‘Unsafe’ conditions at Texas ICE facility put immigrants at risk of injury or death, lawsuit says

Attorneys and experts are raising the alarm that immigrants at Camp East Montana, the sprawling desert detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base in west Texas, face a risk of serious injury or death because of ongoing, extreme health and safety hazards there, according to a fresh court filing, the Guardian can reveal.

The allegedly dangerous conditions persist at the tent jail, the largest immigration detention facility in the US, despite regular reports from inside and outside the federal government that it has violated dozens of official standards since it opened last year.

One correctional expert, who has run two state prison systems, Dean Williams, said in testimony as part of the new filing that conditions at Camp East Montana “shock the conscience” and were “far beyond those of the most secure prisons I have overseen”, even though it is a civil, not a criminal, detention facility and the vast majority of the men and women held there have no criminal records.

“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,” said another expert, Jeffrey Keller, a doctor and administrator who has run the healthcare for detention centers in nine states, as part of the filing.

The new documents were filed in federal court in the western district of Texas, El Paso, on Thursday night as part of a lawsuit filed in May.

It was the first lawsuit relating to Camp East Montana, and was revealed by the Guardian at the time. The class-action lawsuit filed against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accuses the agency of “dire” conditions that severely violated the human and constitutional rights of those at the facility.

The latest severe warnings in the case are included in documents that ask the judge to find Camp East Montana’s conditions unlawful and require improvements, with an independent monitor enforcing compliance.

The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the ACLU Foundation of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel LLP on behalf of detainees.

Their new request is a motion for preliminary injunction asking the court to order defendants to protect the health and safety of the detainees. It comes as people detained there continue to describe alleged use of force and harassment from guards, lack of appropriate medical care, extremely limited access to hygiene products, exposure to serious contagious illnesses, not enough edible food and other concerns that raise alleged constitutional and statutory issues as well as ethical ones.

“All tell similar stories – of 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,” the new court filing says.

One unnamed male detainee is quoted 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.”

The Trump administration swapped contractors at the privately run ICE facility to Amentum Services, Inc, a Virginia-based company, in March, from a different Virginia-based contractor. The move followed three deaths of Camp East Montana detainees in the custody of ICE.

The court filing on Thursday includes a description of how the daughter of one of those three men saw her father on a video call the day before he died and “[i]t was like he was drowning in his own blood”. His doctor told her that the detention staff “waited until the last minute to take him to the hospital”.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, Amentum and the Pentagon have been approached for comment. The Pentagon referred the Guardian to DHS.

DHS has previously said that “claims that there are ‘inhumane’ conditions at Camp East Montana are categorically false”.

Camp East Montana has received “among the highest number of violations in a single report of any facility” inspected by the government watchdog, the Office of Detention Oversight, according to the non-profit newsroom Pogo Investigates.

And warnings of failing to meet official federal standards and other problems began almost as soon as the facility opened in August 2025 amid the second Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, with ICE noticing medical service gaps, unsanitary conditions and a lost, loaded firearm, while the Pentagon flagged “at least 22 violations” around food services, safety and hygiene during the operation’s first week, according to the court filing.

Misconduct allegedly runs rampant among guards, who “regularly use unnecessary and excessive force against people”, including against one of the lawsuit’s named plaintiffs, Gerald Akari Angye, who suffered a fractured spine and wrist, attorneys wrote in the court document.

Guards have also allegedly called detainees slurs including “faggot”, “gay” and “fucker”, and in one instance, a guard disclosed that a person in custody was HIV positive and then had others vote as to whether that person should be removed from the housing unit, the filing alleges.

Williams warned in testimony in the filing that “people at Camp East Montana are at risk of serious injury and death at the hands of guards”.

At the same time, people in custody who have sought out healthcare have sometimes allegedly 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 one example, “a nurse told someone to harm himself, making him stop asking for help”, according to the attorneys filing the latest accusations.

More than a dozen people reportedly contracted measles in February and March, with hundreds more held in quarantine and isolation for the disease in May and June. Meanwhile, in November, someone with tuberculosis was allegedly housed within the facility’s general population.

The facility is accused of conditions where soap is widely unavailable, so detainees must 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”, the attorneys alleged.

And without access to nail clippers in the housing units, guards have instead told people they can bite their nails, and, on their toenails, the guards have allegedly been heard to say: “If you can bite them, bite them,” according to the court filing.

“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 in the latest filing.

They underscored that these conditions “serve no legitimate governmental purpose”.