They are paying three-quarters of a billion dollars to keep beating migrants. The contract extension published last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes this plain. Amentum Services Inc. will continue operating Camp East Montana in El Paso through September 2027 at an additional cost of $776 million. This is on top of the $452 million Amentum was awarded in March. The notice did not address the reports of routine beatings. It did not need to. The extension is the answer.
Let me show you what that answer means in the bodies of the people it is being done to, because the numbers can make you forget that bodies are what we are talking about. Ninety percent of the detainees at this facility reported being beaten. That is not an advocacy organization’s estimate. That is the finding of surveys conducted inside the camp, and it is the reason Democratic members of Congress and human-rights organizations have been calling for the camp’s closure since it opened in August 2025. The administration’s answer to those calls is to extend the contract. To add three-quarters of a billion dollars. To keep the doors locked and the beatings going for another fourteen months.
The prior operator was removed for poor performance. That is how the notice puts it — “poor performance,” as though the contractor had failed to meet a quarterly target or botched a supply chain. The actual conditions were bad enough that even ICE, an agency whose tolerance for mistreatment is calibrated for the task, concluded that the operator had to go. And then ICE handed the keys to Amentum, and Amentum’s people kept beating detainees, and now Amentum gets $776 million more.
I want to pause on that sequence, because the logic it reveals is the logic of the machine. Operator A is removed for conditions so bad that even the agency running the detention apparatus cannot defend them. Operator B is brought in. Under Operator B, the conditions remain bad enough that a federal watchdog finds ICE has wasted millions of dollars and endangered the people in its custody. Operator B is then given a no-bid extension worth more than the original contract — a no-bid extension, which means the market feedback loop that normally forces a contractor to correct its failures has been deliberately severed. The procurement structure itself insulates the abuse from the only consequence the market offers. The mistreatment is not a bug the replacement was supposed to fix. The mistreatment is the function the contract exists to purchase.
The Hebrew prophet Amos stood in the marketplace at Bethel and named what he saw in the plainest language the tradition has: “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals — they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way.” The silver at Camp East Montana is $1.228 billion in eighteen months. The needy are the men and women in the bunks. The trampling is the ninety percent.
There is a word the prophets used for what happens when a people becomes so accustomed to cruelty that the cruelty ceases to register as news. The word is hardness of heart. It is not a metaphor. It is a clinical description of what happens to a conscience that has been asked to look at the same thing for too long and has learned to look away. The notice from ICE is an exercise in hardness of heart as bureaucratic form. It names the dollar figure. It names the contractor. It names the end date. It does not name the beatings, because the beatings have become ordinary, and ordinary things do not belong in contract-modification notices.
I need to say something about my own complicity here, because I am not exempt from what I am describing. I am a citizen of the country that built this camp and pays for it. My tax dollars are in the $776 million. My silence, in the years before this column, was part of the permission structure that made the camp possible. The Catholic tradition I write from has, in too many of its institutional expressions, been silent about the detention apparatus in its own backyard — Camp East Montana sits in El Paso, the city where I grew up, the city whose bishop has spoken clearly on immigration but whose national conference has been selective about when the apparatus becomes urgent enough to name. We are all of us implicated. The confession does not get me off the hook. It just means I will not pretend to be standing somewhere clean while I name what is happening.
What is happening is that the United States government is running a detention camp where nine out of ten detainees report being beaten, and the government’s response to the documentation of that fact is to extend the no-bid contract that keeps the camp open. The contract is with a company called Amentum. The extension is worth $776 million. The beatings will continue.
I am addressing the men and women of Amentum Services Inc. now, because the pastoral-prophetic tradition I write from requires me to speak to the perpetrator in the second person, not the third. I know you are bound by law and contract — the statutes of procurement and the fiduciary duties you owe your shareholders bind you in a web of obligation. But the binding of law is not the binding of the soul. The law has seams, and conscience is the thing that finds them. You can look at the web of obligation and see it for what it is: a permission structure, not a command. The permission is not a requirement. You can refuse it. You are the people who hold the contract. You are the people whose employees are documented as having beaten detainees at a rate that would be a scandal in any prison, any jail, any facility anywhere in the developed world. You have been given $452 million to run this camp. You are being offered $776 million more. You can say no. That option is real. You can tell ICE that you will not renew, that you will not be the name on the contract for a facility where nine out of ten detainees report being beaten. You can walk away. The money is real. The choice is real. The door of return is open. You can walk through it.
I am addressing the men and women of ICE who read this column, and I am asking you the question Jesus asked the Pharisees who brought him the woman caught in adultery. Not the famous line — the one before it. He bent down and wrote on the ground. He did not answer them right away. And when he stood up, what he said was: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” I am not without sin. You are not without sin. The question is what you do with the stone in your hand. The contract extension is the stone. Put it down.
Archbishop Óscar Romero stood in the cathedral in San Salvador on March 23, 1980, and said the words that would get him killed the next day. He addressed the soldiers directly. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.” The soldiers were under orders. Romero knew that. He addressed them anyway. He did not say “the system of repression should perhaps be reevaluated.” He said cese la represión. Stop it. He said it in his own voice. He said it the day before they shot him through the heart while he was saying Mass.
I am not Romero. I am a carpenter in a small town who writes a column. But I am writing in the tradition he died in, and that tradition does not permit me to look at ninety percent of detainees reporting beatings and a $776 million contract extension and call it a procurement decision. It is the repression. It is cruelty made routine and cruelty made profitable and cruelty extended for another fourteen months because the people making the decision have hearts hard enough to do it. The decision can be reversed. The contract can be cancelled. The camp can be closed. The detainees can be treated like the human beings they are. The door is open. Walk through it.
The Lord will ask us to account for all the migrants who have fallen on their journey of hope. They were victims of the throwaway culture. Pope Francis wrote that in Fratelli Tutti. He wrote it from Rome. The camp is in El Paso. The distance between the two cities is not the distance between the teaching and the conduct. That distance is measured in the length of a human heart that has turned away from what it knows. It is a short distance. It can be crossed in either direction. Cross it back.