Trump admin to open nation's largest immigration detention center in Texas with $1.2B contract
The feds will be able to hold up to 5,000 illegal immigrants at a time at Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas, to meet the demands of the rapidly expanding Trump administration's deportation campaign, Bloomberg reported.
Shackled migrants walk toward a military transport plane before their deportation from the US.
US Department of Defense/AFP via Getty Images
The Department of Defense awarded the contract, which ends Sept. 30, 2027, to Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics LLC to set up a tent city on the base.
The Trump administration has sought to erect temporary facilities to hold migrants as it attempts to make room for the 3,000-person quota it's seeking to collar each day. The effort has been turbocharged by a new flood of $45 billion for new detention beds from Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The massive spending bill will double Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention capacity, with the goal of holding 100,000 illegal immigrants at a time as the Trump administration seeks to carry out 1 million deportations each year.
ICE opened 'Alligator Alcatraz,' a tent detention center erected by the state of Florida in the middle of the alligator-infested swampland of the Everglades, earlier this month. The feds can currently hold up to 3,000 illegal immigrants there and hope to expand that to 5,000.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also set his sights on two additional military bases, Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, for the deportation campaign, according to the Associated Press.
The Trump administration has set out to deport one million illegal immigrants each year.
AFP via Getty Images
'We're looking for any available bed space we can get that meets the detention standards we're accustomed to,' Trump's border czar Tom Homan said Friday.
'The faster we get the beds, the more people we can take off the street,' he added.
Fort Bliss has previously been used for immigration purposes, housing unaccompanied migrant kids and Afghan refugees following the US withdrawal from the war-torn country, according to Stars and Stripes.
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