ICE extended Amentum's no-bid $776M contract to keep Camp East Montana open through 2027

On July 22, 2026, ICE published a notice extending without competitive bidding the contract of Amentum Services Inc. to keep operating Camp East Montana — the nation's largest immigration detention facility, a tent camp on the Army's Fort Bliss base in El Paso, Texas — through September 30, 2027, at a potential additional cost to taxpayers of $776 million; the Associated Press first reported the extension on July 27, 2026. That is on top of a $452 million initial contract Amentum was awarded in March 2026 when it was installed on short notice to take over from a prior contractor removed for poor performance; in total, Amentum stands to be paid more than $1.2 billion for operating the camp from March 2026 through September 2027.

ICE's notice justified the no-bid extension by arguing that relocating the camp's detainees elsewhere would be "impracticable" given a lack of available bed space, and that switching contractors would require replacing Amentum's "proprietary infrastructure" and hiring new staff, creating duplicative costs. The notice stated that "any lapse in contract coverage would directly threaten the life, safety, and well-being of detainees."

The extension came ten days after a July 15, 2026 joint report by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, based on interviews with 80 people including 71 current or former detainees, found that people held at Camp East Montana had been subjected to indiscriminate beatings by guards, life-threatening medical neglect, coercive removals to third countries, and conditions the groups said may amount to enforced disappearance. The report documented the January 3, 2026 death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos, whom witnesses said guards asphyxiated in the facility's solitary-confinement unit. Democratic members of Congress and advocacy groups had called for the camp's closure; a Human Rights Watch researcher who co-authored the report called the extension "reckless" and said it demonstrated "the Trump administration's full-scale assault on human rights."

Competitive bidding exists so that a contractor's cost and performance can be tested against alternatives before public money is committed further. By waiving that process to keep the same operator in place at a facility recently documented to have caused serious, ongoing harm to the people in its custody, ICE removed the ordinary mechanism for accountability at the moment it was most needed.