Inside a cluster of windowless tents, detainees describe losing their sense of time as they spend weeks and even months beneath the flicker of industrial lightbulbs.
Camp East Montana—the largest immigrant detention facility in the country—has quickly become a symbol of the second Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. Located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, the 5,000-bed center began receiving detainees last August. Since then, immigrant detention levels have surged to over 65,000 individuals nationwide, with thousands of people held in Camp East Montana in an environment where frequent beatings and severe neglect have been documented by a leading humanitarian organization.
At least three people have died while detained at Camp East Montana in the past year, including a 55-year-old father whose death on January 3 was ruled a homicide after security guards beat him, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune. And, in February, an inspection report found dozens of violations of national detention standards, including 22 deficiencies related to “use of force” incidents.
Weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ended a $1.26 billion contract with Camp East Montana’s former lead contractor, Acquisition Logistics, a small, veteran-owned business registered to a single-family home in Virginia. As a replacement, the agency tapped Amentum Services, a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company and a major player in federal contracting, which had begun as a subcontractor at Camp East Montana before assuming management of the facility in April.
In late July, a federal contract notice showed ICE decided to extend Amentum’s contract, potentially placing the contractor at Camp East Montana through September 2027, without the agency having taken bids from other companies and despite allegations of fraud and wage theft that have followed Amentum over its time as a government contractor. The extension for the next 12 months is worth over $776 million. Amentum has faced numerous lawsuits from labor unions and former employees, and it is actively fighting a whistleblower in court over allegations that it inflated the cost of services it provided to an Afghan refugee program in 2021 in order to make a higher profit off a valuable federal contract.
The agency’s extension also comes on the heels of an independent audit in June by the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that the web of contractors operating the facility spent up to about $19 million on unused services over a 7-month period, including payments for meals before the first detainees arrived.
Camp East Montana in January (Paul Ratje/The New York Times/Redux)
The contract to manage Camp East Montana draws from an unprecedented $45 billion funding package from Congress which was approved last year. In the rush to expand immigrant incarceration nationwide, lawyers and civil rights groups say the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created an environment prone to opportunism.
The department expanded operations at a dramatic scale without including some of the conditions typically required in prior contracts, such as clear oversight mechanisms and financial penalties for contract violations, according to Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official with knowledge of DHS contracts under prior administrations.
Under past administrations, tighter budgets forced DHS to prioritize where funds were allocated. But, with an influx of billions of dollars earmarked specifically for immigration enforcement, “money is no longer an object,” Trickler-McNulty said.
She also pointed to the recent dismantling of two internal DHS offices that were established to inspect civil rights violations, which she said has limited the number of “external people going to the facility and taking an independent look.”
According to Nayna Gupta, an immigration attorney and the policy director of the American Immigration Council, Congress is essentially writing “blank checks to agencies” with few accountability or oversight mechanisms to evaluate spending—creating a context where “there’s more money available than ever before” to go to private contractors.
“If private contractors want to whittle down on medical services in a facility, want to shortchange sanitation in a facility in order to pocket more of the money that came to them in the contract, there are very few folks at the federal level in Congress really watching how they move because there were never any meaningful requirements for those contracts in the first place,” Gupta said.
When ICE awarded the original Camp East Montana contract to Acquisition Logistics in July 2025, the contract was written without a Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP), which allows the government to put monetary sanctions for any violations of the contract. ICE and Army officials told the GAO, which identified the lack of oversight, a QASP was not included in the contract because of the “expedited time frames for opening the facility,” the GAO report said.
Since the 2010s, Amentum—including its corporate predecessors and numerous subsidiaries—has faced numerous lawsuits from labor unions and former employees. The contractor is currently fighting a whistleblower in court over allegations that it inflated the cost of services it provided to an Afghan refugee program in 2021 in order to make a higher profit off a valuable federal contract.
The lawsuit was brought against Amentum in 2023 under the False Claims Act, alleging that Amentum and affiliated subcontractors used a mechanism called “contract stacking” to artificially inflate the costs associated with services they provided for a federal Afghan refugee program at a military base in New Jersey.
