The Trump administration is reportedly closing a controversial immigration jail in Texas where three detainees died and a measles outbreak has forced more than a dozen others into quarantine.
Plans are advancing for the shuttering of Camp East Montana, part of the Fort Bliss army base, less than eight months after it opened, the Washington Post said on Wednesday.
The newspaper said it obtained an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo with plans to terminate a $1.2bn contract awarded to a private company called Acquisition Logistics LLC last year to run the jail for undocumented immigrants on behalf of the federal government.
The memo did give a reason or timeline for the decision, but Camp East Montana – a sprawling, tented facility similar to a number of large camps hastily set up by, or for, ICE nationwide to accommodate Donald Trump’s surge in immigration arrests – has repeatedly been criticized for harsh living conditions and often violent treatment by guards of those housed there.
The homeland security department (DHS) told the Guardian that while no final decision had been made regarding its termination, it was reviewing the facility “to ensure it meets standards”.
“ICE is always looking at ways to improve our detention facilities to ensure we are providing the best care to illegal aliens in our custody,” the spokesperson, Lauren Bis, said in a statement. “DHS undergoes rigorous audits and inspections of our facilities to ensure they are meeting our high standards.”
Three detainees have died at the camp on the Mexico border 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 he died of “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression”.
Witnesses said they saw five guards choking the man after he was bundled into a segregation unit. DHS said initially that Lunas Campos had experienced “medical distress”, then issued a later statement in which it claimed he had tried to take his own life, and “violently resisted” officers trying to stop him.
Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old Guatemalan man who had also been held at the Fort Bliss facility, died in its hospital after health complications late last year. And in January, Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, a Nicaraguan detainee with two young sons, died of a “presumed suicide” according to ICE after guards found him hanging from a bed sheet.
A record 53 people died in ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in 2025, according to Democrats who wrote to the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, earlier this year. Six more have died already this year, in addition to the shooting deaths of two unarmed US citizen protesters by federal immigration officers 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 round the clock noise from construction work. At least 14 detainees are under quarantine during a measles outbreak, DHS confirmed this week.
Conversely, the government has frequently tried to dismiss claims of harsh or violent treatment of detainees at Camp East Montana and other notorious immigration jails, such as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida Everglades, as “fake news”.
Camp East Montana’s population has declined in recent weeks to about 1,500 detainees, about half as many people as in January, and far short of 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 $38bn buying and refurbishing up to 24 warehouses across the country and converting them into immigration camps for tens of thousands of people awaiting deportation.
Among the buildings already bought, the Post reported, is a former large distribution center about 15 miles south of Fort Bliss.
