ACLU coalition asks judge for independent monitor at Fort Bliss site
Attorneys filed the new documents Thursday night in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, El Paso, as part of a class-action lawsuit brought in May against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The May case was the first lawsuit relating to Camp East Montana, which the Guardian reported on when it was filed, and accuses ICE of “dire” conditions that severely violated the human and constitutional rights of those at the facility. The plaintiffs include the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the ACLU Foundation of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel LLP.
The new request takes the form of a motion for preliminary injunction that asks the judge to find the conditions unlawful, order improvements, and appoint an independent monitor to enforce compliance. The filing describes “relentless physical and verbal abuse by guards; of going days or weeks without seeing the sun; of filthy, crowded living conditions with repeated outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis and other diseases; and of egregious medical neglect that has resulted in unnecessary suffering and death.”
Two expert declarations accompanied the filing. Dean Williams, who has run two state prison systems, testified that conditions at the facility “shock the conscience” and are “far beyond those of the most secure prisons I have overseen,” despite Camp East Montana being a civil, not criminal, detention site where the vast majority of those held have no criminal records. Dr. Jeffrey Keller, a doctor and administrator who has run healthcare for detention centers in nine states, testified that “poor healthcare and unsafe conditions at Camp East Montana have resulted in preventable death and put all people at risk of harm, including serious injury and death.”
The filing quotes an unnamed male detainee as saying: “I am dying of hunger here. I throw up frequently after eating. I am a skeleton of the person I was before. Any day now, I think I will die here.” Attorneys also included an account from the daughter of one detainee who died, who told the court that during a video call the day before his death, “[i]t was like he was drowning in his own blood,” and that his doctor told her detention staff “waited until the last minute to take him to the hospital.”
The lawsuit alleges that guards at the facility “regularly use unnecessary and excessive force against people,” including against one named plaintiff, Gerald Akari Angye, who attorneys say suffered a fractured spine and wrist. The filing also alleges guards called detainees slurs including “faggot,” “gay” and “fucker” and, in one instance, disclosed that a person in custody was HIV-positive before having others vote on whether that person should be removed from the housing unit. The filing alleges that people in custody who have sought healthcare have sometimes undergone treatment in public hallways or had regular appointments in the middle of the night, when they should have been sleeping, if they received care at all. In another episode, the filing alleges, “a nurse told someone to harm himself, making him stop asking for help.”
Williams warned in his testimony that “people at Camp East Montana are at risk of serious injury and death at the hands of guards.”
The new filing comes after the Trump administration switched contractors at the privately run facility in March, replacing one Virginia-based contractor with Amentum Services Inc., also based in Virginia. The move followed three deaths of Camp East Montana detainees in ICE custody. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, Amentum, and the Pentagon were approached for comment; the Pentagon referred the Guardian to DHS, which has previously said that “claims that there are ‘inhumane’ conditions at Camp East Montana are categorically false.”
Warnings about the facility predate the contractor change. According to the filing, Camp East Montana received “among the highest number of violations in a single report of any facility” inspected by the government watchdog, the Office of Detention Oversight, as reported by the non-profit newsroom Pogo Investigates. The facility opened in August 2025 amid the second Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, according to the court filing, with ICE flagging medical service gaps, unsanitary conditions and a lost, loaded firearm in early inspections, and the Pentagon flagging “at least 22 violations” around food services, safety and hygiene during the first week of operations.
The filing describes a sustained pattern of infectious disease exposure: more than a dozen detainees contracted measles in February and March, hundreds more were held in quarantine or isolation for the disease in May and June, and in November someone with tuberculosis was allegedly housed within the facility’s general population. Attorneys allege soap is widely unavailable, forcing detainees to ration containers of shampoo “the size of single-use ketchup packets, but even then [they] do not have enough to wash their hands after using the bathroom and before eating.” When detainees sought nail clippers, the filing alleges, guards told them to “bite them” on fingernails and responded to requests to address toenails by saying: “If you can bite them, bite them.”
“Rain, rocks, mice, and crickets infiltrate the living areas. Toilets clog and overflow and are not timely fixed. The foul smell of urine, feces, and body odor is ever-present,” the attorneys wrote, adding that these conditions “serve no legitimate governmental purpose.”