Guards at Camp East Montana, an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, witnessed detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos with a bedsheet tied around his neck and the door handle, a setup that would tighten if the door was opened. Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant with a history of mental illness and prior institutionalization in New York, had been detained for about a month before his death.

According to a nearly 300-page unpublished medical examiner’s investigative report reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Campos expressed frustration about his medical care almost immediately after admission. The report includes detailed notes of medical staff interactions with him.

Federal officials have dismissed detainee claims of inadequate medical care and poor conditions at Camp East Montana and other detention centers as “false” and “fearmongering clickbait,” asserting that many immigrants receive the best medical care of their lives while detained.

Campos was sentenced to a year in jail following a 2003 conviction for sexual contact with a child under 11, as reported by The Associated Press. His children declined to comment on the medical care failures or his criminal history but, through Horowitz, stated, “They want people to know that he was a person like anyone else and that he didn’t need to die.”

Investigative records from the El Paso medical examiner indicate that after Campos’s suicide attempt, facility staff monitored him every 15 minutes, as federally required. At the time of his death, the typical detainee had spent 38 days at the facility, based on a ProPublica analysis of government data from the Deportation Data Project.

This case highlights ongoing concerns about how mental health crises are managed in immigration detention centers.

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