ICE detention deaths are running at a record pace in 2026, and the United States’ largest immigration detention center — a sprawling tent facility on a Texas Army base — has logged three deaths, 49 regulatory violations, and allegations of guards betting on which detainee would die next.
Summary
- ICE detention deaths are on a record pace in 2026, with 25 people dying in custody since October — three of them at Camp East Montana, the largest immigration detention center in the United States.
- Federal inspectors visiting the El Paso facility in February found 49 violations of detention standards, including failures to document suicide prevention checks and inadequate medical care.
- The facility was initially run by Acquisition Logistics LLC — a private company with no prior detention experience that secured a $1.3 billion federal contract — and it did not respond to NPR’s questions about conditions or its management record.
ICE detention deaths are running at a record pace in 2026, and the United States’ largest immigration detention center — a sprawling tent facility on a Texas Army base — has logged three deaths, 49 regulatory violations, and allegations of guards betting on which detainee would die next. Camp East Montana, located on the grounds of Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, was opened in August 2025 and currently houses around 3,000 immigrants with capacity for 2,000 more. According to NPR’s April 3 investigation, it is both the country’s largest detention center and one of its deadliest.
Out of 25 people who have died in ICE detention since October, three were held at Camp East Montana. The first, Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a Guatemalan national, died of kidney failure in December after two weeks of hospitalization. A month later, Cuban national Geraldo Luna Campos died while in detention, with DHS initially citing “medical distress.” The third death occurred on January 14, when Victor Manuel Diaz, a Nicaraguan national, died by suicide according to DHS. His family disputes the circumstances. “When we talked to Victor after he had been detained by ICE in Minnesota and brought to Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss Army Base in El Paso, we were not worried because Victor would just be returned to Nicaragua to us,” the family said in a statement to NPR. “Little did we know it was the last time we would ever hear his voice.”
In February, ICE inspectors documented 49 violations of federal detention standards at the facility — including inadequate medical care and failure by staff to “accurately document required checks to prevent significant self-harm and suicide.”
The private contractor problem
Acquisition Logistics LLC — a company with no prior experience running a detention facility — secured a $1.3 billion federal contract to manage Camp East Montana. It did not respond to NPR’s questions about detainee conditions or its management of the facility. DHS said in a statement that it inherited the contract from the Department of War. The same DHS that is being positioned to receive and cross-reference sensitive voter data through its SAVE system is also the agency overseeing ICE, and the 49 violations at Camp East Montana raise direct questions about whether the department has the operational capacity to responsibly manage the data and human oversight obligations it is accumulating simultaneously.
Former detainee Owen Ramsingh, speaking from the Netherlands after being deported in March, told NPR he personally witnessed guards betting on which detainee would die by suicide. “This is so screwed up that you’re trying to bet on our lives, you know, with these other officers thinking this s- – – is funny,” he said.
A transparency failure with documented consequences
More than 45 people interviewed by the ACLU at Camp East Montana described “alarming conditions of confinement and repeated instances of coercion, physical force, and threats,” the civil liberties group said in a December letter to ICE. DHS said in response that “staff abides by strict prevention and intervention protocol” when signs of self-harm are detected.
The gap between that statement and the 49 violations documented by federal inspectors in February represents exactly the kind of institutional opacity that critics argue becomes systemic when government agencies — and the private contractors they empower — operate without meaningful accountability for how personal data and human custody are managed. The record death pace at Camp East Montana has not yet produced any public disciplinary action against Acquisition Logistics or the facility’s current operators.
