ICE Taps New Contractor to Run Deadly Detention Center in Texas
In early March, the administration of President Donald Trump (R) announced that it planned to offer a no-bid contract to an engineering and electronic services company to run the United States’s largest immigrant detention center, where one detainee was killed and at least two others have died in recent months.
In addition to the three deaths, the facility—Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas—was faulted during a recent inspection for having dozens of violations of national standards related to excessive force, disease, and other unsafe conditions. As reported by The Washington Post, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Detention Oversight performed a three-day inspection in February of this year that uncovered 49 violations. It was the first inspection of the lockup since it was hastily built and opened last summer. For comparison, the highest number of violations found during the office’s other inspections was only 13 so far this year.
Randall Kallinen, an attorney representing the family of a detainee who died at the facility in January 2026, said of the report: “Camp East Montana gets an F … not only are the detainees in danger of excessive force, they are also in danger of improper or negligent medical care and mental health care, as well as danger from other detainees.”
Camp East Montana, according to ICE data up to February of this year, locks up nearly 3,000 detainees per day. The inspection occurred prior to ICE’s decision to switch contractors. The previous company, Acquisitions Logistics LLC, was granted $1.3 billion to build and operate Camp East Montana, which is located at the Fort Bliss Army base, despite the fact that it was a small company with little experience operating out of a single-family home in Richmond, Virginia.
The new contractor, Amentum Services, received $453 million to provide detention, transportation, and medical services from March 11 to at least September 30, 2026, according to The Washington Post. While Amentum is said to have more experience in running immigrant prisons, lawmakers who have toured Camp East Montana remain skeptical that conditions will improve. U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar (D), who has toured the camp multiple times, claimed that the violations found by the February inspection amount to “a drop in the bucket of what is so profoundly wrong with that facility.”
Rep. Escobar suggested that the inhumane conditions could be an intentional method of pressuring detainees to self-deport and that “ICE is completely uninterested in really creating any change or holding the contractor accountable.”
Sources: The Washington Post, Mother Jones
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