The Trump administration is awarding $1.26 billion to build the nation’s largest detention and deportation center, to be located at Fort Bliss, Texas.
Fort Bliss, which is near El Paso, encompasses more than 1.12 million acres of land along the border with Mexico, and also features an airport. The new facility will have room for 5,000 beds and will likely serve as a deportation hub for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to Bloomberg.
The housing is set to consist of tents that will feature heating and air-conditioning. The contract is being awarded to Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics Company with $232 million of the total price being put up by the U.S. Army.
An ICE official told Bloomberg that the federal government “is indeed pursuing all available options to expand bedspace capacity. This process does include housing detainees at certain military bases.”
The announcement of the contract for Fort Bliss comes only a week after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that DHS will be setting up new deportation and detention facilities at military bases in Indiana and New Jersey.
Since Trump came into office this year, the administration has added 60 facilities to the list of those used to house migrants marked for deportation.
Now two more are being added to that list. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth informed Congress in a letter that Camp Atterbury in central Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey will be available “for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security to house illegal aliens.”
In the letter, Hegseth insisted that turning space over to immigration enforcement “will not negatively affect military training, operations, readiness, or other military requirements, including National Guard and Reserve readiness.”
