Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) led Democrats on Thursday in urging the Trump administration to shut down an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Texas.
Two dozen lawmakers cited concerns over mismanagement and poor living conditions at El Paso’s Camp East Montana. They pointed to the three deaths at the facility since December, which include one homicide.
Aside from the ICE center’s “poor” and hasty construction, the lawmakers said that detainees have been grappling with “foul” drinking water, rotten food, and inadequate medical care.
“We do not believe Camp East Montana is being run professionally or responsibly,” Escobar and 23 other congressional Democrats wrote in a letter to ICE director Todd Lyons and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “For the safety of everyone at the facility, for an end to abuses to detainees, and for fiscal responsibility to the American people, the site cannot continue to operate.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to ICE and DHS for comment, but did not receive a reply. The Trump administration has previously dismissed humanitarian concerns about the El Paso detention center.
Escobar, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and other lawmakers said Camp East Montana was built by Acquisition Logistics, LLC, a company holding “previous experience managing immigration detention facilities,” at a cost of $1.2 billion in taxpayer funds.
The East Montana facility is ICE’s largest detention center, holding more than 3,000 men and women on Fort Bliss, a military base. Health officials announced Thursday that 17 measles cases have been reported in El Paso, including 13 at Camp East Montana. Earlier this month, officials reported two cases of tuberculosis and 18 cases of COVID-19 at the facility.
Immigration advocates and civil liberties groups have long expressed concern about alleged human rights abuses, particularly after Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death at Camp East Montana in early January. The American Civil Liberties Union suggested Lunas Campos, 55, was “choked to death” by guards, and urged Congress to shut the facility down.
After initially saying Lunas Campos died from “medical distress,” officials in mid-February updated the cause of death to say it was the result of staff’s “spontaneous use of force” to prevent the man from “harming himself.” The medical examiner’s autopsy found that he became “unresponsive while being physically restrained by law enforcement.”
Less than two weeks after Lunas Campos died, officials said Victor Manuel Diaz, 35, died by suicide at Camp East Montana, a finding contested by his family.
Unlike Lunas Campos, Manuel Diaz’s body was sent to a U.S. Army hospital rather than the local medical examiner. A military spokesperson said that the agency would not make his autopsy public, according to the Texas Tribune.
Previously, officials said Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, died on Dec. 3 of liver and kidney failure after being hospitalized for over two weeks following detention. The El Paso County Medical Examiner reported in late January that Gaspar-Andres died of natural causes.
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Critics have alleged Gaspar-Andres was only hospitalized “once his condition had severely deteriorated,” with his family telling the Texas Tribune that they believed poor treatment and Camp East Montana’s lack of medical care exacerbated his condition, leading to the man’s death.
“My father told me he was suffering greatly there in that jail, from lack of food, lack of medical attention, and the conditions of the place,” Gaspar-Andres’s daughter said.