The Pool
An Associated Press investigation, drawn from 911 calls and detainee accounts, reports that staff at the nation's largest ICE detention facility — Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in Texas — placed bets on which detainee would next die by suicide; Camp East Montana sits on the site of a World War II Japanese American internment camp.
#bureaucratic cruelty #civilian harm #predatory capital
According to Associated Press reporting based on 911 call logs and detainee accounts, staff at Camp East Montana — the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, holding around three thousand people in tents on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas — operated a betting pool on which detainee would next die by suicide. Owen Ramsingh, a legal permanent resident held there for several weeks, told the AP that he overheard a guard say he had paid five hundred dollars into the pot, with payouts going to the staff member with the most accurate predictions. DHS told the AP that Ramsingh, who was brought to the United States from the Netherlands at age five, was lying. In January, the facility called 911 for Geraldo Lunas Campos, a fifty-five-year-old Cuban man; DHS reported it as an attempted suicide, but a medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. That same month, a thirty-six-year-old Nicaraguan man at the facility died by suicide.
The site itself is significant: Camp East Montana stands where Fort Bliss housed Japanese Americans during World War II. The AP’s review documents one hundred and thirty 911 calls in the first roughly five months of operation, including at least six additional self-harm incidents serious enough to require emergency response. The betting pool, if it operated as Ramsingh described, was therefore betting on a frequent enough event that wagering on its next instance was a structurally coherent activity for guards to organize.