Donald Trump incarcerating innocent migrants in filthy detention camps. In my opinion, call them concentration camps.

"The New Ellis Island" is a July 2026, review essay by journalist Julia Preston for The New York Review of Books. It examines the book El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa, using the history of El Paso, Texas, to explore national immigration policies. 

Preston uses Ulloa’s book to explain how El Paso, Texas, has become a modern-day equivalent to historic Ellis Island. 

Historically, Ellis Island in New York Harbor processed over 12 million European immigrants who sought a new start in America. Today, El Paso serves as a major gateway and "bellwether" for US immigration policy, where the country's complicated history of welcoming and rejecting migrants is embroiled in American history.

In this blogspot, I want to highlight the final page of Preston's essay in her book review, because she describes the here and now of this ongoing challenging story.

Preston describes Ulloa’s determination to elevate El Paso was spurred by a horrific event. As a reporter for The Boston Globe, she returned to El Paso to cover the aftermath of a mass shooting by Patrick Crusius, a young white supremacist armed with an AK-47-style rifle and one thousand rounds of ammunition, at a local Walmart on August 3, 2019. He killed twenty-three people, among them both the mother and the father of an infant. Minutes before the attack, Crusius had posted a manifesto online in which he decried “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and said, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement.” 

At the time, Donald Trump was routinely vilifying Mexicans as criminal predators stampeding over the border. Crusius amplified to an extreme the fear of Mexicans that had long permeated the Southwest and was spreading, fanned by Trump’s rhetoric, across the country.

El Paso closes with the advent of Trump 2.0, as the he revives the specter of an alien invasion to justify an evilmass deportation blitz. Yet the outcomes for Ulloa’s families are mostly positive, proving her point about borderland social mobility. Raúl Reyes, the grandson of Miguel Martinez, is a historian in El Paso dedicated to recovering the past of his and many other Texas families. The judge who arraigned the Walmart shooter in an El Paso courtroom was a descendant of the Chews. Blanca and Susan Rubio, the daughters of Sabino, were elected to seats in the California state legislature.

“We are those bad Mexicans that he talks about,” Blanca Rubio said, referring to Trump, in a newspaper interview not long after Susan was sworn in. “We were undocumented, and then we fought hard, we got an education, and now we’re sitting here.”

In his State of the Union address this February, President Trump revived the tropes of Manifest Destiny to express his view of the nation’s origins. Americans, he said, had “carved pass through an unforgiving wilderness, settled a boundless frontier, and tamed the beautiful but very, very dangerous wild west. From empty marshes and wide-open plains, we raised up the world’s greatest cities.” Ulloa comprehensively refutes this version of events. In the Texas borderlands, the marshes were never empty nor were the plains wide open. The story Ulloa tells also makes clear that the unfettered nativism of Trump’s second term is not new in American history—not the poisonous invective depicting Venezuelans and other immigrants as gangsters and thieves, not the cruel removals of people who provide essential labor in American workplaces, not the roundups that ensnare noncitizens and citizens alike.

The border at El Paso is quieter now than it has been in decades, as Trump has made good on at least one of his campaign promises, to impose control by blocking illegal crossings and eliminating access to asylum along the boundary line. By the end of Trump’s first year back in the White House, Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the Mexican border had plummeted to the lowest numbers since 1970, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Yet, consistent with Ulloa’s argument, El Paso is still an epicenter of the United States’ system of social engineering through immigration. Despite the calm at the border, the city has not been spared Trump’s deportation campaign. The Catholic ✝️bishop of El Paso, Mark J. Seitz, in a pastoral message shared in parishes throughout the diocese on March 15, described its impacts. “Neighbors are being snatched as they walk out of immigration court proceedings downtown,” the bishop reported.

Workers are being taken from construction sites across the city…. Young women are languishing in mental torture for months in private detention centers, even when, coerced by the conditions of their imprisonment, they beg to be deported…. So many people are once again being made to feel like they are less than American.

In the first half of 2025, El Paso was second in the country in the number of deportation arrests of immigrants after hearings at the city’s immigration courts, surpassed only by arrests at the courts in New York City, according to a study by the mathematician Joseph Gunther.

