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EL PASO — Southern New Mexico Congressman Gabe Vasquez paid a visit to a neighboring House district Monday for a tour of the nation’s largest immigration detention facility on the grounds of U.S. Army installation Fort Bliss.

Spring winds kicked up grit from the floor of the desert surrounding Camp East Montana, a massive tent encampment with room for 5,000 male and female detainees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with about 820 held there on Monday, facility administrators told Vasquez.

“This camp is in my community’s backyard,” Vasquez told reporters outside the facility after a roughly 90-minute tour he said would not be his last. “People are indiscriminately being picked up by ICE in my home state of New Mexico and moved to this facility.”

Less than a year after the camp was established last summer, at least three deaths have occurred here. One detainee’s death, that of Geraldo Luna Campos of Cuba, was reported by the Department of Homeland Security in a that focused on criminal allegations against him yet was vague as to how he died. The  El Paso Medical Examiner stated in an autopsy report that Campos died of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression,” the Texas Tribune . ICE then bypassed the county when a third detainee died in favor of an Army-conducted autopsy.

In February, ICE’s own Office of Detention Oversight conducted an inspection that subsequently detailed 49 deficiencies in federal detention standards and policies including reports of excessive force and improper physical restraints, medical neglect and complaints of insufficient food leading to health problems.

Vasquez said the conditions he observed, days after the inspection report was released to the public, were “beneath our American values.”

Since the inspection took place, ICE replaced the private contractor operating the facility, Acquisition Logistics LLC, with Virginia-based provider Amentum Services, although Vasquez said Acquisition was still operating there on Monday. Despite its lack of experience running detention facilities, Acquisition was awarded a nearly $1.3 billion contract to run Camp East Montana.

Amentum’s contract, through September of this year, took effect March 13. 

A spokesperson for ICE told the Journal, “Amentum has been a close partner with ICE in managing Camp East Montana and was best suited to take over as the prime government contractor for this facility. Amentum’s size, maturity and pedigree make them the right partner at the right time.”

The spokesperson said ICE would work with the new contractor to provide “higher standards of medical care, more thorough case processing and intake procedures, and delivery of performance requirements according to well-defined accountability measures,” while ICE would “continue to ensure that all of the detainees in our custody receive the level of care, service, and medical support they need to match our high detention standards.”

Vasquez, a Democrat from Las Cruces who grew up in the El Paso area, said he met with a group of nearly a dozen detainees who consented to speak about conditions at the camp despite widespread fears of retaliation.

From the evidence available, Vasquez said his staff believes the overwhelming majority of those held at the camp were civil detainees and not violent criminals. However, he said that despite giving the facility a week’s notice of a congressional oversight visit, Amentum staff did not provide data requested by his staff.

Meanwhile, Vasquez said detainees reported medications being withheld or confiscated and a lack of personal hygiene items as well. 

DHS has new leadership since President Donald Trump fired cabinet Secretary Kristi Noem a month ago and Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Senator from Oklahoma, was confirmed as her successor. Vasquez did not predict much improvement under Mullin’s leadership absent a change in the administration’s focus on mass deportations and incarceration of immigrants for civil offenses.

“There are small business owners in there,” Vasquez said, addressing reporters in a business suit with his congressional pin prominently displayed on his lapel, the sprawling white tops of the encampment behind him. “There’s folks that were working on corn farms in Iowa. There’s folks that were mechanics in Minnesota. Detained outside their homes. No criminal record. Folks that are working hard jobs across our country. That’s who they’re detaining.”

Since Feb. 14, appropriations for DHS have been blocked in Congress, but ICE operations continue in part from funding advanced in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill styled as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated a historic $165 billion to DHS including over $75 billion for ICE.

Vasquez said he spoke to a Cuban refugee granted humanitarian parole who was detained in Albuquerque when he reported for a regular court proceeding. Although ICE has said the average length of a detention at the facility is 60 days, this detainee and others reported being there several months.

Vasquez said about 100 people were reportedly in medical quarantine at the facility, where a measles outbreak and cases of tuberculosis have been reported, although the contractor reportedly provided no data about diseases or active cases.

As vehicles entered and exited the gateway to the camp behind him, Vasquez repeated his frequent calls for bipartisan immigration reform as well as legislation increasing reporting requirements for ICE detention facilities and the closure of Camp East Montana.

“We can be a nation that has strong borders and smart immigration reform,” Vasquez said. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to cause terror inside our own communities. We don’t have to lock up people in makeshift detention centers in the middle of the hot Chihuahuan desert. We can give people opportunity and treat them with decency. We’ve got to get back to work and work together as Republicans and as Democrats.”

Algernon ��’A������������ is the Journal’s southern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at adammassa@abqjournal.com.