The Trump administration plans to tap a major engineering and electronic services company to run the country’s largest immigration detention center, where one detainee was killed and two others have died.
The Department of Homeland Security intends to award the no-bid contract to run Camp East Montana and manage its detainees to Chantilly, Virginia-based Amentum Services Inc. The company would replace Acquisition Logistics, a small Richmond, Virginia-based government contractor that DHS hired last July for $1.2 billion to build and operate the ICE facility at the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas.
NBC News reported earlier this month that ICE was re-evaluating the future of Camp East Montana.
Amentum has been a subcontractor at the sprawling tented facility, which has drawn scrutiny since its construction. The facility, which housed almost 3,000 immigrants as of mid-February, was quickly erected to advance President Donald Trump’s mass deportation strategy, which requires doubling detention space nationally. Camp East Montana was intended to hold up to 5,000 immigrant detainees.
By January, three detainees had died while in custody at Camp East Montana. The Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, originally from Cuba, was ruled a homicide by “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression,” according to the final autopsy report.
The facility also has experienced outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles.
A DHS spokesperson previously told NBC News that the Acquisition Logics contract “was inherited” from the Defense Department and that DHS was reviewing the facility and the contract.
Amentum and Acquisition Logistics did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment about the contracts. DHS and ICE did not immediately provide a comment.
DHS said in a posting 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” for uninterrupted operations “following the termination of the incumbent contract.” The new contract is for an estimated 180 days.
Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, has been highly critical of the facility and its multiple crises. In a March 4 news release, she called it “the epitome of fraud, waste, abuse, and the exploitation of human suffering at the hands of private prison corporations and the Trump administration.”
In a statement Wednesday, Escobar said that “while I’m relieved that Acquisition Logistics has been fired by DHS, they should also be investigated for the fraud they’ve perpetrated on the American taxpayer.”
“Whether the new contractor is an improvement remains to be seen, and I remain deeply concerned about the chronic substandard conditions that exist at Camp East Montana,” she said. “That tent facility should be shuttered, and ICE’s plan to literally warehouse 8500 human beings in Socorro should be terminated.”
DHS has signed a $122.8 million deal for 826,000 square feet of warehouses in Socorro, an El Paso bedroom community of about 40,000 people, The Associated Press reported. The space is large enough to fit 4 1/2 Walmart Supercenters, the AP reported.
The two other detainees who died at Camp East Montana were Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, originally from Guatemala, and Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, originally from Nicaragua.
Gaspar-Andres died at an El Paso hospital Dec. 3. In a Dec. 5 news release, ICE said that his cause of death was pending but that “medical staff attributed it to natural liver and kidney failure.”
Diaz, who had been arrested in Minneapolis, was found “unconscious and unresponsive” in his room by contract security, DHS said in a news release. ICE said Diaz’s Jan. 14 death was presumed 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 in Fort Bliss, rather than by the county medical examiner as directed in DHS contract guidelines.
Kallinen said he obtained the military’s autopsy report, but is awaiting releasing it until he can compare its results with those of an independent autopsy being done for the family.
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