Several plaintiffs are suing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for abusive conditions and abhorrent medical care at their Texas Camp, East Montana.
Camp East Montana ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas
The claimants say ICE agents violated their human and constitutional rights when they locked them in the facility. Several advocacy groups have joined in on the class action on behalf of the detainees at the detention facility to block all of its future operations.
The site is barebones tented grounds in the desert in the El Paso’s Fort Bliss military base. Trump’s government has been holding immigrants here for the past ten months.
The lawsuits detail how the camp environment was dangerous and squalid for the detainees, with regular incidences of physical abuse, solitary confinement, disease outbreaks, and insufficient medical care.
The detention environment, the lawsuit alleges, was specifically designed for blatant human rights abuse. Captives are held in windowless enclosures and are frequently assaulted by guards, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit further discloses that solitary confinement is used to punish and silence victims of physical abuse by the guards. Meanwhile, the detainees are exposed to tuberculosis, measles, and other diseases with no access to medical care. In less than a year since the facility became operational, “there have already been three reported deaths at Camp East Montana.”
The collective lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Texas. The mentioned plaintiffs include Gerald Akari Angye, Navdeep, Erik Ivan Rodriguez Flores, and ZOR. The Department of Homeland Security has been named in the suit, as well as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting ICE director Todd Lyons, the Pentagon, and the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
As of May 2026, the facility in question is estimated to hold over 2500 people. It has a capacity to hold 2500 more, but likely faces shutdown following the rising number of deaths, including suicides, among detainees held there.
As ICE continues to increase operations across the country using aggressive strategies, the government may soon face an infrastructural and logistical challenge –where to place all the people. Americans fear that more taxpayer dollars may be spent on setting up new facilities.
But advocacy groups have more urgent concerns – safety and humane conditions for those detained. Currently, there is little watchdog oversight going on at the facilities. ICE has blocked all efforts from agencies and members of Congress seeking authorized visits.
In the past, the DHS has labeled all allegations made about the state of things at Camp East Montana as “unequivocally false.”
Gerald Akari is one of the detainees and a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He is from Cameroon. He says that he has previously been tortured in his home country, but nothing comes close to the conditions he witnesses at Camp East Montana.
“I never thought I would experience such treatment here in the United States of America.” In his lawsuit through the Beyond Borders Program, Akari documents how he was so “severely beaten for consulting an attorney that he had to be hospitalized before detention. But on detention, he was thrown in an isolated cell where no further medical care was provided.
The lawsuits disclose that the detention camp is dusty, and some detainees cough up blood. There is no adequate ventilation to stop sand and dust from the desert. There are inadequate sanitary facilities, so there is an “ever-present smell of urine, feces, and body odor.” During body searches, guards are “touching people without consent,” and a majority of those detained are beginning to mentally deteriorate and spiral into suicidal tendencies.
The lawsuit was initiated by a coalition of civil rights groups and legal advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and the Human Rights Watch.