A Cuban immigrant died at the hands of guards in a federal detention facility in El Paso, according to his family members, who on Tuesday asked a court to block the deportation of two people who they say witnessed the death or the moments leading up to it.
The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, died on Jan. 3 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody at Camp East Montana, a sprawling encampment on the Fort Bliss military base along the Texas-Mexico border. Mr. Lunas Campos’s family said that a fellow detainee saw the guards choke him to death, according to the legal filing they submitted on Tuesday. Another detainee saw Mr. Lunas Campos struggle with the guards before he died, the filing said.
Both witnesses have since been given deportation notices. The children of Mr. Lunas Campos, who are preparing to file a wrongful-death suit over the episode, asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to stop the deportations so the witnesses could provide testimony in that suit.
Federal officials have offered a different account of Mr. Lunas Campos’s death. On Jan. 9, ICE said that he had died after “experiencing medical distress.” But after The Washington Post reported the family’s claims about the death last week, a Department of Homeland Security official said that Mr. Lunas Campos had died by suicide.
Mr. Lunas Campos had “resisted interventions from security staff” who were trying to save him, the homeland security official said in an emailed statement to The New York Times. “During the ensuing struggle,” the statement added, Mr. Lunas Campos “stopped breathing and lost consciousness.”
According to the family, an employee of the El Paso medical examiner’s office had told them that it planned to list the manner of Mr. Lunas Campos’s death as homicide. The family said a conversation was recorded between Mr. Lunas Campos’s daughter and a woman they said was an employee of the medical examiner’s office. They shared the recording with The Times, but The Times could not verify its authenticity.
“The doctor is listing the preliminary cause of death as asphyxia due to neck and chest compression,” a woman is heard saying to Mr. Lunas Campos’s daughter, Kary Lunas, in the recording.
The medical examiner’s office told The Times that an autopsy report was pending. It declined to comment on the recording.
Mr. Lunas Campos’s children are seeking to stop the witnesses’ deportations so they can provide what they believe is critical testimony for their wrongful-death suit, said Will Horowitz, their lawyer.
One of those people is Santos Jesus Flores, who said he witnessed the guards choking Mr. Lunas Campos and heard him repeatedly saying “I cannot breathe” in Spanish, according to the motion to block the witnesses’ removals. The other detainee, who said he saw Mr. Lunas Campos struggle with the guards, is Antonio Ascon Frometa, the filing states.
The family also said in the filing that the timing of the deportation orders “raises the inference that the federal government is attempting to make them unavailable as witnesses in petitioners’ anticipated lawsuit.”
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Mr. Lunas Campos, 55, was one of three detainees who have died at Camp East Montana since it opened in August. On Dec. 3, Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, of Guatemala, died after he was admitted to an El Paso hospital, officials said. And on Jan. 14, Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, of Nicaragua, died of a “presumed suicide,” according to federal officials, who said the official cause of death was under investigation.
Camp East Montana is part of a network of detention camps holding the thousands of immigrants President Trump has sought to deport. It is the largest immigration detention facility in the country, with about 2,700 detainees.
The facility has come under scrutiny over the past few months. Last year, several human rights groups urged federal officials to close the camp, noting “alarming conditions of confinement and repeated instances of coercion, physical force and threats against immigrants,” and Representative Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat, called the conditions “dangerous and inhumane.”
The Department of Homeland Security has pushed back against those claims. “Any claim that there are ‘inhumane’ conditions at ICE detention centers are categorically false,” The agency said a statement last year in response to news reports about the conditions at Camp East Montana. It added, “Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE.”
The department did not immediately respond to questions about the facility on Tuesday.
According to ICE, Mr. Lunas Campos was arrested last July in Rochester, N.Y., and was transferred to the El Paso facility in September. He had entered the country in 1996 and over the following decade, he was convicted of crimes including criminal possession of a weapon, reckless driving and petit larceny, ICE said.
Jeanette Pagan Lopez, the mother of two of Mr. Lunas Campos’s children, said she had spoken to him by phone about a week before he died. She said she had heard about abuse, a lack of food and inadequate medical care for detainees in the facility.
“I need some kind of justice,” she told The Times. “I know I can’t bring him back.”
Pooja Salhotra covers breaking news across the United States.
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