A Government Accountability Office report said a rushed timeline and inexperienced contractor led to failures at the Camp East Montana holding facility in Texas.
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A loaded gun went missing for months. People with HIV and diabetes were left untreated. And, absent daily cleaning services, security guards sometimes offered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees cookies to clean their own housing units.
These were some of the findings released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, which detailed “significant, pervasive issues” with the Trump administration’s oversight of Camp East Montana, a tent encampment for migrants in the Texas desert.
The facility, constructed from July to November 2025 near the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss base in El Paso, was built to accommodate up to 5,000 detainees in tentlike structures each as long as two football fields.
Since opening last August, the administration’s own inspectors have documented dozens of violations of federal standards at Camp East Montana, including failures to treat detainees’ medical conditions and employ enough security staff to keep detainees safe. Three immigrant detainees have died there in the past six months, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose Jan. 3 death following a struggle with guards was ruled a homicide by the local medical examiner.
In its report, the GAO blamed many of the problems at the detention center on the administration’s rushed timeline for building and opening it. In its haste, the government hired a company to oversee the facility that had with no experience in immigration detention — a decision that “resulted in a significant learning curve” for the contractor, the GAO said.
Earlier this year, ICE terminated its contract with this original contractor, Acquisition Logistics LLC, after the agency said it was reviewing the facility to ensure it met federal standards for immigrant detention. It awarded a new contract to Amentum Services, a Chantilly, Virginia-based federal contractor, according to government procurement records.
Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on the GAO’s findings but said that in addition to the new contractor, the facility will have more staff and on-site medical care as well as more oversight from ICE.
“ICE is always looking at ways to improve our detention facilities to ensure we are providing the best care to illegal aliens in our custody,” Bis said in an email.
Because the administration agreed to pay Acquisition Logistics a flat fee no matter how many detainees were held there, the GAO found it wasted up to $11.5 million on meals and other services during the first two weeks of August, when the GAO says nobody was held there. The Washington Post has previously reported that the facility held no more than a few dozen detainees during that period.
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Ideally, the GAO said, detention contracts should include tiered pricing where the government pays more or less based on fluctuations in the number of detainees.
After the GAO presented this finding to the Department of Homeland Security in May, the department told GAO it would reduce the capacity of Camp East Montana to 4,000 detainees and shift the facility to a flexible pricing contract. Under the new terms, the government will initially fund 1,500 beds and pay a fee for every additional 250 beds.
A spokesman for the Army could not immediately provide comment Tuesday. Acquisition Logistics did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The GAO report raises new concerns about the medical care of detainees at Camp East Montana, citing internal inspections that showed the facility failed to perform contractually required health assessments. As a result, people with serious chronic conditions had no treatment plan, the GAO found.
Camp East Montana also failed to test new arrivals for tuberculosis, relying instead on a questionnaire about symptoms for the infectious disease, the GAO found, citing a December report by ICE. This resulted in one detainee who was positive for tuberculosis being housed with the facility’s general population.
In January, a contract security guard lost a loaded firearm at the facility, the GAO found, citing an internal ICE report. Despite numerous searches, the weapon had not been found as of March, the GAO said, exposing “the staff, detained noncitizens, and the public to significant risk.”
Several people who have been held at Camp East Montana have claimed they were physically abused by guards, incidents for which they say there has been no accountability. An ICE inspection report earlier this year found the facility violated 22 federal standards relating to how staff members used force and restraints, including not recording incidents on video and not submitting written reports to ICE.
As the GAO looked into the use of force that led to Lunas Campos’s death, the watchdog found that the contractor did not document the incident in reports to ICE. Documentary evidence associated with the man’s death, GAO said, “was missing or destroyed.”
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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
