Locked Away

This press release from Representative Veronica Escobar (D-TX) was published on 2026-07-13 and titled "Locked Away".

Locked Away

On a military base in West Texas, where the government has built a sprawling tent complex to hold thousands of immigrants, deprivation and dire conditions are part of the design. The Trump Administration’s goal, a former ICE official said, “is to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave.” In an office park in El Paso, Texas, across the street from the Nuevo Amanecer Church, is a one-story white stucco building with a scuffed metal door. A small sign decorated with a drawing of a globe hangs above the entrance, announcing the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. ISAP , as it’s known to roughly two hundred thousand enrollees, is an initiative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—an alternative to detention which allows immigrants with open or unresolved legal cases to live freely while checking in with officials a few times a year. It began, in 2004, with a simple premise: the federal government cannot jail everyone it might want to deport. One of the program’s participants, Rey, is a Cuban in his mid-fifties who came to the U.S. in 1994. Shortly after arriving, he was involved in a robbery in Florida. He served a five-year prison sentence, but, because Cuba didn’t cooperate with American authorities, he could not be deported. Instead, he was authorized to remain in the country. In 2014, Rey moved to El Paso, where he worked as a truck driver and began making regular visits to the local ISAP office. “My friends would tell me, ‘Are you crazy? One day they’re going to arrest you,’ ” he said recently. “I would tell them, ‘If, when we were young, we did things wrong, now we have to do things the right way.’” Rey, who is tall, heavyset, and bald, with a baritone voice, is a laid-back optimist. He and his wife, a U.S. citizen whom I’ll call Sara, met at a weekly salsa night at an El Paso bar. She was struck by his unhesitating generosity. “Rey is the kind of person who, if he has something, he’ll give it to you,” she said. In El Paso, Rey went on to open a Cuban pizzeria, a night club, and trash-collection and furniture-restoration businesses. “My wife calls me a dreamer,” he told me. They got married a decade ago, when Sara’s son was a year old. “We eventually told him that Rey wasn’t his biological father, but he didn’t care,” Sara said. “As far as he was concerned, Rey was always his dad and always would be.” Last October, Rey’s case manager at ISAP called and asked him to stop by for an appointment. He arrived between errands, having just taken his son to school and carrying two thousand dollars in his pocket, a payment for a new pizza oven. “I was running around like crazy,” he said. It was also Sara’s birthday; they were supposed to meet for lunch. Rey spent a few minutes in the waiting room of the ISAP office—a drab space with bare blue-and-white walls and two rows of chairs—before an official summoned him inside. “Walk down that hallway,” he told him. A group of ICE agents was waiting. “No one explained what was happening,” Rey told me. They put him in handcuffs and led him to a van that was loaded with people. A woman inside was sobbing as she told the agents that her three children were currently in school. “What are they going to do?” she asked. “Who’s going to pick them up?” By two o’clock that afternoon, Sara hadn’t heard from Rey and decided to drive to the ISAP office. His car was still in the parking lot. Inside, an official gave Sara the address of a detention center. When she got there, another official told her that family visits were conducted alphabetically, by detainees’ last names; she’d have to come a different day for Rey’s turn. Sara, a college graduate who works for the State of Texas, is pragmatic and personable. “You have a computer,” she replied. “Can you just do me the favor of telling me if my husband is being held here?” The official refused. Sara went to another detention center in the area, where she was told that Rey was at the place she’d just left. When she returned to the first jail, an official directed her to a side door of the building. A man in a khaki uniform emerged and handed her a ziplock bag containing Rey’s wallet, which was empty, and the shoelaces from his sneakers. A few hours later, Rey and more than a dozen other detainees were driven ten minutes east, to a facility where he would spend the next six weeks. It was down a long, barren drive, almost a mile from the main road, and sealed off behind a metal gate. Four large white tents stood in an imposing line, flanked by a few small buildings. The desolate surroundings scared some of the others, but Rey, whose pizzeria was nearby, recognized where they were—at a military base called Fort Bliss. Last summer, the Trump Administration picked Fort Bliss to be the site of the largest immigrant-detention center in the country. ICE was ramping up arrests nationwide, and the government, in search of more space to hold people, opted to erect tents—known in government parlance as “soft-sided facilities”—a