The Playbook You Paid For Twice

You know the feeling. The contractor you hired to redo the kitchen shows up with the wrong crew, floods the floor, disappears with the deposit, and then the guy who replaces him charges double because "the walls are already open." You pay twice. You have no choice. The walls are open.

Now do that with $1.3 billion of your money, 5,000 beds in the Texas desert, and three dead men.

The place is called Camp East Montana, a tent city on Fort Bliss outside El Paso. It is the largest immigration detention facility the federal government has ever built. And the paperwork behind it is the cleanest example I have seen this year of how privatization actually works: the government pays a company to do a thing, the company fails, and then the government pays again to fix the failure. The company keeps the first check.

Read the GAO's own report yourself, the one that names the deaths and the missing evidence.

Start with who got the first check. Acquisition Logistics LLC is registered to the home of a retired Navy commander in Richmond, Virginia. Public Citizen counted about 30 prior federal contracts worth a combined $48 million. Its website sat behind a password. GAO put it more politely: the original contractor "lacked prior detention facility experience."

The Army knew this and signed anyway, because the White House wanted beds fast. When a rival bidder, Gemini Tech Service, protested to the Court of Federal Claims (No. 25-1337C), the Army kept building. The court's September 2025 opinion, as excerpted by Public Citizen, found the Army "violated the statute by failing to comply with the CICA stay which was in place." That is not a BTP characterization. That is a federal judge describing the government breaking its own procurement law to rush a check to a firm with no track record.

Speed has a price, and GAO itemized it. The Army did not write a Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan "due to the expedited time frames." ICE never inspected the camp before filling it, as its own policy requires. No perimeter cameras. No outdoor recreation. No space for lawyers. And because the contract set no performance metrics, ICE officials told GAO they were "unable to apply any financial penalties." You cannot dock a contractor for failing a test you never wrote.

Here is what the first billion actually purchased. A tuberculosis patient housed with the general population in November 2025, because the contractor used a symptom questionnaire instead of the required skin test. A guard who lost a loaded firearm in January 2026; as of March it still had not been found. Guards paying detainees in cookies to clean their own dormitories. An October escape that ICE's own oversight officials blamed on the contractor's "inability to account for detained noncitizens."

Then the deaths. Public Citizen names them: Francisco Gaspar Andrés, December 3, 2025. Geraldo Lunas Campos, January 3, 2026. Victor Manuel Díaz, January 15, 2026. GAO reports the coroner ruled Lunas Campos's death "a homicide due to asphyxia" after a use of force. It also reports that "the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ICE, as required," and that "evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed." That is proven by GAO. Who destroyed it, and whether anyone will be charged, is not.

The suicide is its own indictment. GAO found the man showed risk factors, was placed in a medical holding room rather than a suicide-resistant cell, and was "left unattended for intervals longer than 15 minutes." A private company was paid a fixed price per head, per day, for that man's safety. It collected.

ICE terminated Acquisition Logistics "for convenience" in the spring. Read those words carefully. Termination for convenience is the government's no-fault exit. It does not claw back the roughly $315 million USAspending shows already paid out on the DHS side of the award, or the $598 million obligated. It does not touch the $7.1 million in phantom meals. Nobody on the contractor side has been fined for the deaths. The only OSHA penalties from this camp were three subcontractors cited over the July 2025 forklift death of a 38-year-old worker named Hector Gonzalez: $15,000, $15,000, and a contested $11,585. Acquisition Logistics was not cited at all.

Now the second check. Amentum Services, a 50,000-employee giant that had been a subcontractor at the camp, got a sole-source deal because, as DHS wrote, "no other vendor possesses the necessary rights or operational control." Translation: the walls are open. Four months later ICE extended it by $776 million without competition, arguing that a lapse "would directly threaten the life, safety, and well-being of detainees." The agency that let a man die unattended in a holding room now says continuity of contractor is a matter of life and death.

Public Citizen counts more than $94 million in penalties against Amentum and its subsidiaries since 2000, including a $21 million False Claims Act settlement by its DynCorp unit in April 2025. That is the firm chosen to raise standards. Reported, not proven wrongdoing at Fort Bliss. But it is the record ICE chose not to compete against.

I spent twenty years inside a system that decides who gets noticed by who is being paid to notice them. The difference here is that somebody was being paid. Handsomely. And they still did not look.

GAO says ICE "could save tens of millions of dollars through September 2026" just by pricing meals to the people actually inside. DHS agreed and said it would get to tiered pricing "by the end of 2026." So the fix is scheduled for after the money is spent.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, whose district holds the camp, asked on June 9 for four things: shut it down, investigate the contractor, refer the destroyed evidence to law enforcement, and redirect the funds. ICE's answer, seven weeks later, was a $776 million extension and the line "Far from closing, Camp East Montana is upgrading."

Forward this to one person who thinks "privatize it" means "save money," and ask them which of the two checks they would like back.

Quick break before the sources, and this one is about hiring the people who actually do the work.

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Burn Notice: When the government fires a contractor "for convenience" and hires the next one without a bid, the only people who paid for the failure are the ones who died in it and the ones who funded it.

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