Uncovering abuse inside America's largest ICE detention center

Speaker 10:00

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Tonya Mosley· Host0:15

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. Over the past year, we've watched ICE agents arrest immigrants at traffic stops, outside schools, even at the routine check-ins people attend to stay in compliance. And in the past week, two of these attempted detentions turned deadly. Agents shot and killed two men in their vehicles, a construction worker in Houston, and on Monday, a man in Biddeford, Maine. ICE agents are reportedly now arresting some two thousand people a day. But the arrests are only part of what we've seen. My guest, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, takes us inside what happens next. Some spend weeks or months in detention, and others are deported to countries they've never set foot in. His latest reporting is from the country's largest immigrant detention center, a sprawling complex of tents built on a military base in El Paso, designed to hold up to five thousand people. Through the stories of families separated and the detainees themselves, Blitzer documents how the conditions at these centers have become a form of enforcement, detention not as a place where people wait for their cases to be decided, but as a tool to