Fort Bliss detention center to get new operator after scrutiny

The Trump administration plans to tap a major engineering and electronics services company to run the nation’s largest immigration detention center, where one detainee has been killed and two others have died.

The Department of Homeland Security intends to award the no-bid contract to operate Camp East Montana and manage its inmates to Chantilly, Virginia-based Amentum Services Inc. 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 U.S. military base at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

NBC News reported earlier this month that ICE was reevaluating the future of Camp East Montana.

Amentum is a subcontractor at this large tent facility, which has been under intense scrutiny since its construction. The facility, which housed nearly 3,000 immigrants as of mid-February, was quickly built to advance President Donald Trump’s mass deportation strategy, which requires doubling detention space nationwide. The East Montana camp was intended to house up to 5,000 detained immigrants.

In January, three detainees died while in custody at Camp East Montana. The Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, from Cuba, was ruled a homicide by “asphyxia due to compression of the neck and torso,” according to the final autopsy report.

The facility 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 contract.

Amentum and Acquisition Logistics did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the contracts. DHS and ICE did not immediately provide comment.

DHS said in an article about the contract award to Amentum that it was for the immediate provision of housing, medical care, transportation and compliance with ICE’s 2025 detention standards. It said the action was “necessary” to allow operations to continue “following the termination of the historic contract”. The new contract is for an estimated duration of 180 days.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, has been highly critical of the facility and its multiple crises. In a March 4 press release, she called him “the epitome of fraud, waste, abuse and exploitation of human suffering by private prison companies and the Trump administration.”

In a statement Wednesday, Escobar said that “while I am relieved that Acquisition Logistics has been terminated by DHS, they should also be investigated for the fraud they perpetrated against the American taxpayer.”

“It remains to be seen whether the new contractor is an improvement, and I remain deeply concerned about the chronic substandard conditions that exist at Camp East Montana,” she said. “This tent facility should be closed and ICE’s plan to warehouse literally 8,500 human beings in Socorro should be abandoned.”

DHS signed a $122.8 million deal for 826,000 square feet of warehouse space in Socorro, an El Paso bedroom community of about 40,000 residents, the Associated Press reported. The space is large enough to accommodate 4 1/2 Walmart supercenters, the AP reported.

The other two inmates who died at Camp East Montana were Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, from Guatemala, and Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, from Nicaragua.

Gaspar-Andres died in an El Paso hospital on December 3. In a Dec. 5 press release, ICE said the cause of his death was pending but “medical staff attributed it to natural liver and kidney failure.”

Diaz, who was arrested in Minneapolis, was found “unconscious and unresponsive” in his room by contract security officers, 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’s attorney, Randall Kallinen, told NBC News on Thursday that an autopsy was performed by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System at William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss, rather than the county medical examiner as outlined in DHS contract guidelines.

Kallinen said he had obtained the autopsy report from the Army but was waiting to release it until he could compare its results with those of an independent autopsy performed for the family.