GAO Report on ICE Jail in Fort Bliss Finds Independent Failures
by Michael Dean Thompson
In response to one of Pres. Donald Trump’s (R) January 2025 executive orders, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) worked with U.S. Army to create America’s largest immigration detention facility to date on Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, known as Camp East Montana.
When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed ICE’s expansion of immigration detention and operations at the request of members of Congress, it found numerous waste and performance issues in the awarding and development of the $1.3 billion contract. The larger investigation is still ongoing; however, GAO officials produced a distinct report this past June for Camp East Montana because they saw a need for “ICE to take immediate corrective actions to save taxpayer dollars and improve detention operations.”
The entire process of awarding the contract to build and administer the facility was expedited as directed by “senior leadership.” ICE and the Army had agreed to the use of Ft. Bliss by February 2025 and by April, ICE had made its first failed attempt at awarding a contract, terminating it just three days later for “convenience.” They awarded another contract in May that was also ultimately unsuccessful. At that point, they handed the process over to the Army. The GAO does not explain why those two contract attempts failed, though the decision to hand responsibility over to the Army implies challenges with vendors unapproved by the Army.
A contract was awarded in July worth up to $1.3 billion with a base period of 2.5 months and two option years. It required the vendor to have 1,000 beds operational within one month. For contracts over $250 million, a GAO study had found the period from solicitation to award required an average of 168 days. This contract was executed in just one month, and took advantage of the Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract (WEXMAC) vehicle.
WEXMAC is used to contract with a pool of approved vendors when time frames and quantities of services are not known, such as for food, transportation and construction. However, it had never been used for detention services. Most WEXMAC contractors, therefore, also had no experience with detention services, as was the case with the contractor selected to perform the work. The result was substantial waste; including paying millions of dollars for thousands of unneeded meals over many months.
ICE has a controlling set of National Detention Standards (NOS), which defines requirements for detention facilities and was incorporated into the contract. According to the contract, the contractor is required to achieve “100% direct detainee supervision and full compliance with national standards.” Camp East Montana was intended to continually grow each month after the completion of its first 1,000 beds to eventually hold 5,000 detainees.
At the end of February 2026, however, it was overpopulated with 1,600 people while maintaining a capacity of 1,000. Even without the overcrowding, the facility does not meet sufficient supervision requirements. A GAO visit found the facility has areas with no video coverage and the coverage that exists does not have sufficient staff to monitor it. The same visit found the facility was not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements so that disabled people were being housed in medical care rooms.
The facility also had only one outdoor recreation yard, which ICE admitted was insufficient to support the 1,500 detainees held at the time. In light of the inadequate facility-wide surveillance, the contractor had critically not yet implemented a classification system to segregate high-risk detainees. That led to cases of high and low risk detainees being housed together. ICE found that the contractor did not fully understand the classification requirements, which is another impact of the company’s inexperience working with detainees.
ICE terminated the contract in mid-April and entered into a new contract with a different vendor. Under the previous contract, the Army did not include a Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP). A QASP establishes how the government monitors the contract implementation. Both ICE and the Army blamed that lack on the expedited time frames for opening the facility. As a result, ICE was unable to apply financial penalties to the contractor because it says it had no meaningful metrics upon which to base them. At the time of GAO’s report, it was unknown if the new contract had included a QASP.
In the government’s ill-advised and poorly planned rush to deport noncitizens, they have put people at risk and wasted taxpayer money. As it turns out, ICE never even inspected Camp East Montana before shoving detainees into the facility. See: Waste and Performance Issues at Camp East Montana Provide Valuable Lessons for Future Facilities, GAO-26-108886.
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