A cardiac emergency in a hospital corridor triggers a response from staff and equipment already inside the building. At Camp East Montana, an immigration detention center in El Paso, the public record shows something different: when some serious medical crises exceeded what the facility could handle on site, staff or people outside the facility called 911 and waited for the city’s emergency system.
That is the structural spine of what ProPublica documented after obtaining recordings of more than 160 emergency calls through public records requests. The calls include facility staff seeking help as well as friends and relatives calling on behalf of detainees.
Three men died at Camp East Montana in the six weeks between December 2025 and January 2026.
The facility operates under an ICE contract with Amentum Services Inc. In July 2026, the Associated Press reported that ICE plans to extend the no-bid contract through September 30, 2027, at a potential additional cost of $776 million. The Department of Homeland Security has said the site provides comprehensive medical services, including mental health services, and refers detainees requiring a higher level of care to local emergency services as needed.
The 911 recordings show what that referral pathway can look like in practice. In one November call reviewed by ProPublica, a nurse reported that a woman with COVID-19 was short of breath, her oxygen saturation was dropping, and the facility did not have oxygen available. In another episode, staff requested an ambulance after a man overdosed shortly after arriving at the site.
A hospital with no oxygen would not be a hospital. A detention center can still operate without hospital-level equipment, but that makes the dividing line between on-site care and emergency transfer especially important.
The calls show that line being crossed in real time. Some calls came from medical staff inside the facility; others came from relatives or friends asking the city to intervene. In the COVID call, a nurse was already assessing the patient when she told dispatch that the facility had no oxygen available. The issue documented by the call was not the absence of all medical staff. It was the limit of what the on-site operation could provide before municipal emergency services had to take over.
That operational limit is the relevant question. DHS describes higher-level emergency referrals as part of the facility’s medical model, while the recordings show that 911 was repeatedly the route through which that escalation occurred.
Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national with a history of mental illness, died on January 3 after an altercation with guards over his medication. The El Paso Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide. The Texas Tribune reported that the autopsy attributed his death to asphyxia from neck and torso compression while he was being restrained. Whether that finding would lead to criminal charges or prosecution was not established by the medical examiner’s ruling itself.
Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old Guatemalan man, died in December 2025. ICE initially attributed his death to liver and kidney failure, but a later autopsy obtained by KVIA reported that he died from complications of alcoholic hepatic cirrhosis and classified the manner of death as natural. Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan, died on January 14 after being found unconscious and unresponsive in his room. His autopsy was performed at William Beaumont Army Medical Center, which does not release autopsy reports to the public.
Three deaths, three different circumstances, one facility, six weeks.
The temptation with a story like this is to read it as a scandal about one bad site. The 911 record points to a narrower structural question: what medical capacity is expected inside a residential detention facility, and at what point should a municipal emergency system become the next step?
In one October call obtained by ProPublica, a man in North Texas repeatedly contacted 911 seeking emergency care for his partner, who he said was inside the facility with severe kidney-stone pain. The dispatcher asked why the facility itself was not calling. The episode matters because it shows that at least some emergency requests were reaching the public system from outside the detention center rather than through staff.
Emergency medical services are designed to respond to acute incidents across a community. A detention facility holding a residential population has a different responsibility: routine care, ongoing monitoring and the ability to identify when a person needs a higher level of treatment. Camp East Montana’s calls show municipal EMS becoming part of that chain when the facility’s own capacity reached its limit.
That arrangement also has consequences outside the facility. Each ambulance response draws on El Paso’s emergency system, and each hospital transfer moves a detainee from a federal detention setting into the same municipal medical infrastructure serving the rest of the community.
The medical calls sit alongside broader allegations about conditions at Camp East Montana. ProPublica described a Venezuelan detainee identified as Xavier saying the experience was taking a severe toll on him physically and emotionally. Separately, an Associated Press report published by The Washington Post detailed a joint Human Rights Watch and ACLU report in which dozens of detainees alleged beatings, denial of medical care and other abuses. DHS said the reports of inhumane conditions were categorically false and denied that detainees were being beaten or abused.
Skepticism still matters here. Detention populations can have significant medical needs, and a death in custody is not by itself proof that medical care caused the death. The 911 record adds something more specific: documented instances in which the facility turned to the city’s emergency system, including a call where a nurse said oxygen was not available on site.
DHS’s position is that the facility provides comprehensive medical and mental health services and refers detainees to local emergency services when they need a higher level of care. That description is not inherently inconsistent with the calls. The dispute is over whether the capacity demonstrated in those calls is adequate for a residential detention population.
There is a broader accountability problem whenever government custody is carried out through contractors and multiple institutions. Responsibility for one person’s care can span ICE, a private operator, municipal paramedics, outside hospitals and medical examiners. Camp East Montana shows how difficult that chain becomes to evaluate when the public’s clearest view of it comes through emergency recordings and records requests.
ICE has said it plans to keep Camp East Montana operating through at least September 30, 2027. If that plan is carried through, the current medical arrangement will not be a short-lived emergency posture. It will remain part of how one of the country’s largest immigration detention facilities operates.
The calls already in the public record force a concrete question. If a facility describes its medical services as comprehensive, what level of emergency capability should exist inside the fence before the response becomes a 911 call to the city?
At Camp East Montana, municipal emergency response has repeatedly become the bridge between on-site care and higher-level treatment. The recordings make that boundary visible, call by call.