Three Immigrants Die at Camp East Montana, the Country's Largest Immigration Detention Center, Built at Fort Bliss on a Billion-Dollar Contract to an Inexperienced Firm

Details

In the summer of 2025, the Trump administration chose Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army base outside El Paso, Texas, as the site of what would become the largest immigrant-detention center in the country. As ICE ramped up arrests nationwide and searched for space to hold people, the government erected tents — known in government parlance as "soft-sided facilities" — at military installations and near existing ICE jails. The El Paso complex, a line of large white tents that could hold up to 5,000 people, was named Camp East Montana; the ACLU has described it as the largest internment facility in the United States. The first detainees arrived in early August 2025, while the site was still under construction, kept awake at night by trucks and jackhammers and blanketed by dust during the day.

The base carries a loaded history: during the Second World War, fifty-six U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were interned at Fort Bliss as "enemy aliens." Spanish-language media dubbed the new tent camp the "Alligator Alcatraz of Texas," after the state-fronted Florida facility from which many of Camp East Montana's detainees were transferred.

The Contract

The contract to run Camp East Montana was worth more than a billion dollars — an initial award of roughly $1.3 billion against an indefinite-delivery ceiling of about $2.7 billion. The Department of Defense first awarded it to Deployed Resources, a logistics contractor that had run tent facilities under the Biden administration, then almost immediately reversed course. The administration cited technical reasons; current and former ICE officials told The New Yorker that Deployed Resources had landed on a "no-contract list" because of its past association with the Biden White House.

When the contract went out a second time, eleven companies bid. On July 18, 2025, the Army announced the winner: Acquisition Logistics, a Virginia firm with no prior detention experience. According to research by the nonprofit Public Citizen, the company was founded in 2008, employed somewhere between eight and fifty people, and was registered to the Richmond-area home of its founder and CEO, Kenneth Wagner, a 78-year-old Navy veteran. Its largest prior federal contract had been a $16 million program-management job at a California naval base — making the new award roughly 81 times bigger than anything the firm had handled before. Wagner's sixty-page bid offered little more than a rhetorical embrace of the administration's immigration policies, warning that "any misstep by inexperienced contractors" could create political "fodder."

The award drew a bid protest from a competing contractor, Gemini Tech Services, and a court found the Army had violated the Competition in Contracting Act's automatic-stay requirement. The Army responded in writing that the contract was consistent with an executive order titled "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" and that delay would "directly exacerbate the existing detention capacity crisis." Flouting state law, Acquisition Logistics operated in Texas for eight months without registering; its first attempt to register, on March 19, 2026, was rejected two days later as an improper filing.

The rush to open produced other failures. On July 21, 2025, a 38-year-old construction worker, Hector González, was crushed to death by falling building materials; OSHA later found three subcontractors responsible, one of them owned by a Trump campaign donor whose companies had prior infractions ranging from employing undocumented workers to wage-and-hour violations.

Conditions Inside

Because the tents opened before they were finished, the early conditions were severe. Detainees reported toilets that would not flush, water that ran only sporadically, and fetid water leaking into the dining area and under the beds; lacking mops, some men used their own underwear and socks to soak it up. Outdoor recreation areas, visitation spaces, and phone booths were not built; tablets meant for calling lawyers did not work. One Cuban detainee said fifteen days passed before the men were let out of the tent at all, and then only at night: "I have not seen the sun for approximately one month."

For much of August 2025, the people held there were effectively off the grid. ICE's public detainee locator, which is supposed to show where someone is held within seventy-two hours, issued error messages for those at Camp East Montana; according to an administration official, someone at ICE deliberately changed the settings to display "Call ICE for details." Between August 2025 and January 2026, detainees placed about 130 calls to 911 from the facility, at least six of them from people saying they were considering suicide.

Medical care, run by the contractor Loyal Source, was a recurring failure. The facility was never designed to house seriously ill detainees, yet roughly one-third of the population had a chronic illness and hundreds needed daily insulin. Detainees described being denied prescribed medications for diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma, and clinic staff who "prescribed water for a wide range of conditions." People meant to stay two weeks remained for months; when Lunas Campos died, the typical length of detention had stretched to 38 days, and he had been held more than 100.

The Deaths

At least three detainees died at Camp East Montana between December 3, 2025, and January 14, 2026.

The first, Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old from Guatemala, died of liver and kidney failure at a local hospital in early December 2025 after nearly two months of treatment at the facility.

The most contested was the January 3, 2026 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban who had lived in Rochester, New York. Lunas Campos was asthmatic and had bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety; records show he complained at least eight times about missing doses of the antipsychotic medication he needed, gave himself a black eye banging his head against a wall, and in October was found with a bedsheet tied around his neck — an incident staff dismissed as a "suicidal gesture" and declined to treat with hospitalization. On the night he died, multiple detainees in the Special Housing Unit said in sworn declarations that Lunas Campos was handcuffed and that guards were "on top of him" as he pleaded for his asthma medicine and said, "I have asthma. I can't breathe."