El Paso is also a major juncture in the United States’ punitive immigration infrastructure. Not far from downtown sits Camp East Montana, an enormous tent city constructed in 2025 in a bleak patch on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a US Army base that makes recurring appearances in Ulloa’s account. The camp is the country’s largest immigration detention center, part of an archipelago that the Department of Homeland Security is assembling nationwide to hold as many as 100,000 immigrants. People who were arrested as far away as Chicago and Minneapolis have been sent to Camp East Montana. Under Trump’s rules, immigrants have been denied bond and forced to wait out slow-moving immigration court proceedings in detention, with the evident intent of causing them to despair and leave the United States on their own. To date more than four hundred federal judges and three appeals courts have ruled this policy unlawful and ordered immigrants released; two appeals courts have backed the policy, allowing DHS to continue.

Despite receiving $45 billion for detention in Trump’s big 2025 tax and spending bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has demonstrated that it is overwhelmed by the demands of jailing so many people. Almost as soon as it opened, Camp East Montana devolved into a hellhole with inedible food, eating areas flooded with sewage, a lack of basic hygiene, and dangerously inadequate medical care that led to outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis, according to a report in December by the American Civil Liberties Union that was based on interviews with forty-five detainees. The death on January 3 of a Cuban detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County medical examiner. It was the result of a “spontaneous use of force” by guards, ICE admitted in an official incident report. The report states that the guards were trying to prevent Lunas Campos “from harming himself.” But a witness interviewed by the El Paso Times said he heard the man pleading for asthma medication. Lunas Campos is one of three detainees who have died in the camp since December. According to a report published on June 9 by the US Government Accountability Office, another detainee died in January by suicide after being left alone and unattended in a windowless holding room. The GAO report found that some of the teeming dormitories at the camp were cleaned only once a week. No treatment plans were in place for detainees with HIV or diabetes. The conditions posed “serious risks to the safety and security” of detained people and staff, the report found. In March ICE fired the contractor running the facility, but then hired another one instead of closing the camp down.

What is new in Trump’s second term is the scale of the deportation blitz. The whole country is becoming a borderland, as DHS tries to achieve Trump’s goal of deporting one million people this fiscal year. Acting largely on his executive edicts, agents have extended into the country’s interior the race-based stops, strong-arm arrests, disregard for due process, and fast-track removals that have long been the regular practice of the Border Patrol in remote reaches along the line. A Border Patrol chief from California, Gregory Bovino, led Operation Metro Surge, the occupation by more than three thousand agents of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, applying what he called, in an interview with The New York Times, his strategy of “total immigration domination.” After the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters who were US citizens, Trump sensed that the show of force had gone too far. 

Trump replaced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator who is equally hard-line but said in his confirmation hearing that DHS would be less conspicuous: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.” Bovino retired. But under the command of the “border czar,” Tom Homan, agents are still hunting down immigrants, regardless of whether they have criminal records, in homes, schools, grocery store parking lots, and workplaces, if less noisily. On June 5 the Republican-led Congress voted to provide another 💲70 billion to ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other DHS offices for enforcement, detention, and deportation. (Maine Writer, this appropriation was approved by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins in exchange for passing more tax cuts for the rich and multimillionaires like herself.)

Also new is the widespread resistance to Trump’s crackdown. In Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and many other places where ICE arrived—including El Paso—citizens have rallied with whistles and horns to alert immigrants of danger, tracked agents’ movements with phone cameras in hand, provided food for families too scared to leave their homes, and even offered places for them to hide. When ICE has tried to open new detention centers, towns have been fighting back with lawsuits, city council resolutions, environmental restrictions, petition drives, and street protests. Places as distant as Chester, New York, and Oklahoma City have succeeded in stopping ICE’s projects. As with the social blend of El Paso, many immigrant families now include a mix of legal status, with undocumented parents, US-born children (who are by definition citizens), and relatives with other forms of status. Neighbors can see that the kids attend local schools and the parents work in the community. More Americans have become witnesses to the damage left behind when parents are separated from their children, including many who are US citizens, and deported. 

Polls re[prt how Trump’s assault is losing public support. In a survey in March by the Public Religion Research Institute only 35 percent of Americans rated Trump’s handling of immigration favorably, down from 48 percent in March 2025; 48 percent held very unfavorable views. If Ulloa’s history is any guide, it may be that the country is reaching the nadir (aka, "lowest point") of one of its perennial immigration cycles.