By Andrew Hay
May 31 (Reuters) – Civil rights groups have filed a lawsuit over alleged human rights abuses at the United States’ largest immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, where three people have died in the nine months since it opened.
The American Civil Liberties Union, and other groups, brought the complaint on behalf of four people currently held at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent encampment set up under President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation strategy.
The action, filed in United States District Court Western District of Texas, names camp operator U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parent agency the U.S. Department of Homeland Security among defendants. It is the first lawsuit against the desert facility on the Fort Bliss military base and aims to improve conditions for its more than 2,700 detainees, the ACLU said in a statement.
A DHS spokesperson said claims there are inhumane conditions at the camp are categorically false.
A congressionally mandated inspection of the camp’s temporary structures in February found 49 violations of detention standards, including 11 related to “use of force and restraints” and five related to “medical care.”
“We’re suing to ensure that no other human being has to endure the inhumane treatment,” said Kyle Virgien, an attorney for the National Prison Project of the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit together with Human Rights Watch and the Texas Civil Rights Project.
According to the ACLU lawsuit, detainees are confined in windowless enclosures where they suffer physical abuse by guards, abhorrent medical and mental healthcare, indiscriminate use of solitary confinement and exposure to diseases such as measles and tuberculosis.
The DHS spokesperson said no detainees were being beaten, abused or denied medical care at the camp. The camp has no measles cases as of March 12 and there has been no spike in deaths in ICE custody under the Trump administration, the person said.
“ICE takes seriously the health and safety of all those detained in our custody,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold U.S. citizens.
Venezuelan immigrant Erik Ivan Rodriguez, a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement he experienced physical violence as officials tried to coerce him to sign deportation papers. Another plaintiff, Gerald Akari Angye from Cameroon, said he was beaten by guards.
The January 3 death of a Cuban immigrant at Camp East Montana was ruled a homicide by El Paso medical examiners, who cited “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.”
Immigration officials at first attributed Geraldo Lunas Campos’ death to “medical distress.” They later said he tried to take his life and died in a struggle with guards who attempted to save him.
The ACLU lawsuit alleged he was beaten to death after asking for his asthma medication. A fourth man died shortly after being released from the camp, where he had been denied chemotherapy for cancer, the complaint said.
U.S. immigration detention deaths reached a 20-year high in 2025 as the Trump administration ramped up the number of people held for alleged violations.
(Reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
