(Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration is aiming to construct the largest federal migrant detention facility in the United States on a military base in Texas, the Pentagon said on Thursday, the latest move to use military resources to make good on his immigration agenda.
Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings, and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants. Since taking office this year, Trump has sent migrants to Guantanamo Bay naval base, though in far fewer numbers than planned.
The Pentagon said the initial plan was to hold 1,000 migrants at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, by mid to late August and then finish construction of a facility with 5,000 beds in “the weeks and months ahead.”
“Upon completion, this will be the largest federal detention center in history for this critical mission – the deportation of illegal aliens,” Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson, told reporters.
While the facility is being built on a military base, the Department of Homeland Security is expected to be responsible for the migrants.
The detention of migrants on U.S. bases is not new. Even under Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, the Pentagon had approved a request to house unaccompanied migrant children at military facilities in Texas.
Trump’s administration is also building other facilities to hold migrants. A 1,000-bed Indiana facility is set to open and has been nicknamed the “Speedway Slammer.”
The Trump administration has hailed its actions along the border, including the deployment of active-duty troops, as the reason for a sharp decline in crossings by undocumented migrants. Trump made voters’ concerns about immigration a cornerstone of his 2024 reelection bid.
The number of migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has hit record levels in recent weeks, with about 57,000 detained as of July 27, according to ICE data.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart. Additional reporting by Ted HessonEditing by Rod Nickel)
