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Immigrant rights advocates and elected Democrats are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to shut down an immigrant jail outside of El Paso, Texas. New evidence calls into question the official narratives about the recent deaths of two men held at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent city at the Fort Bliss Army base in West Texas. Geraldo Lunas Campos and Victor Manuel Diaz are among the 38 documented people who have died while in custody at jails and prison run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its contractors since President Donald Trump took office.

On December 8, before the two men died, a coalition of civil and human rights groups sent a letter to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and other top Trump administration officials warning about “alarming” conditions at Camp East Montana. The facility had just reported the death of an immigrant, Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, the first person to die at the camp since its opening less than four months earlier. The groups said additional deaths were imminent if the camp continued to operate.

The letter reported that people arrested on immigration violations and shipped to Fort Bliss from across the United States had reported inedible food, medical neglect, solitary confinement, physical coercion, and “abusive sexual contact” by Camp East Montana’s staff of private contractors. Groups of detainees have said they were driven an hour away to the border and ordered to self-deport by “jumping” into Mexico despite not being Mexican; some have reported beatings by the masked officers after refusing.

ICE has said the deaths remain under investigation, but referred to Victor Manuel Diaz’s death as a suspected suicide and Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death as an attempted suicide in statements to the media. With both deaths, Fort Bliss is quickly becoming the poster child for a dangerous network of incarceration looming behind Trump’s deadly immigration policing operations in Minnesota and beyond.

The controversy over the deaths at Fort Bliss — and growing fear among attorneys, family members, and neighbors for the people snatched by ICE agents during chaotic raids and incarcerated — comes as Senate Democrats threaten to hold up legislation needed to fund the government over the killing of U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers in Minnesota. Like the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the two Minneapolis residents among the 12 people shot and six killed by federal officers during chaotic immigration raids since Trump took office, DHS officials have consistently denied responsibility when people die in their custody.

“The government knew of the horrors at Fort Bliss,” said Charlotte Weiss, a staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, in a statement........

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