Immigration

More than 100 other people have been isolated in connection with the [measles] outbreak, said Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, whose El Paso district includes the detention center. She added that Camp East Montana is closed to lawyers and visitors because of the outbreak.

The Fort Bliss facility was built and has been operated by Acquisition Logistics, a small government contractor out of Richmond, Virginia, that won the $1.2 billion ICE contract in July. The firm’s largest previous federal contract was for $16 million…

Its CEO is a 77-year-old man named Kenneth Wagner who appears to run the business out of his private home. Previous attempts to reach Wagner have been unsuccessful.

ICE is in the process of a $38 billion expansion of its detention centers nationwide, according to internal ICE documents. To do this, the agency is buying mega warehouses across the country and plans to use them to boost the number of people who are arrested and detained nationally from 70,000 to 160,000. NBC News was first to report on the warehouse expansion in November.

In January, ICE purchased a warehouse for more than $120 million outside El Paso, not far from Camp East Montana.

Two DHS contractors have expressed skepticism of ICE’s plans to house more than 8,000 detainees per center. They said housing more than 1,500 people in any facility is risky.

Charlotte Weiss from the Texas Civil Rights Project has been visiting the facility almost weekly and has raised concerns about what she says is a lack of food, excessive use of force and inadequate health care. She said the detention center is not scheduled to reopen to visitors until mid-March because of the measles outbreak.

Weiss is hopeful DHS will close the facility for good: “We have been calling for it to be shut down from the very beginning and more so because the government has been on notice on these issues for three months.” …

The Washington Post first broke this story:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is taking steps to close Camp East Montana, a massive immigrant detention camp near the Mexican border that opened less than eight months ago, according to an internal ICE document reviewed by The Washington Post.

The document, distributed to agency staff this week, indicated that ICE is drafting a letter to terminate the facility’s contract, but did not give any timeline or reason for the decision. The $1.2 billion contract, awarded to Acquisition Logistics LLC in July of last year, had an estimated date of completion of Sept. 30, 2027…

Once seen as the model for a new breed of makeshift tent encampments the Trump administration planned to rapidly build all over the country in its campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants, Camp East Montana struggled to provide safe and humane housing for thousands of people, The Post’s reporting has shown. Detainees have complained of physical abuse by guards, inadequate food and substandard medical care. Last September, ICE’s own inspectors found dozens of violations of federal standards.

These problems culminated with the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban detainee who died following a struggle with detention center staff — an incident the local medical examiner later ruled a homicide. Campos is one of three detainees who died at the facility in the span of two months, including a Guatemalan man who died of health complications last December and a Nicaraguan man who died of an apparent suicide in January.

Camp East Montana’s population has declined to about 1,500 detainees in recent weeks, about half as many people as it held in January, according to a separate internal ICE document obtained by The Post. It is currently closed to visitors and attorneys due to a measles outbreak, according to Rep. Veronica Escobar (D), who represents El Paso and periodically visits the detention center…

“Camp East Montana should have never opened. The $1.24 billion cost for this facility could have been used for healthcare, nutrition programs, and a litany of other things to improve our society and our country,” Escobar said in a statement. “Instead, it promoted the dehumanization of immigrants and lined the pockets of a corrupt, incompetent private prison corporation.”

The El Paso tent encampment was built in the span of a few weeks last year on a formerly empty patch of desert adjacent to the Fort Bliss Army base. When the first detainees arrived Aug. 1, they were held on an active construction site, where dust swirled and excavators hummed as contractors worked to finish building the facility…

At Camp East Montana, detainees live in enormous white tents, each as long as two football fields. Inside, temporary walls divide the cavernous spaces into smaller pods, where up to 72 people eat, shower, sleep in bunk beds and used the bathroom, documents and interviews show. Because the pods are open on top, without ceilings, the conversations, outbursts and cries of hundreds of people create a cacophony day and night.

In September, as the site’s population surged past 1,000 detainees, inspectors with ICE’s detention oversight unit said in an internal report that the migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention, according to The Post’s reporting. The facility lacked basic procedures for keeping guards and detainees safe and for weeks did not provide many of them a way to contact lawyers, learn about their cases or file complaints, the report said.

ICE inspectors also said Camp East Montana failed to follow mandatory procedures for medical care. Some medical charts were never filled out and some intake screenings were never conducted, meaning, the inspectors wrote, that the medical team could not “identify emergent or past chronic medical conditions, mental illness issues such as suicidal/homicidal ideation or intent that could lead to detainee life-safety issue.”

In interviews with the American Civil Liberties Union and other nonprofit groups in November, several immigrants detained at Camp East Montana claimed they were beaten by guards for complaining, demanding medical treatment, refusing to eat or for resisting deportation…

Deaths in ICE detention centers have occurred with increasing frequency in recent months. At least 30 people died in detention last year — the highest in two decades — and at least nine detainees have already died this year, ICE records show.