The Border Week: Up to 11.5 Million Dollars for an Empty Camp, 1,601 Reentry Cases, and SB 4 in Full Effect

Up to 11.5 million dollars in payments for an empty detention camp, destroyed evidence in a homicide investigation, and a lost loaded gun appear in a federal watchdog report on the country’s largest immigration detention facility. Federal court records showed illegal reentry prosecutions in South Texas running nearly 23 percent above their first-quarter pace, and Senate Bill 4, the state law that criminalizes illegal entry into Texas, entered the week enforceable in its entirety. The Texas Border Examiner opens its weekly digest with the events, court records, and primary documents that defined the Texas border from June 1 through June 10.

Featured analysis: 1,601 illegal reentry cases in South Texas

1,601 criminal cases under 8 U.S.C. §1326, the illegal reentry after removal statute, reached the Southern District of Texas between April 1 and May 31, the Texas Border Examiner reported June 9 based on PACER records. The two-month pace of roughly 800 filings a month runs nearly 23 percent above the first quarter, when the district averaged 652 cases a month, and above March, the busiest single month of the year to that point. 715 of the cases, 44.7 percent of the district total, came through McAllen. Laredo produced 574, or 35.9 percent, and posted the steepest growth of any division, up more than 30 percent over its first-quarter pace. Brownsville added 214. The three border divisions together handled 1,503 cases, 94 percent of the district’s §1326 docket. Chief Judge Randy Crane handled 309 of the cases over the two months, more than any other judge in the district, and he and Judge Drew B. Tipton together accounted for 83 percent of McAllen’s docket. The full division and judge breakdown appears in the original analysis.

GAO: Camp East Montana wasted millions and opened without meeting detention standards

Up to 11.5 million dollars in taxpayer money went to waste during the first two weeks of August 2025, when Camp East Montana stood empty, according to a Government Accountability Office report published June 9. The Army awarded and administered the 1.3 billion dollar contract for the facility on Fort Bliss in El Paso, the largest immigration detention facility in the country, and the contract requires ICE to pay the full cost of meals and operational services for 5,000 people regardless of the actual population. The facility held about 1,600 detained noncitizens at the end of February 2026. GAO calculated that ICE could save tens of millions of dollars through September 2026 by adopting measures such as tiered meal pricing. ICE terminated the contract for convenience in April 2026 and selected a new operator, but the new contract still lacks those savings measures, and the agency continues to pay for meals it does not need, the report found. Reuters identified the replacement operator as Amentum Services Inc. and reported that about 57,000 immigrants sat in ICE detention nationwide as of early June, up from around 40,000 in January 2025. ICE conducted no pre-occupancy inspection, and the facility opened without perimeter security cameras or space for attorney and family visits, El Paso Matters reported . Three detainees have died at the facility since it opened in August 2025. In the death of a 55-year-old Cuban detainee that the El Paso County medical examiner ruled a homicide, the contractor failed to provide use-of-force and death reports to ICE, and evidence “was missing or destroyed,” the report states. In a separate death by suicide, staff placed the detainee in a medical holding room instead of a suicide-resistant cell and left the person unattended for longer than 15 minutes. The report also documents the absence of treatment plans for detainees with diabetes or HIV, a failure to quarantine a detainee with tuberculosis, and dormitories cleaned once a week instead of the required once a day, the Texas Tribune reported. A loaded gun a private contractor brought onto the installation went missing for months, The Washington Post reported. The report follows a February inspection by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight that found 49 violations of detention standards and a lawsuit the ACLU of Texas and other organizations filed over conditions at the facility.

Border courts: a stash house death, a 30-year sentence, and a fake citizen on offshore oil platforms

32 people, one of them pronounced dead on arrival at an emergency room, passed through a Laredo stash house that Mexican national Cruz Alberto De La Garza, 39, admitted to operating when he pleaded guilty June 3 in the Southern District of Texas. The investigation began October 15, 2025, after two of the migrants had been dropped off at the emergency room, and the medical examiner identified environmental exposure with heat effects as a cause of the death. Later that day, law enforcement encountered a tractor-trailer at the Border Patrol checkpoint in Cotulla and found 30 more people crammed into the sleeper compartment. Investigators determined the group had been held at the stash house in extreme heat with little food, water, or ventilation. De La Garza faces up to life in federal prison.

360 months in federal prison went to Jordy Alexander Amaya, 28, of Oklahoma, in a Del Rio courtroom on June 5 for trafficking cocaine from Mexico, the Western District of Texas announced. CBP officers found about 1.9 kilograms of cocaine in his vehicle at the Eagle Pass Port of Entry on September 16, 2024, and trial evidence tied him to a Texas-based organization that distributes methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl. 195 months went the same day to Mexican national Armando Garcia-Martinez for conspiracy to harbor migrants in a Del Rio case that caused serious bodily injury and placed lives in jeopardy. 52-year-old Mexican national Ezequiel Escamilla Martinez of Brownsville pleaded guilty to using a stolen identity to fraudulently obtain access to restricted offshore oil platforms, the Southern District announced June 5. Between September 23, 2022, and February 12, 2025, Escamilla Martinez used the false identity to obtain a Transportation Worker Identification Credential card, a Texas driver’s license, and a U.S. passport, and he used the fraudulent passport to cross the border more than 80 times in 2024 and 2025. He admitted he was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, not in Brownsville as he had claimed.

SB 4 entered the week in full effect

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stayed a district court injunction on May 29 and cleared Senate Bill 4, the state law that criminalizes illegal entry into Texas and lets state magistrates order removals, to take effect in its entirety, JURIST reported. Judge Leslie Southwick cast the only dissent. The order followed the full court’s April 24 en banc ruling, which vacated the original injunction by a 10 to 7 vote on standing grounds, and a May 14 injunction a district court issued in a class action the ACLU and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed. The Texas Department of Public Safety made the first arrests under the law on May 24 in Hidalgo County, where two men face state illegal entry charges. First-time illegal entry carries a state misdemeanor charge, and repeat offenses carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison. The law remained enforceable through the end of the digest period, with constitutional challenges still pending. The illustration for the article was prepared by @cute_сhaika