Adam Isacson

Adam Isacson

Director for Defense Oversight

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With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here. 

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

THE FULL UPDATE:

Serious concerns are mounting about Camp East Montana, a sprawling detention facility, made entirely of tents, that the Trump administration opened in August 2025 on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a large army base in El Paso, Texas.

The camp, which was holding 2,903 detained migrants on January 8, is the largest migrant detention facility in the country right now. It has already faced allegations of beatings, medical neglect, insufficient food, frequent emergency calls, and denial of meaningful access to counsel, amid concerns that the company given a $1.24 billion contract to run it, Acquisition Logistics, has little experience with detention management.

Alarms are sounding louder after three people detained at Camp East Montana died within the space of 44 days in December and January:

The El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner issued an autopsy report on January 21 finding that the second death, of Lunas Campos, was a homicide, the Washington Post and other outlets reported.

In mid-January, ICE had informed that the death of Lunas Campos, a father of four with a criminal record who had lived in the United States since the 1990s, was a presumed suicide. The autopsy report, however, found that he died of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression” and that he became “unresponsive while being physically restrained by law enforcement.”

Two other detainees told the Post that they witnessed at least five guards struggling with Lunas Campos after he refused to enter a segregation unit, claiming he needed his medication (he reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder and anxiety). One said that during the struggle, he heard Lunas Campos say, “I can’t breathe.”

Both witnesses were given deportation notices days after speaking to Washington Post reporter Douglas McMillan about what they saw. Lunas Campos’s children have gone to federal court in western Texas to try to stop the witnesses’ removal from the United States, and a hearing is scheduled for January 27.

Across the United States, at least 30 people died in ICE detention during the 2025 calendar year, the most in more than 20 years. Another six died in the first two weeks of 2026, including two at Fort Bliss.

The Guardian reported on the September 2025 case of Randall Gamboa Esquivel, who entered the United States at the U.S.-Mexico border while in good health in December 2024. He spent 10 months in detention, only to be flown back to Costa Rica in an air ambulance from the Port Isabel Detention Center in south Texas. Gamboa died a few weeks later.

On October 3, ICE halted payments to contractors providing medical care in its detention facilities, and is unlikely to resume those payments until the end of April, even as the size of the nationwide detained population continues to break records. “ICE’s failure to pay its bills for months has caused some medical providers to deny services to ICE detainees,” a Trump administration source told Judd Legum of Popular Information, who broke the story. The stoppage is the result of a lawsuit brought by a small right-wing advocacy group that halted a “small but crucial” claims-processing role played by the Veterans Administration.

The ICE detained population stood at 68,990 people on January 3, up from 39,152 a year earlier. Silky Shah of Detention Watch reported the current population at over 73,000 in a January 20 column.

Even amid that growth, ICE sharply reduced the frequency of detention facility inspections carried out by its Office of Detention Oversight (ODO) in 2025: the Project On Government Oversight and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop revealed a 36.25 percent year-over-year decline in inspections.

In December, a Washington, DC federal judge had ruled that, as spelled out in a prior year’s appropriations law, ICE had to permit members of Congress to carry out unannounced oversight visits to detention facilities. However, on January 8, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem sent the court a memorandum reinstating a requirement that members of Congress seek approval from ICE seven days in advance of any visits.

The original appropriations law had prohibited ICE from using regular appropriations funds to deny access to members of Congress. But now that ICE has an enormous amount of money from a “non-regular” appropriations bill, the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Congress passed in July 2025, Noem’s memo instructs the agency to ban unannounced congressional visits using funds from that bill. The judge who upheld legislators’ right to unannounced visits in December ruled that Noem’s memo was valid, at least until it faces a separate court challenge.

For now, members of Congress must give a week’s notice before seeking to observe detention conditions. Oversight is minimal even as the detained population grows and reports of deaths mount, along with accounts of abuse and neglect.

The Republican-majority Congress needs to pass several appropriations bills by January 30 to avoid a partial government shutdown. Among them is the bill that would fund DHS for the remainder of the 2026 fiscal year (bill text – explanatory statement)

Two law enforcement agencies within DHS—ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—are not in danger of shutting down, though, because they already have about $170 billion from the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Congress passed in July.

Most congressional Democrats are refusing to support the DHS appropriation because it lacks deep reforms or cuts to ICE, at a time when a torrent of citizen videos show the fast-growing agency’s masked personnel treating people, including U.S. citizens, with violence and cruelty.

Despite that, seven Democrats in the House, all but one from districts that Donald Trump won in 2024, joined 213 Republicans (of 214 Republicans who voted) in passing the DHS appropriation on January 22. The bill now goes to the Senate.

As hammered out in both houses’ appropriations committees, the 2026 Homeland Security appropriation would give the Department $64.4 billion. It leaves out most or all funding for especially controversial items like border wall construction, ICE detention and deportation, and new hiring, all of which got pushed through Congress in last July’s “big bill” and is already available to spend between now and 2029.

The 2026 bill would provide $10 billion in new funding for ICE, including $3.8 billion for its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division, which is about $400 million more than 2024 and about $100 million less than 2025.

The 2026 bill lacks language mandating changes to ICE and CBP tactics, training, and accountability that are deep enough to be considered meaningful reforms, even as accounts of those agencies’ abuse and brutality, especially in Minnesota, dominate news coverage and national discourse.

The bill’s important, but less fundamental, accountability and transparency provisions include:

In the current climate of anger about ICE and CBP operations and mistreatment of migrants and citizens, the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats oppose the bill. In the House, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) came out against the bill, but did not formally “whip” his caucus to oppose it, a step that would have made clear to rank-and-file Democrats that “yes” votes would be considered defiance of party leadership.

The seven Democrats who joined Republicans in voting for the bill on January 22 were Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Don Davis (D-North Carolina), Laura Gillen (D-New York), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), Marie Gluesenkamp........

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