TEXAS — Four detainees being held at an immigration detention camp in West Texas are suing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other government entities and officials over what they allege are “flagrant human rights abuses.”
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court Western District of Texas on Friday, alleges people held at Camp East Montana are subject to windowless enclosures, physical abuse by guards, “abhorrent” medical and mental healthcare and solitary confinement “to punish and silence victims of guard abuse.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are listed as Gerald Akari Angye, Navdeep, Erik Ivan Rodriguez Flores and ZOR. Defendants include ICE, ICE Director Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE’s El Paso Field Office Marisa Flores, Assistant Field Office Director of ICE’s El Paso Field Office Angel Garite, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
A spokesperson for DHS said the claims in the lawsuit were “categorically false” in a statement to NPR.
“ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies to ensure that all ICE facilities comply with performance-based national detention standards. All detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” the statement to NPR said.
Since it opened last year, three deaths have been reported at Camp East Montana — including a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man named Victor Manuel Diaz whose death was reported as a suicide. The El Paso County medical examiner ruled the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban migrant, a homicide due to asphyxia after being physically restrained by law enforcement. And, according to The Associated Press, 48-year-old Guatemalan national Francisco Gaspar-Andres died after being transferred to an El Paso hospital for care.
“People consistently report that they are being “punished,” “tortured,” and deprived of basic human necessities,” the lawsuit claims. “People arbitrarily placed in low, medium, and high security housing units at Camp East Montana are subjected to similar punitive conditions including being in a windowless tent, with bright white lights, engulfed by sand and dust, with no meaningful programming or recreation, and with severe restrictions on their movements and invasions of their privacy.”
Read the full lawsuit here.