Detainees sue ICE over conditions at Camp East Montana amid three deaths and a homicide ruling

A coalition of civil-rights organizations — the ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel — sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement late on May 30, 2026 over conditions at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent camp on the U.S. Army's Fort Bliss base in El Paso and the largest immigration detention facility in the country. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on behalf of four detainees and seeking class certification for everyone held there, the petition argues that conditions amount to "unconstitutional punishment" and violate detainees' due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment. The suit's individual-mistreatment claims — guard beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, and medical neglect — are plaintiff-produced allegations that remain untested in court.

What anchors this entry is the record that exists independent of the filing. In less than a year since the camp opened in August 2025, the facility has seen at least three detainee deaths, one of which the El Paso County medical examiner ruled a homicide — that of Cuban national Geraldo Lunas Campos, who died of asphyxia from neck and torso compression; no one has been charged. ICE's own inspectors documented 49 detention-standards violations, including inadequate medical care and failures to perform required self-harm checks, and the camp endured a nearly month-long measles outbreak. In March 2026, ICE replaced the facility's prime operator, and El Paso Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar has repeatedly called for the camp's closure.

The Department of Homeland Security rejected the suit's characterization, with a spokesperson calling the inhumane-conditions claims "categorically false" and asserting that "no detainees are being beaten or abused." Consistent with this archive's threshold for lawsuit-driven stories — judging the documented action rather than the filing itself — this entry rests on the corroborated facts: the deaths, the medical-examiner homicide ruling, and the violations identified by the government's own inspectors. The camp, built toward a 5,000-bed capacity, held a daily average above 2,500 detainees as of early April 2026.

Recorded for this archive. The lawsuit's individual-abuse allegations are noted as untested; the archived core — deaths, a homicide ruling, and ICE-inspector violations — is independently documented.