14 measles cases reported at El Paso ICE tent camp

At least 14 active measles cases have been reported at a troubled El Paso tent camp holding more than 3,000 immigrants, Democratic U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar said Tuesday. Another 112 people in the facility are being isolated. 

The outbreak has closed the detention center to visitors, reaffirming what Escobar and advocates call an “unfolding humanitarian crisis” at Camp East Montana located on the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base. It comes after a spate of tuberculosis and COVID-19 outbreaks there over the past month and mounting complaints by lawmakers and advocates about the “deteriorating” conditions there.

Escobar said the outbreak also poses risk for the greater El Paso community, adding in a statement that detainees with measles were being quarantined at local hospitals. In addition to the thousands held at the camp, she said there are “likely hundreds of El Pasoans employed there, along with 56 members of the Texas National Guard.”

Yet, during more than half a dozen oversight visits to the camp, including as recently as last week, Escobar said that she has never seen personnel wearing masks to prevent the spread of such highly infectious diseases. 

Escobar’s statement came after the City of El Paso Department of Public Health confirmed 13 measles cases at the ICE facility and four additional cases within the city last week, declining to offer any details. 

The cases within the community involved four people in their 20s and 30s with unknown vaccination status, although around 98% of El Paso County residents are vaccinated against measles, according to city officials. 

Spokespeople for the city and its public health department did not respond to questions Tuesday, including how the four in the community contracted the disease. But last week, city spokesperson Laura Cruz-Acosta told The Texas Tribune that the measles cases inside the detention center and in the community are unrelated. She and health department officials have not responded to questions to explain their contact tracing.

A spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, Chris Van Deusen, deferred questions about the measles cases in the detention facility to the Department of Homeland Security and the cases in the community to the local health department. The latter is a stark departure from last year’s historic statewide measles outbreak that infected 762 people; in that outbreak, the state agency for months provided weekly updates on new cases.

Van Deusen wrote in an email that the “state’s role inside federal facilities is very limited,” but that typically his agency coordinates with local health departments if they need assistance on measles in particular, which is highly contagious. The agency in January responded to measles cases at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, the nation’s only ICE facility holding children and their parents, including by providing vaccine doses. Camp East Montana houses only adults.

Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to detailed questions about the El Paso outbreak or Escobar’s claims on Tuesday.  

In a statement last month, a DHS spokesperson defended its handling of medical care at Camp East Montana, saying, “This is the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

“No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States,” wrote the spokesperson, who did not provide their name. “Get a grip.”

Measles, which is particularly dangerous to unvaccinated children, pregnant women and immunocompromised adults, has a long incubation period, said Peter Hotez, a leading infectious disease expert and dean for Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine in Houston. A person with measles can spread it to as many as 18 other unvaccinated individuals on average and they remain contagious for about four days before and after the rash appears. Investigations are necessary to understand how the infections happened, Hotez said. 

It’s not clear whether the federal government has conducted any such inquiry into the measles cases at either the Dilley center or the El Paso camp. DHS has not responded to multiple questions about its contact tracing and handling of the infectious diseases. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson also directed questions to DHS. The vaccination coverage at either ICE facility is also not clear. 

Escobar and lawyers said the latest public health “crisis” at Camp East Montana underscores the mounting complaints of poor medical care there. Detainees with serious medical issues are often without services, which advocates said can be non-existent even for those with urgent needs. Pregnant women and those with diabetes and HIV have been unable to obtain care. Some, including a man with a broken foot, have been on the waiting list for medical help since September, advocates said. 

“There has been nothing but crisis after crisis inside the walls of this tent city,” Escobar said Tuesday. “I again renew my call for DHS to shut down Camp East Montana and for the Department of Justice to investigate the contractor for fraud.”

In a letter to DHS last week, Escobar and more than two dozen Democrats said that the administration should close the tent camp, which is currently the largest ICE facility in the country. Constructed in a record two months after a $1.2 billion contract was granted to Acquisition Logistics, a Virginia-based company with no listed related experience, it is viewed as a model for more than two dozen ICE facilities the government plans to convert into detention centers across the country, including several in Texas. 

Spokespeople for Acquisition Logistics and two of its contractors in charge of detention and medical care at Camp East Montana did not immediately respond to questions or could not be reached Tuesday.

“For the safety of everyone at the facility, for an end to abuses to detainees, and for fiscal responsibility to the American people,” Escobar and other lawmakers wrote, “the site cannot continue to operate.” 

More than 45 people detained at Camp East Montana have alleged abuse and serious injuries to attorneys, according to a letter the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups sent to DHS and ICE supervisors in December. Those allegations included a teen hospitalized after he accused staff of slamming him to the ground and beating him. The detention staffers blocked the security cameras, he said, and “grabbed my testicles and firmly crushed them.” 

Separately, in a span of six weeks starting in mid-December, three people have died at the camp. 

The first death, 48-year-old Francisco Gaspar-Andres, appeared to “partially be the result of poor medical care by staff,” Escobar and other lawmakers wrote. They argued that despite seeking medical attention from facility staff for “increasingly serious symptoms,” Gaspar-Andres was only hospitalized “once his condition had severely deteriorated.” His family reiterated such complaints of poor medical care to the Tribune.

A month later, 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos died at the facility after ICE officials initially attributed his death to “medical distress.” The agency later said it was a suicide attempt. But the local medical examiner ruled it a homicide involving staff – an unusual development that former ICE officials said has not occurred in at least 15 years. 

Six detainees described in federal court statements that Lunas Campos begged for days to receive his asthma medication. Detention staff refused and threatened him with solitary confinement, inmates said. After Lunas Campos was dragged in shackles to an isolation unit, detainees recalled “what sounded like the slamming of a person’s body against the floor or a wall.” They said they heard him gasp that he could no longer breathe. Then, “silence.” ICE last week quietly updated Lunas Campos’ cause of death, finding it the result of staff’s “spontaneous use of force” to prevent him “from harming himself.”

Eleven days after Lunas Camps died, 36-year-old Victor Manuel Diaz marked the tent camp’s third fatality. Guards told emergency responders that they found the Nicaraguan man with pants tied around his neck, a characterization of suicide that his family has disputed. 

Diaz’s body was sent to a U.S. Army hospital, rather than the local medical examiner, where a military spokesperson said that the agency would not make his autopsy public.

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