U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement replaced the contractor overseeing Camp East Montana and said it is planning to keep the El Paso detention center open, a week after The Washington Post reported on an internal document that appeared to indicate ICE was taking steps to close the facility.
ICE terminated its contract with Acquisition Logistics LLC, the company that has overseen the construction and operation of Camp East Montana since last July, and awarded a new contract to Amentum Services, a Chantilly, Virginia-based federal contractor, according to government procurement records.
The move comes after the department said it was reviewing Camp East Montana to ensure it met federal standards for immigrant detention. The Post has corrected its earlier story about the internal ICE document; the document said ICE was terminating the contract, not closing the facility.
“ICE is always looking at ways to improve our detention facilities to ensure we are providing the best care to illegal aliens in our custody,” Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement Wednesday.
The new contract will allow more on-site staff, precise quality assurance and greater ICE oversight of contractors, she added.
ICE awarded Amentum the contract without a traditional bidding process, according to a description on the SAM.gov procurement site. The website says Amentum will run the facility for 180 days.
Bis did not respond to a question about what happens after the 180-day period ends in September. An Amentum spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Camp East Montana’s population has declined to about 1,500 detainees in recent weeks, about half as many people as it held in January, according to a separate internal ICE document obtained by The Post. It recently closed to visitors and attorneys because of a measles outbreak, according to Rep. Veronica Escobar (D), who represents El Paso and periodically visits the detention center.
Once seen as the Trump administration’s model for a new breed of makeshift, large-scale holding facilities, Camp East Montana has struggled to provide safe and humane housing for thousands of people, The Post’s reporting has shown. The facility, built in a span of a few weeks on a previously empty patch of desert adjacent to the Fort Bliss Army base, consists of several enormous white tents, each as long as two football fields. It was contracted to hold to up to 5,000 detainees – more than any active ICE holding center in the nation.
Detainees have complained of physical abuse by guards, inadequate food and substandard medical care, and three people died there in the span of two months. Last September, ICE’s own inspectors found the facility violated dozens of federal standards, including failing to have basic procedures for keeping detainees safe and failing to provide many of them a way to contact lawyers, learn about their cases or file complaints, according to a copy of an internal inspection report obtained by The Post.
It’s exceedingly rare for ICE to cancel the contract for a detention facility and even rarer for the facility to stay open when that happens, according to Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official at ICE who served in the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.
Acquisition Logistics, a small business registered to the Virginia home of Ken Wagner, a retired senior Naval flight officer, had previously led a variety of technical projects for the federal government but had no documented history of federal contracts for immigrant detention. Its contract to run Camp East Montana had been projected to run through September 2027.
Wagner did not respond to requests for comment.
Amentum was one of several subcontractors who have helped manage the operations at Camp East Montana since it began accepting detainees in August, according to contract documents reviewed by The Post. The publicly traded company, with over 35,000 employees, provides “base camp life support” for government-owned facilities, including in Afghanistan, Puerto Rico and Guam, the contract documents said.
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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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