Written by Amy Powell, Litigation Director at Lawyers for Good Government
I am a lawyer. I have spent years in federal litigation — drafting briefs, arguing motions, navigating the architecture of the American legal system. I thought I understood detention. I had read the reports.
I was not prepared for the dust.
Copyright: Paul Ratje, elpasomatters.org
Camp East Montana (often just called Fort Bliss) sits on the edge of El Paso in the West Texas desert. The facility itself is a kind of temporary permanence: white canvas buildings, hard composite walls, air ducts running along the ceiling like exposed veins. Gravel and dust everywhere. The West Texas wind ripples the canvas walls or ceilings so hard that some afternoons it's difficult to hear the person sitting across from you. Over the course of a day, the reddish desert earth works its way through the cracks and settles in your hair, your eyes, your lungs. I tasted dirt for hours after leaving.
The detention center holds up to 5,000 people. The vast majority have no lawyer.
I was there as part of L4GG's Detention Bridge Project, a new initiative that deploys pro bono attorneys to underserved detention centers to conduct intakes, identify legal claims, connect people with representation, and document conditions. I was one of the first attorneys in.
The Room
We were led to a large room that served as the law library, the barbershop, and the game room. There were half-finished puzzles on the tables. A painting of Selena on the wall. A row of computers loaded with legal forms, the sum total of the "law library" for thousands of detained people. Over the course of two days, I watched guards work on those puzzles. I didn't see a single detainee touch them.
The guards were, almost without exception, courteous and professional. That's what made it hard to hold in my head. A guard who helps you find a conference room, who chats pleasantly about what materials the law library needs, who is genuinely glad you're there — and who is also part of a system that holds a person for months without a bond hearing, in a facility that cannot reliably provide ibuprofen to someone in chronic pain.
All of those things were true at the same time.
The People
Over two days, I met with multiple people detained at the facility. I can't share their stories (there are real ethical and safety considerations around client confidentiality) - but I can tell you what I saw across all of them.
Copyright: Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, elpasomatters.org
I saw people who were exhausted in a way that goes beyond sleep deprivation. There's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from having no control over what happens to you, no sense of when or whether anything will change, no meaningful way to access the legal system that is supposedly deciding your fate. Several people I spoke with had waited weeks or months for a hearing that was still a month away. One person wanted nothing more than to leave the country, and couldn't, because the system had no efficient mechanism to process that request.
I saw people with real legal claims — habeas arguments, asylum claims, pathways through statutes that have existed for decades — who were navigating complex federal proceedings alone, in a second language, in a detention center in the middle of the desert.
I saw people in pain who had been told, functionally, that their pain was not serious enough to treat.
And I saw the math. A facility that holds thousands of people, a partner organization stretched to its limits, a volunteer corps that is new and still finding its footing. We can help one person. We can help ten. But we cannot help 5,000. Not yet.
The media is reporting that Fort Bliss will close soon. The closure can’t come too soon, as the media has also reported that guards were taking bets on which detainees will commit suicide next. But closing Fort Bliss will not make the problems there close down, as ICE continues aggressive enforcement and detentions under dubious legal theories across the country. There is another ICE detention center in the El Paso area (SIX others just in the Western District of Texas, including Dilley), and there are many other underserved centers across the country and more centers planned.
The Part Nobody Tells You About
What I wasn't fully prepared for was the triage.
At the end of each day, the attorneys on the trip would sit together and review the intakes. Who has the strongest claim? Who is most at risk? Who has a lawyer already? Who needs a habeas petition, who needs an asylum filing, who needs someone to track down their identity documents? Who can we refer where?
This kind of clinical analysis is necessary. It is how you make the most of finite resources in a crisis. And it is also emotionally brutal in its own particular way, because you are, in effect, deciding whose situation is urgent enough to prioritize — and that means you are also deciding whose situation is not.
Jessica Riley, L4GG's supervising attorney who has been doing this work for years, said something I keep coming back to: there is value in standing beside someone and fighting all the way, even if you lose. Because that person's life and dignity has value. But our time and resources are finite. And fighting one losing case means not fighting someone else's.
I don't have a clean resolution to that tension. I don't think there is one.
What We're Building
The Detention Bridge Project exists because the status quo is not acceptable. People are being swept up and placed in facilities thousands of miles from their families. They are arriving faster than the existing legal infrastructure can absorb them. The procedural rules at every facility — what you can bring, when you can visit, how to request records — are inconsistent, opaque, and known only to lawyers who have done the work before.
We are building the infrastructure to change that. A database of attorney access protocols so that no lawyer has to start from scratch. A trained corps of volunteers who can do intakes, flag legal claims, support conditions litigation, and ensure that people are not navigating the system entirely alone. A pipeline from intake to representation, from identification to action.
We need more lawyers. We need lawyers who have never done immigration work before and are willing to learn. We need lawyers who are willing to take a habeas case, a bond hearing, an intake call. We need lawyers who can show up — in person in El Paso, or remotely from anywhere.
I went to El Paso as a litigator. I came back as someone who understands, in a way I didn't fully before, that the most important thing we can do right now is put more lawyers in that room.
If you're willing to be one of them:
Please sign up today for the Detention Bridge Project. Training provided. All experience levels welcome.
If you can’t join the project, please consider donating your airline miles, points, or funds to L4GG’s Travel Fund, which sends lawyers to detention centers.