A new investigation into Camp East Montana, the largest immigration detention facility in the United States, is bringing renewed scrutiny to a sprawling tent complex on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, where people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have reported medical neglect, abuse, isolation, disease outbreaks, and barriers to legal help.
The New Yorker reported Monday that the Trump administration chose Fort Bliss last summer as the site of a 5,000-bed detention center built to support its mass deportation agenda. The facility, called Camp East Montana, opened in August 2025 after an expedited federal contracting process and quickly became a central piece of the administration’s expanded detention system.
The facility is not a traditional jail or prison building. It is a tent encampment in the El Paso desert, built on a military base that was once used to intern people of Japanese descent during World War II. It was designed for rapid expansion, rapid transfers, and the detention of thousands of immigrants at a time.
That speed is now part of the scandal surrounding it.
A June report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Army and ICE expedited the award and construction schedule for Camp East Montana, which negatively affected planning and acquisition. The Army awarded and administered a $1.3 billion contract for the facility, then transferred contract administration responsibilities to ICE in October 2025. GAO found that officials used a contracting vehicle not previously used for detention services and selected a contractor that did not have prior detention experience.
The contract also required ICE to pay the full cost of meals and operational services for 5,000 people, even when the facility held far fewer people. GAO said the facility held about 1,600 detained noncitizens at the end of February 2026, creating millions of dollars in waste.
For people held inside the camp, the concerns go far beyond waste. The ACLU, ACLU of Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, Human Rights Watch, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel filed a lawsuit in May on behalf of people detained at Camp East Montana. The suit alleges that people are held in crowded, windowless tents for at least 23 hours a day, deprived of sunlight, subjected to beatings and harassment by guards, placed in solitary confinement, denied adequate healthcare, and exposed to measles, tuberculosis, and coccidioidomycosis.
The lawsuit names ICE as a defendant and argues that the conditions violate detained people’s Fifth Amendment right to due process and the Administrative Procedure Act. It was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas and seeks class certification on behalf of everyone detained, or who will be detained, at the camp.
Legal groups say the facility has already been linked to three deaths. In its case summary, the ACLU says one person reportedly died after asking for an asthma inhaler. AP has reported that 911 calls from the facility showed repeated medical emergencies, suicide attempts, assaults, and signs of deep psychological distress. The calls, obtained through a Texas public records request, covered the period from the camp’s opening in mid-August through Jan. 20.
AP reported that staff at the facility called 911 nearly every day over five months. Some calls involved seizures, heart problems, suicide attempts, fights, and detainees who had not received needed medical care. AP also reported that 80% of people detained at the camp had no criminal record, based on ICE data, undercutting the administration’s public claims that its detention drive was focused on the “worst of the worst.”
The New Yorker investigation adds a wider view of how people disappeared into the camp’s system. Families and lawyers have described struggling to find detainees or reach them after transfers. That problem is especially dangerous inside a facility built for rapid movement, where people may be held far from home, far from counsel, and far from the communities that know they are missing.
Camp East Montana is also a private contractor story. GAO found that the government selected a contractor without detention experience. AP reported that Acquisition Logistics LLC received a contract worth up to $1.3 billion and uses subcontractors at the facility, including Akima Global Services for security and Loyal Source for medical services. The public is paying for a massive detention operation while detainees, lawyers, members of Congress, and watchdogs describe basic failures in safety, healthcare, and oversight.
The Department of Homeland Security has denied that detainees are being abused or held in substandard conditions. DHS has said people at the camp receive food, water, and medical treatment, and that the facility is cleaned regularly. In response to claims raised in the New Yorker investigation, DHS denied that detainees were being beaten or abused.
But the documented record now includes a federal watchdog report, a pending civil rights lawsuit, 911 calls, accounts from people detained there, and warnings from members of Congress who have visited or tried to conduct oversight. Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso has called for the facility’s closure and has said the contractor appears to be experimenting while people are losing their lives.
The policy question is not only whether Camp East Montana can be made cleaner, cheaper, or better managed. It is whether the federal government can build mass detention capacity first and ask questions later, using military land, private contractors, emergency timetables, and weak public visibility to hold thousands of people in conditions that courts have not yet fully examined.
For detained immigrants, the consequences are immediate. People held at the camp may be fighting deportation cases, seeking asylum, trying to contact spouses or children, or waiting for hearings that could determine whether they remain in the United States. Detention conditions can pressure people to give up legal claims, accept deportation, or lose contact with attorneys before their cases are heard.
For families, the damage spreads outward. U.S. citizen spouses and children may lose contact with a detained parent. Attorneys may spend days trying to locate clients. Communities may not know where people arrested by ICE have been taken. The tent walls at Fort Bliss do not contain the harm.
The Trump administration has treated detention capacity as a necessary tool for mass deportation. Camp East Montana shows what that policy can look like in practice: a billion-dollar system of tents, contractors, disease outbreaks, unanswered medical requests, and people locked away in the desert while the public learns the details only through lawsuits, watchdog reports, 911 calls, and investigations.
One plaintiff in the lawsuit, Gerald Akari Angye, put the issue in the simplest terms: “We are all humans and deserve to be treated like it.”
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