Spontaneous Use of Force

Geraldo Lunas Campos was fifty-five years old, a father of three, Cuban, and had lived in the United States for nearly twenty years. He had asthma. In detention at Camp East Montana — a tent facility on the Fort Bliss military installation outside El Paso — he begged for his medication for days. Staff refused. They threatened him with solitary confinement.

On January 3, 2026, guards handcuffed him, tackled him, and compressed his neck and torso until he stopped breathing. Other detainees heard what sounded like the slamming of a body against the floor or a wall. They heard him gasp that he could no longer breathe.

The El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide — asphyxia from compression of the neck and torso. The first such ruling against ICE detention staff in at least fifteen years.

ICE initially described the death as a medical event. After learning the medical examiner would rule homicide, the agency reclassified it as a “spontaneous use of force.”

Eleven days later, Victor Manuel Diaz, thirty-six, Nicaraguan, died at the same facility. ICE called it a presumed suicide. This time, the body was sent to William Beaumont Army Medical Center — a military hospital on Fort Bliss that does not release autopsy reports to the public.

A man was killed and had his death renamed. The next man who died had his body routed to a facility where no independent finding could be produced. This is not incidental. It is the architecture.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in Egbert v. Boule that there is no constitutional cause of action against Border Patrol agents for excessive force — closing the last remaining path for individuals to sue federal immigration agents directly for constitutional violations. The ACLU described the result: ICE and Border Patrol agents are now “effectively a law unto themselves.”

If you cannot sue the agent, sue the government. But the Federal Tort Claims Act excludes discretionary functions and independent contractors — and medical care in immigration detention is overwhelmingly provided by contractors. If you cannot sue the government, sue the contractor. But private detention companies have spent years claiming derivative sovereign immunity — the argument that because they operate on behalf of the federal government, they share its protections.

If the constitutional claim has been closed by the Supreme Court, the statutory remedy blocked by exceptions, and the contractor shielded by derivative immunity — what remains is oversight. And oversight has been gutted.

In 2025, DHS conducted 36 percent fewer inspections of detention facilities while the detained population surged 78 percent. In January 2026 alone, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the U.S. District Court for Minnesota documented 97 ICE violations of court orders across 66 cases. He later found an additional 113 violations in 77 other cases beyond that initial set. His assessment: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

His other assessment: “ICE is not a law unto itself.”

But the architecture says otherwise.

At the start of the current administration, 133 state and local law enforcement agencies participated in 287(g) agreements — the program that deputizes local police to enforce federal immigration law. ICE has since enrolled 1,079 additional agencies. The total is now 1,212. At least 77.2 million people — 32 percent of the U.S. population — live in a county with a 287(g) agency.

No legislation was required. No congressional vote. No public debate. The program operates through bilateral administrative agreements between ICE and local agencies. Each agreement, individually, is a modest expansion of federal enforcement capacity. Collectively, they constitute a national deportation-policing network assembled without a single law being passed.

In Florida, the enrollments include the entire state Highway Patrol, university police departments, and conservation and wildlife agencies. What was designed as a tool for local jails to identify immigrants convicted of serious crimes now operates through traffic stops, campus security, and state parks.

The expansion is ninefold. The mechanism is paperwork.

Camp East Montana is the facility where Campos was killed and Diaz died. It holds more than 3,000 people in tent structures on a military base in the desert. The contract to build and operate it — $1.2 billion — went to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a company whose largest prior federal contract was under $16 million, whose registered address is a three-bedroom house in suburban Virginia, and whose principal is a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer. The Pentagon has refused to release the contract or explain why this company was selected.

Inside: five toilets per 72 people, routinely nonfunctioning. Approximately 140 emergency calls in five months. ICE’s own oversight unit found conditions violated at least 60 federal detention standards in the facility’s first fifty days.

The cost: approximately $152 per person per day. A standard hotel room in El Paso averages $118. Alternatives to detention — ankle monitoring, check-ins, case management — cost less than $4.20 per day.

Camp East Montana is one facility. The Detention Reengineering Initiative — an internal ICE plan disclosed to state governors in February — calls for eight mega-centers capable of housing 10,000 detainees each, sixteen regional processing sites, and ten additional turnkey facilities. Total estimated cost: $38.3 billion. Target capacity: 92,600 beds.

Target date for full operational capacity: November 30, 2026. The day after the midterm elections.

Since October 3, 2025, ICE has not paid a single third-party medical provider. The Veterans Affairs Financial Services Center, which had processed detainee medical claims for over two decades, terminated its agreement with ICE under political pressure. The replacement contractor will not begin processing claims until late April 2026. Approximately $300 million in medical claims remain unpaid. Providers have begun refusing to see detainees.

In 2025, thirty-two people died in ICE detention — tying the record set in 2004, nearly tripling the eleven deaths in 2024. After September 22, ICE stopped issuing the death reports that Congress mandates within ninety days of each death. The blackout lasted until February 6, 2026, when ICE batch-released eight overdue reports — some fifty days past the legal deadline.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official who served across three administrations, described the trajectory: the expansion of detention is “coupled with a dissolution of oversight, a reduction in detention standards, and draconian restrictions on releases” and is “destined to lead to more deaths.”

Every mechanism in this system does one thing: it removes the possibility that someone can be held accountable when a detained person is harmed.

The constitutional claim — closed by the Supreme Court. The statutory remedy — blocked by exceptions for discretionary functions and contractors. The oversight — cut by more than a third while the population it was supposed to monitor nearly doubled. The medical care — defunded since October, with no replacement operational. The death reports — suspended for four and a half months in violation of federal law. The autopsies — routed to military facilities where findings are not released. The court orders — violated at a rate that exceeds what some agencies accumulate in their entire existence.

And the capacity to do all of this has been distributed to 1,212 agencies through administrative agreements that required no vote and no law.

No single one of these changes was presented as a plan to build a system where people die and no one answers for it. Each was defended on its own terms: judicial restraint, budget efficiency, operational necessity, executive discretion. The convergence is the product.

This is not law enforcement. Law enforcement implies constraint — the constraints that distinguish the legitimate use of state force from its absence. What I am describing is force without constraint: a parallel carceral state at industrial scale, assembled through administrative agreements, funded outside the normal appropriations process, and designed so that when it kills, no independent finding of responsibility can be produced, no lawsuit can be filed, no inspection can document the conditions, and no medical provider is being paid to prevent the death.

Geraldo Lunas Campos lived in the United States for twenty years. He had three children. He asked for his asthma medication. He was denied, restrained, and asphyxiated. His death was called a “spontaneous use of force.” The next body was sent where no one could call it anything at all.

Ninety-two thousand six hundred beds by November 30.

Spontaneous Use of Force

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