The Trump administration plans to tap a major engineering and electronic services firm to run the nation’s largest immigration detention center, where one detainee was killed and two others have died.
The Department of Homeland Security intends to award the no-bid contract to run Camp East Montana and manage its detainees to Amentum Services Inc., based in Chantilly, Virginia. The company would replace Acquisition Logistics, a small government contractor based in Richmond, Virginia, that DHS hired last July for $1.2 billion to build and operate ICE facilities at the Fort Bliss US Army base in El Paso, Texas.
NBC News reported earlier this month that ICE was reevaluating the future of Camp East Montana.
Amentum has been a subcontractor on the sprawling tent facility, which has come under scrutiny since its construction. The facility, which housed nearly 3,000 immigrants as of mid-February, was built quickly to advance President Donald Trump’s mass deportation strategy, which calls for doubling detention space nationwide. Camp East Montana was intended to house up to 5,000 immigrant detainees.
In January, three detainees had died while in custody at Camp East Montana. The death on January 3 of Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, originally from Cuba, was declared a homicide due to “asphyxiation due to neck and torso compression,” according to the final autopsy report.
The center has also experienced outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles.
A DHS spokesperson previously told NBC News that the Acquisition Logics contract “was inherited” from the Department of Defense and that DHS was reviewing the facility and the contract.
Amentum and Acquisition Logistics did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the contracts. DHS and ICE had no immediate comment.
DHS said in a post about awarding the contract to Amentum that it was for the immediate provision of housing, health care, transportation and compliance with ICE detention standards by 2025. It said the action was “necessary” for uninterrupted operations “following the termination of the current contract.” The new contract has an estimated duration of 180 days.
Rep. Verónica Escobar, D-Texas, has been highly critical of the facility and its multiple crises. In a March 4 press release, he called it “the epitome of fraud, waste, abuse and exploitation of human suffering at the hands of private prison corporations and the Trump administration.”
In a statement Wednesday, Escobar said that “while I am relieved that DHS has fired Acquisition Logistics, they should also be investigated for the fraud they have perpetrated against the American taxpayer.”
“It remains to be seen whether the new contractor represents an improvement, and I remain deeply concerned about the chronic poor conditions that exist at Camp East Montana,” she said. “Those tent facilities should be closed and ICE’s plan to literally warehouse 8,500 human beings in Socorro should be ended.”
DHS has signed a $122.8 million deal for 826,000 square feet of warehouses in Socorro, an El Paso bedroom community of about 40,000 people, The Associated Press reported. The space is large enough to house 4 1/2 Walmart Supercenters, the AP reported.
The other two detainees who died at Camp East Montana were Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, 48, originally from Guatemala, and Víctor Manuel Díaz, 36, originally from Nicaragua.
Gaspar Andrés died in an El Paso hospital on December 3. In a Dec. 5 news release, ICE said the cause of death was pending but “medical staff attributed it to natural liver and kidney failure.”
Diaz, who had been arrested in Minneapolis, was found “unconscious and unresponsive” in his room by contracted security personnel, DHS said in a news release. ICE said Diaz’s death on Jan. 14 was presumed to be a suicide, but that the death was under investigation.
Diaz’s family attorney, Randall Kallinen, told NBC News on Thursday that the autopsy was performed by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System at William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss, rather than by the county medical examiner as outlined in DHS contract guidelines.
Kallinen said he obtained the autopsy report from the Army, but is waiting to release it until he can compare its results with those of an independent autopsy being performed for the family.
