilities and eventually brought to El Paso.

While being held at Camp East Montana for more than three weeks, Chavez says he was given no information about the status of his asylum case.

“You never, ever, ever speak with an ICE officer personally about your case,” he said. “They give us generic answers. And when you focus on one issue, they say, ‘I don’t know your case, I couldn’t tell you.’”

‘Visible frustrations and unruliness’

By Aug. 18, ICE had shipped more than 900 migrants to Camp East Montana from all over the country.

The migrants, mostly men but some women, had a variety of backgrounds and countries of origins, Escobar said. Many had been living and working in the U.S. for decades and had wives and children who are U.S. citizens, she said.

Detainees were brought to live in enormous white tents, each as long as two football fields. Inside, temporary walls divided the cavernous spaces into smaller pods, where up to 72 people ate, showered, slept in bunk beds and used the bathroom, documents and interviews show. Because the pods were open on top, with no ceilings of their own, the conversations, outbursts and cries of hundreds of people created a cacophony day and night.

ICE’s website states that immigrant detention is not meant as a form of punishment, but rather, only to ensure people show up for their court hearings and removal proceedings. And yet, ICE’s inspectors found some people at Fort Bliss were being held without many basic human necessities.

During the first few weeks, some toilets and sinks didn’t work, according to a memo written by an ICE employee in August and obtained by The Post.

By September, inspectors found that only one of the four planned outdoor recreation areas had been completed, and it had to be shared among 1,200 detainees. ICE requires one hour of recreation time per day, five days a week. At Fort Bliss, each person was only allowed 40 minutes of recreation per session, and some detainees reported only getting three sessions in a two-week period.

“There’s just one yard for everyone, and it’s a tiny yard,” Chavez said. This added to detainees’ “visible frustrations and unruliness,” the ICE inspectors wrote.

Due to concerns that detainees were not being given enough food, the facility decided to increase “overall meal calories by 30%,” the ICE inspectors wrote, noting in early September that this plan had not been implemented and was still awaiting the approval of a dietitian. Inspectors also found that detainees needing a certain diet for a medical condition were being served a generic “medical meal” that did not necessarily address the needs of their specific conditions.

ICE inspectors also said contractors failed to follow mandatory procedures for medical care.

Some medical charts were never filled out and some intake screenings were never conducted, meaning, the inspectors wrote, that the medical team could not “identify emergent or past chronic medical conditions, mental illness issues such as suicidal/homicidal ideation or intent that could lead to detainee life-safety issue.”

One detainee had been given psychotropic medication but there was no record of that person ever consenting to it. Another had been placed on suicide watch but there was no record of anyone watching them.

The medical contractor at Camp East Montana, a Florida-based firm called Loyal Source, runs dozens of medical clinics for migrant facilities along the Southwest border. In 2022, a federal oversight agency blamedLoyal Source for “critical understaffing” of these facilities that jeopardized the health and safety of migrants in custody.

Loyal Source did not respond to requests for comment. In comments to congressional investigators published in a report this year, Loyal Source said it does not have a responsibility to fully staff all of the migrant facilities, because its contract only requires it to fill a certain percentage of positions. The company partly blamed the government’s lengthy background check process for its inability to quickly hire new staff.

A ‘serious vulnerability’

In a press briefing outside the base last month, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the facility would be part of an effort to deport immigrants with “criminal charges or convictions” who have exhausted all of their legal remedies.

“We’re not talking about gardeners, housekeepers, or people like that,” Cornyn said.

The ICE inspection report says that Camp East Montana holds migrants “of all security levels,” and ICE’s own public data says the facility has admitted both criminal and noncriminal migrants. The facility classifies detainees based on risk level upon their arrival and has a system for keeping high- and low-risk populations separate from one another.

The report says the facility does not, however, have good policies and practices for keeping all of the site’s occupants secure from danger.

When federal inspectors arrived in September, they reported that Camp East Montana had 286 security personnel for more than 1,200 detainees. That’s only a portion of the 452 detention officers Acquisition Logistics told the government it would employ by the time the detainee population passed 1,000, contract records show.

Inspectors also found the facility had no approved security policy, which would include procedures for finding contraband that may pose a threat or controlling access to keys or equipment that could be used as weapons.

Armed guards stationed along the facility’s perimeter were given instructions about the care and handling of their weapons, but the instructions did not explain which situations would justify the use of lethal force, inspectors noted, calling this “a serious vulnerability.”

Daniel Gilbert and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report