The Trump administration is reportedly closing a controversial immigration jail in Texas, where three detainees died and a measles outbreak forced more than a dozen people into quarantine.
Plans are moving forward to close Camp East Montana, part of the Fort Bliss military base, less than eight months after it opened, the Washington Post said Wednesday.
The newspaper said it obtained an internal memo from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with plans to terminate a $1.2 billion contract awarded last year to a private company called Acquisition Logistics LLC to run the jail for undocumented immigrants on behalf of the federal government.
The memo gave a reason or timeline for the decision, but Camp East Montana — a sprawling tent facility similar to a series of large camps quickly set up by or for ICE across the country to accommodate Donald Trump’s surge in immigrant arrests — has been repeatedly criticized for harsh living conditions and guards’ often violent treatment of those housed there.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told The Guardian that while no final decision had been made on its termination, it was reviewing the facility “to ensure it meets standards.”
“ICE is always looking for ways to improve our detention facilities to ensure we provide the best care to illegal aliens in our custody,” spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement. “DHS undergoes rigorous audits and inspections of our facilities to ensure they meet our high standards.”
Three detainees have died at the camp on the border with Mexico since it opened last July. In January, the El Paso medical examiner’s office reportedly said it would investigate the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban migrant, as a homicide after determining that he died of “asphyxiation due to neck and chest compression.”
Witnesses said they saw five guards strangle the man after he was put in a segregation unit. DHS initially said Lunas Campos had experienced “medical distress,” then issued a subsequent statement alleging that he had attempted to take his own life and “violently resisted” officers attempting to detain him.
Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, a 48-year-old Guatemalan who had also been held at the Fort Bliss facility, died at his hospital after health complications late last year. And in January, Víctor Manuel Díaz, 36, a Nicaraguan detainee with two young children, died of a “presumed suicide” according to ICE after guards found him hanging from a sheet.
A record 53 people died in ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in 2025, according to Democrats who wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this year. Six more have already died this year, in addition to the shooting deaths of two unarmed U.S. citizen protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January.
At Camp East Montana, ICE’s own inspectors found dozens of violations during visits last year, and detainees have frequently complained of beatings, food deprivation, inadequate access to medical care and 24-hour noise from construction work. At least 14 detainees are under quarantine during a measles outbreak, DHS confirmed this week.
To the contrary, the government has frequently tried to dismiss reports of harsh or violent treatment of detainees at Camp East Montana and other notorious immigration prisons, such as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida Everglades, as “fake news.”
Camp East Montana’s population has dropped in recent weeks to about 1,500 detainees, about half what it was in January, and well below its capacity of 5,000, according to a separate ICE memo obtained by the Post.
The reported closure comes as ICE focuses on what it calls a “new detention model”: spending more than $38 billion to buy and renovate up to 24 warehouses across the country and convert them into immigration camps for tens of thousands of people awaiting deportation.
Among the buildings already purchased, the Post reported, is a large former distribution center about 15 miles south of Fort Bliss.