ICE's account changed repeatedly. It first said guards "observed him in distress"; after the El Paso County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide — cause of death "asphyxia due to neck and torso compression" — the agency claimed he had "violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life." The Government Accountability Office later found that "evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed" and that the contractor had failed to provide required use-of-force and death reports to ICE. At least five detainee witnesses have contradicted the government's version of events; some said ICE retaliated against them for speaking out, suspending their phone privileges or moving to deport them.

The third death was Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan arrested at a Korean-barbecue restaurant in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. Transferred to Camp East Montana on January 7, he died seven days later, on January 14, in what ICE called a "presumed suicide"; the GAO found staff had failed to follow suicide-prevention procedures despite recognizing his risk factors. His ex-wife disputed the suicide finding, noting he had just recovered from tuberculosis and returned to work.

Solitary Confinement and Oversight Failures

The complaints prompted site visits by both ICE and the GAO. Officials who inspected the facility described the Special Housing Unit — used for solitary confinement, largely of detainees who had complained about conditions — as built with features that made suicide easier, including a door handle and a beam within reach of the bed, while the cameras in that area did not work. "When we left, we told our leadership that someone was going to kill himself," one official said. According to the GAO, ICE had not inspected the facility before sending detainees there, a breach of its own policy.

In its June 2026 report, the GAO found that staff failed to accurately document the checks required to prevent self-harm and suicide, and that the government wasted millions of dollars billing for meals and operations at the full 5,000-person capacity even though the population was far lower. A February 2026 ICE inspection documented 49 detention-standard violations; ICE's own oversight unit had earlier found the facility violated at least 60 standards in its first 50 days. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat, was repeatedly blocked from inspecting the site despite the statutory right of members of Congress to do so, and said she had to sue twice to get in; more than two dozen House Democrats and 36 Texas state House Democrats called for investigations or closure.

The Lawsuits

On May 29, 2026, a coalition including the ACLU and the Texas Civil Rights Project sued ICE over conditions at Camp East Montana on behalf of detainee plaintiffs describing severe medical neglect; DHS called the claims "categorically false" and said "no detainees are being beaten or abused." On July 1, 2026, Lunas Campos's family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit seeking more than $1 million against the guards, Acquisition Logistics, and the security contractor Akima Global Services, alleging the guards killed him and that their employers failed to train and supervise them and to treat his mental illness.

Coercion and Deportation

Detainees said the conditions functioned as leverage. Deportation officers appeared regularly in the tents to ask detainees — including those with valid or pending legal claims — whether they were "staying or leaving," and many people who could not endure the facility signed away their cases. According to testimony given to the ACLU, officers periodically handcuffed detainees who refused and drove them to remote stretches of the border, where masked men waited on the Mexican side; one Cuban man said that of the thirteen people bused with him, only four returned. This is consistent with a broader pattern: Human Rights Watch found that over the past year, migrants at some detention centers were far more likely to agree to deportation than in 2024 — the intended effect, former ICE official Claire Trickler-McNulty told The New Yorker, of a strategy "to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave."

The Contractor Shuffle and What Comes Next

In March 2026, DHS terminated its contract with Acquisition Logistics and, on roughly March 13, handed operations to Amentum, one of the facility's own subcontractors, under a sole-source, no-bid, 180-day arrangement. Amentum has its own documented history of safety, health, and regulatory violations; the security guards simply changed the color of their shirts and stayed in their posts. The facility's population peaked around 3,000 in January 2026, fell to roughly 750 by late April amid a measles outbreak, then climbed back above 1,800 in the following weeks.

Camp East Montana is widely seen as a preview of a larger build-out. In February 2026, DHS purchased three warehouses in Socorro, just outside El Paso, for $123 million, part of an ambitious plan to spend some $38 billion converting two dozen warehouses across the country into immigration jails — contracts kept out of the main DHS databases, just as Camp East Montana's had been. As with the tents at Fort Bliss, the warehouses were never designed for long-term detention; a Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer called the camp "a crystal ball into what the warehouses could look like." The trajectory tracks the administration's wider detention build-out and partial retreat, from Alligator Alcatraz to the empty warehouses ICE is now trying to offload.

How It Fits

Camp East Montana is where several threads already documented in this tracker physically converge. Detainees were funneled in from Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago (more than 100 Chicago arrestees) and from Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, as well as from Alligator Alcatraz in Florida; the surge in immigration habeas petitions was, for many, the only exit. The deaths there also fit the wider pattern of lethal force and neglect in the administration's immigration campaign, alongside the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Nationally, more than 60,000 people were in ICE custody by mid-2026, roughly 70 percent of them with no criminal record, and at least 52 people had died in ICE custody since the start of the president's second term — nearly a fifth of those deaths, by an AP count, suicides.