On August 15, the Washington Post took a deep dive into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to double immigrant detention space after lawmakers approved an unprecedented budget boost for the agency in July as part of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — “the largest investment in detention in deportation in U.S. history,” according to the American Immigration Council.
$45 billion was set aside specifically for detention centers. The Reeves County Detention Facility outside Pecos is the largest detention center on the Post’s list, with a capacity of 3,700 single adults and 2,000 in the Reeves Family Facility.
The Reeves County Detention Center lost its federal contract in 2021, after its operator Geo Group “struggled to maintain adequate staff, leading to substandard medical care and inmate riots,” the Post reported.
That year, CBS 7 in Midland-Odessa reported on the closing of the facility and included remarks from former Reeves County Judge Leo Hung, who opposed the closure and faced numerous headaches in figuring out where to transfer remaining detainees and staff. “We do not believe that Reeves County has failed to provide adequate care to inmates under its contractual obligations,” he said in a statement. “Naturally, we are disappointed that despite our best efforts, the BOP has seen fit to close this facility.”
The Reeves County facility has a checkered past and has made national headlines for inmate riots and deaths. In 2013, progressive watchdog Mother Jones ranked the facility in its list of “America’s 10 Worst Prisons”. They highlighted the case of Jesus Manuel Galindo, a 32-year-old detainee with epilepsy who was repeatedly denied seizure medication in favor of Tylenol and whose corpse was allegedly carried out of the facility in a garbage bag, sparking “the first of several riots in which detainees took hostages and set fire to parts of the mammoth detention complex,” Mother Jones reported.