ICE taking steps to terminate contract of Fort Bliss detention center, document shows

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to terminate its contract for Camp East Montana, a massive immigrant detention camp near the Mexican border that opened less than eight months ago, according to an internal ICE document reviewed by The Washington Post.

The document, distributed to agency staff this week, indicated that ICE is drafting a letter to end the contract but did not give any timeline or reason for the decision. The $1.2 billion contract, awarded to Acquisition Logistics LLC in July of last year, had an estimated date of completion of Sept. 30, 2027.

Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the department is reviewing Camp East Montana to ensure it meets standards, and that “no decisions have been made related to contract extension, termination, or award.”

“ICE is always looking at ways to improve our detention facilities to ensure we are providing the best care to illegal aliens in our custody,” Bis said. “DHS undergoes rigorous audits and inspections of our facilities to ensure they are meeting our high standards.”

Acquisition Logistics did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Once seen as the model for a new breed of makeshift tent encampments the Trump administration planned to rapidly build all over the country in its campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants, Camp East Montana struggled to provide safe and humane housing for thousands of people, The Post’s reporting has shown. Detainees have complained of physical abuse by guards, inadequate food and substandard medical care. Last September, ICE’s own inspectors found dozens of violations of federal standards.

These problems culminated with the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban detainee who died following a struggle with detention center staff - an incident the local medical examiner later ruled a homicide. Campos is one of three detainees who died at the facility in the span of two months, including a Guatemalan man who died of health complications last December and a Nicaraguan man who died of an apparent suicide in January.

Camp East Montana’s population has declined to about 1,500 detainees in recent weeks, about half as many people as it held in January, according to a separate internal ICE document obtained by The Post. It is currently closed to visitors and attorneys due to a measles outbreak, according to Rep. Veronica Escobar (D), who represents El Paso and periodically visits the detention center.

The move comes as DHS embarks on a new $38 billion plan to acquire industrial warehouses and retrofit them into detention centers, some capable of holding as many as 10,000 detainees at a time. One of the 10 buildings the government purchased for this plan is a large distribution center 15 miles south of Camp East Montana.

State and local officials in many of the places DHS plans to build warehouse detention centers have criticized the plan as too big and too rushed - the same reasons activists and government inspectors have cited for some of Camp East Montana’s problems. The facility was meant to be a temporary holding center where people would be held “for periods of approximately two weeks or less,” prior to their deportation or release, the facility’s contract states. But internal ICE records show many people have been there for months.

“Camp East Montana should have never opened. The $1.24 billion cost for this facility could have been used for healthcare, nutrition programs, and a litany of other things to improve our society and our country,” Escobar said in a statement. “Instead, it promoted the dehumanization of immigrants and lined the pockets of a corrupt, incompetent private prison corporation.”

The El Paso tent encampment was built in the span of a few weeks last year on a formerly empty patch of desert adjacent to the Fort Bliss Army base. When the first detainees arrived Aug. 1, they were held on an active construction site, where dust swirled and excavators hummed as contractors worked to finish building the facility.

Jessica Rovero, an Army spokeswoman, declined to comment.

At Camp East Montana, detainees live in enormous white tents, each as long as two football fields. Inside, temporary walls divide the cavernous spaces into smaller pods, where up to 72 people eat, shower, sleep in bunk beds and use the bathroom, documents and interviews show. Because the pods are open on top, without ceilings, the conversations, outbursts and cries of hundreds of people create a cacophony day and night.

In September, as the site’s population surged past 1,000 detainees, inspectors with ICE’s detention oversight unit said in an internal report that the migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention, according to The Post’s reporting. The facility lacked basic procedures for keeping guards and detainees safe and for weeks did not provide many of them a way to contact lawyers, learn about their cases or file complaints, the report said.

ICE inspectors also said Camp East Montana failed to follow mandatory procedures for medical care. Some medical charts were never filled out and some intake screenings were never conducted, meaning, the inspectors wrote, that the medical team could not “identify emergent or past chronic medical conditions, mental illness issues such as suicidal/homicidal ideation or intent that could lead to detainee life-safety issue.”

In interviews with the American Civil Liberties Union and other nonprofit groups in November, several immigrants detained at Camp East Montana claimed they were beaten by guards for complaining, demanding medical treatment, refusing to eat or for resisting deportation.

“There is always the risk of retaliation here for trying to ask for our rights to be respected,” one of the detainees, a 35-year-old Cuban man, said in a sworn declaration to the groups.

In January, The Post interviewed a Camp East Montana detainee who said he witnessed Lunas Campos being choked to death by guards. The deputy medical examiner for El Paso County deemed the death a homicide and said the death was caused by “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression,” which means Lunas Campos did not get enough oxygen because of pressure on his neck and chest.

A DHS press release gave no cause of Lunas Campos’s death, and saying only that “staff observed him in distress.” But after The Post published a story, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Lunas Campos had tried to take his own life and guards were trying to save him. “Campos violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life,” McLaughlin said. “During the ensuing struggle, Campos stopped breathing and lost consciousness.”

Deaths in ICE detention centers have occurred with increasing frequency in recent months. At least 30 people died in detention last year - the highest in two decades - and at least nine detainees have already died this year, ICE records show.