Local Lawsuits and Federal Waste Report Cast Doubt on US Immigration Detention Expansion

A scathing federal watchdog report has found that the rushed opening of Camp East Montana, the largest immigration detention centre in the United States, wasted millions of dollars and endangered detainee health. The facility at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, was stood up in August 2025 under a $1.3 billion Army contract, but investigators say senior leadership’s expedited timeframes led to severe lapses in security, medical care, and use-of-force documentation. Evidence in a detainee death investigation was destroyed or lost, the report noted, and the centre has not been running at full capacity since its troubled launch.

Viewed from state capitals and city halls, the federal push to expand detention capacity is meeting determined local resistance. In Utah, Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County have jointly sued the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prevent the opening of a massive facility that would hold at least 7,500 people, warning it would strain regional services and resources. Meanwhile in California, Attorney General Rob Bonta and Santa Clara County are challenging a planned ICE centre on farmland outside Gilroy, arguing the administration bypassed mandatory state and local environmental reviews and ignored risks to contaminated land and endangered species. Bonta said federal officials were “trying to jam through a new facility on a community that does not want it.”

These legal battles are unfolding against a backdrop of diminishing accountability. ICE has quietly eliminated a Biden-era rule requiring the agency to report deaths that occur within 30 days of a detainee’s release, even as detainee deaths reach a 20-year high. The shift, outlined in a memo from acting director David Venturella, returns the agency to reporting only deaths that happen while a person is in custody, significantly narrowing the public’s window into the health consequences of detention.

From Washington, the twin narratives of watchdog-identified waste and local legal pushback expose a dissonance at the heart of federal detention policy. The Camp East Montana experience illustrates the perils of speed over oversight, while the lawsuits from Utah and California suggest communities are no longer willing to absorb the costs—fiscal, environmental, and social—of such large-scale operations. Analysts in London note that the convergence of court challenges and internal mismanagement findings may slow the administration’s ambitious build-out, even as the death-reporting rollback signals a broader retreat from transparency. The detention landscape is now defined less by capacity alone than by the legal, financial, and ethical toll exacted in communities from Texas to the Pacific coast.