“Contract stacking is one of the unfortunate ways that government contractors pump up what the government pays,” said Charles Tiefer, who served on the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an interview, Tiefer said government contractors often use an opaque chain of subcontracts, hiring contractors performing various services on the same government project. That practice can enable companies to misrepresent the costs they report upward to government officials for reimbursement. (Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Amentum will remain a defendant as the lawsuit proceeds, though claims against other subcontractors were dismissed.)
In 2025, DynCorp, by then an Amentum subsidiary, paid $21 million to the federal government to settle a separate False Claims Act lawsuit over allegations of inflating costs associated with training Iraqi police officers prior to being acquired by Amentum.
“I don’t think Amentum cleaned up the DynCorp act,” Tiefer said. “The fact that they acquired DynCorp showed that they agreed that they wanted to take as many government contracts as possible, and make as much money off those contracts. That was the DynCorp way, and that was the Amentum way.”
From the beginning, Amentum was heavily involved in operating Camp East Montana.
Government records show that Acquisition Logistics entered into a $200 million subcontract with Amentum on July 16, 2025—two days before signing its contract to run Camp Montana with the Department of Defense, which originally set up the contract before it was transferred in October of that year to DHS. When an independent contractor suffered a heart attack early in the facility’s construction process, an Amentum representative—not one from Acquisition Logistics—was present during an investigation conducted by the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer.
Investigators from the GAO found facility contractors spent up to $11.5 million in payments for facility services during a two-week period in early August before the first detainees arrived. Between August 16 and September 30, investigators identified at least $423,000 in wasted meal services and an additional $7.1 million which contractors supposedly spent on unnecessary food services from that October to March 2026.
Meanwhile, several current and former detainees have said they experienced drastic weight loss due to the poor or inadequate meals inside the facility. One was held at Camp East Montana during the facility’s first 50 days and told the Washington Post that “he was fed cookies, candies and potato chips in lieu of meals.”
His detention at Camp East Montana overlapped with the time period in which the GAO report found the payments for unused meals.
A class action lawsuit filed in May by the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal advocacy organizations contains harrowing accounts from former and current detainees of the conditions inside the facility. Many of their descriptions point to a pattern of cost-cutting practices which detainees have said amount to circumstances that are “in some respects even more punitive than prison,” even though immigrant detention is civil rather than criminal.
A plaintiff in the lawsuit described a three-week period in which janitorial staff provided by one of the facility’s subcontractors failed to clean a sewage break, forcing detainees to use their own clothing to clean human feces from eating areas.
“We’re looking at conditions that are violating individuals’ constitutional rights to receive adequate healthcare, to receive food that is sufficient and that does not cause them to become ill,” said Charlotte Weiss, an immigration attorney based in El Paso who regularly visits clients at Camp East Montana.
Amentum was awarded the contract to manage the detention center without competition in March. Four months later, ICE offered to extend the company’s no-bid contract, claiming the number of detainees and “the proprietary nature of its infrastructure” meant only Amentum was fit to manage the facility—though the company is less experienced in detention management than some private prison companies, which also manage ICE facilities.
“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,”a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to the Observer.
The DHS spokesperson stated further that the “new contractor will allow Camp East Montana to continue abiding by the highest detention standards WITH the ability to provide MORE medical care on-site. This contract also allows more on-site staff and a PRECISE quality assurance surveillance plan. ICE will have even more oversight of the contractors at this facility. Far from closing, Camp East Montana is upgrading.”
Acquisition Logistics declined to comment, and Amentum did not respond to requests from the Observer for an interview or statements. During a recent earnings conference call, John Heller, Amentum’s CEO, informed investors that “strong operating performance enabled higher-than-anticipated profitability” and identified contracts related to homeland security as an area of core growth.
According to Weiss, complaints about living conditions and infrastructure issues have persisted at Camp East Montana after Amentum took over the facility. “We have not seen any change that has happened … in fact, it seems like some aspects have been getting worse,” Weiss said.
As Amentum stands to profit for months to come from its large government deal, detainees remain confined to windowless tents in the desert, breathing in dust while American taxpayers pay billions to oversee their confinement.
The post ICE Contractor for Controversial Camp East Montana Is Trailed by Fraud Allegations appeared first on The Texas Observer.
Leave a Reply