ICE is preparing to shutter a new $1.2 billion detention center that was seen as a prototype for other large-scale detention facilities less than a year after it opened.
Camp East Montana, a tent encampment built on scrubland next to the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas, began receiving detainees on Aug. 1, 2025, but it quickly was accused of appalling human rights abuses. Three migrants died in the facility within the space of two months, according to a leaked document.
The facility was initially touted as a blueprint for a new generation of rapid-build detention facilities, and the Department of Homeland Security, led by Kristi Noem, dismissed initial criticism of the facility’s conditions as a “smear campaign.”
But an internal ICE document obtained by The Washington Post, circulated to agency staff this week, shows the agency is now drafting a letter to end the facility’s contract with Acquisition Logistics LLC. The firm had been awarded the $1.2 billion deal in July of last year, with a completion date originally set for Sept. 30, 2027. No reason for the decision was given.
DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said the department is reviewing the facility to ensure it meets standards and that “no decisions have been made related to contract extension, termination, or award.”
Immigration policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said the move was notable. “Camp East Montana in El Paso opened in August and quickly became the deadliest ICE facility, with infamously terrible conditions,” he wrote on X,
He also noted that ICE is closing it “just as they plan to open up a detention camp nearly three times larger in a converted warehouse just outside El Paso.”
The catalogue of failures at Camp East Montana has been severe. In September 2025, ICE’s own detention inspectors found more than 60 violations of federal standards. They flagged absent medical intake procedures and inadequate safety protocols—including weeks in which many detainees had no way to seek legal advice, track their immigration proceedings, or submit grievances
In interviews with the American Civil Liberties Union in November, multiple detainees alleged guards beat them for demanding medical treatment or raising grievances.
The three deaths at the camp across a two-month window included Geraldo Lunas Campos.
The Cuban national died on Jan. 3 following a physical confrontation with detention staff—a death the El Paso County deputy medical examiner ruled a homicide, attributing it to “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression.”
DHS initially said only that staff had found Campos “in distress,” before the then-Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Campos had attempted to take his own life and that guards had been trying to intervene.
The camp’s population has fallen to roughly 1,500 people—about half the figure recorded in January—and it is currently off-limits to legal representatives and outside visitors following a measles outbreak.
“Camp East Montana should have never opened,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar, the El Paso Democrat who periodically visits the facility. “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.”
The closure comes as DHS barrels ahead with a sweeping $38 billion expansion plan to repurpose large commercial warehouses as mass detention facilities, some of which are designed to hold up to 10,000 people at a time.
Acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons has described the model as treating deportations “like a business”—comparing it to “Prime, but with human beings.”
One of the ten buildings the government has already purchased for the program is a large distribution center 15 miles south of Camp East Montana. Among the sites identified are a 10,000-bed facility in Stafford, Virginia, roughly 40 miles south of Washington; a 9,500-bed center near Dallas in Hutchins, Texas; and a 9,000-bed hub east of Baton Rouge in Hammond, Louisiana.
State and local officials in several of those locations have raised the same objections that plagued Camp East Montana—that the scale is too great and the pace too reckless.
The facility was designed to hold people for roughly two weeks ahead of deportation or release, but internal ICE records show many detainees remained there for months.
Deaths in ICE custody have surged under Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive. At least 30 people died in detention last year, the highest annual toll in two decades, and at least nine more have died in 2026, according to the Post.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and Acquisition Logistics LLC for comment.
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