ICE routes Diaz autopsy to military hospital, bypassing ME who ruled prior Camp East Montana death a homicide

Victor Manuel Diaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan national, died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody on January 14, 2026 at Camp East Montana, the tent detention facility on the Army's Fort Bliss base in El Paso, Texas. ICE agents had arrested Diaz on January 6 at his workplace in the Minneapolis area — a restaurant in Coon Rapids — as part of Operation Metro Surge, the agency's December surge into Minnesota, and transferred him roughly 1,200 miles south to Texas. Contract security staff found him unconscious and unresponsive in his room; ICE attributed the death to a "presumed suicide" while saying the official cause remained under investigation. Diaz had come to the United States in 2024 seeking work, requested asylum, and was later ordered removed in absentia; he is survived by two sons, his mother, and five siblings in Nicaragua.

Diaz's family rejected the suicide account. "I don't believe for a minute," his mother, María del Rosario Díaz García, told Sahan Journal, and a brother questioned how a person under constant watch in detention could take his own life. The accountability concern deepened when ICE routed Diaz's autopsy to the William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss — which releases reports only to family and investigators, not the public — rather than to the El Paso County medical examiner, who had examined two earlier deaths at the facility. Just weeks before, that medical examiner had ruled the January 3 death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide caused by "asphyxia due to neck and torso compression," contradicting ICE's suicide-attempt account. The family's attorney and a Human Rights Watch fellow argued that an independent authority with no institutional ties to the Department of Homeland Security should have controlled the autopsy and investigation. Diaz was the third detainee to die at Camp East Montana in a 44-day span, at a facility ICE's own inspectors had cited for roughly 49 detention-standards violations.

The Standing records this as a death in custody and as part of the documented pattern of corrections abuse at Camp East Montana — three deaths in six weeks, a homicide ruling against the conditions of confinement, and a custodial agency steering the review of its own deaths away from independent local examiners. The event is part of the Operation Metro Surge episode, which originated his arrest in Minnesota, and of the cluster of deaths at the El Paso tent camp.