For the second time in two years, Texas is experiencing a significant measles outbreak. But unlike last year’s outbreak in the South Plains, little information is available about the new surge because it erupted at a privately operated federal detention center — and company officials aren’t talking.
What blunted the effect of this outbreak is that the West Texas Detention Facility is in Hudspeth County. That expansive county is even more sparsely populated than Gaines County, where last year’s outbreak was centered. Still, dozens of cases are already at the detention center in Sierra Blanca, the seat of Hudspeth County. Related infections have turned up in El Paso, the closest big city, according to The Texas Tribune.
The Tribune’s reporting solves this mystery: Why did federal officials report many more cases of measles in Texas than the Department of State Health Services did? At the time, the state tallied 18 infections while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 93.
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News stories showed scattered cases at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Dilley and at Camp East Montana near El Paso. But dozens of cases were unaccounted for, and neither ICE nor the CDC explained them.
Now we know: Most of those mystery cases were affiliated with a third federal facility, the one in Sierra Blanca, which is operated by Louisiana-based LaSalle Corrections for the U.S. Marshals Service.
It’s a serious outbreak. As of last week, Hudspeth County had 130 confirmed cases of measles in a county of only 3,500 residents. That’s more cases than the whole state had between 2015 and 2024. Yet The Tribune reported that facility managers declined to provide El Paso public health officials with information about detainees’ vaccination history or their close contacts at the facility, which hampered health workers’ ability to track the disease.
Imagine if ICE had been able to buy that enormous warehouse in Hutchins it had wanted to use as a detention center. A measles outbreak there would have spread almost immediately to the surrounding population, and hundreds of local residents could have caught the virus before the facility’s operators alerted Dallas County public health workers or medical facilities.
As measles vaccination rates have declined, local communities are even more vulnerable to the disease. Public health officials need time to prepare.
“You really want to make sure they [residents] are aware it’s in the community and they get vaccinated,” said Dr. Philip Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services. “You want clinicians to have it on their radar.”
The job of the state’s top political leaders is to protect Texans’ interests. That means pressing federal officials to quickly and consistently provide the information public health workers need to keep people safe.
