WASHINGTON — People held at the immigration detention camp at Fort Bliss have endured severe physical abuse, life-threatening medical neglect and coercive removals, according to an 84-page report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, which calls for the facility’s closure and investigations into recent deaths.
The joint report, titled “You’re Only Getting Out Deported or Dead: Abusive U.S. Immigration Detention at Ft. Bliss,” focuses on Camp East Montana, currently the largest immigration detention facility in the United States. The camp has the capacity to hold up to 5,000 people inside five soft-sided, tent-like structures, with up to 72 people crowded into individual penned pods.
Between October 2025 and June 2026, researchers interviewed 80 individuals, including 71 current detainees, family members and legal providers. Those interviewed consistently described their living conditions as deplorable.
Detainees reported flooded cells, bathrooms covered in feces, a complete lack of basic hygiene supplies such as soap, and spoiled or frozen food. Many reported being kept indoors for weeks at a time without seeing the sun. One detained individual described the prolonged sensory deprivation and lack of outdoor recreation as “torture.”
The report also details frequent, coordinated violence by facility staff. Detainees described tactical groups of 15 to 20 guards, dressed in black with face masks and no identification tags, entering the pods to beat people. Guards reportedly used physical violence as collective punishment or to suppress hunger strikes, medical requests and protests over basic living conditions.
The report states that this violence proved fatal on Jan. 3, 2026, when Gerardo Lunas Campos died in the facility’s solitary confinement unit. Detainee witnesses reported hearing guards choke Lunas Campos after he requested medication, recalling his screams of “I can’t breathe!” and “You are suffocating me” before he went silent.
While immigration officials initially classified the death as a suicide, an autopsy report by the El Paso County Medical Examiner later officially ruled the death a homicide caused by asphyxiation.
Rather than representing an isolated failure of a single administration, analysts at the American Bar Association say these conditions are the predictable byproduct of a bipartisan carceral system optimized for corporate profit. Legal scholars point to the framework enabling rapid, mandatory detention established by the Clinton administration’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
Federal archives also show the physical tents at Fort Bliss were previously used under the Biden administration in 2021 to hold thousands of unaccompanied children, drawing similar federal investigations into safety and operational failures.
The continuous flow of federal funds to private defense contractors further highlights what the article characterizes as a structural profit motive. According to federal procurement records and corporate filings, Camp East Montana’s operations were initially funded through a $1.3 billion federal contract awarded to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a startup with no prior civilian detention experience.
Despite dozens of federal violations, the Department of Homeland Security kept the camp open, quietly transferring the primary contract in early 2026 to Amentum Services Inc., a multibillion-dollar global defense contractor with its own history of safety violations, wage theft and regulatory lawsuits.
The contractor change protected profits while keeping the detention system active. Meanwhile, locator systems hid detainees from their families, violating laws against enforced disappearance. Angélica César of Human Rights Watch and the ACLU labeled the facility a “human rights disaster,” calling for its closure, an end to mandatory detention and investigations into recent deaths.
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