Trump could use a South Jersey military base to confine undocumented immigrants

The Trump administration is readying plans to detain thousands of undocumented immigrants at military sites across the United States, the New York Times has reported, an effort that could eventually touch South Jersey and the sprawling Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

The administration’s plan to deport millions of people includes a military base component, the newspaper said, and a detention hub is being developed at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, to eventually hold up to 10,000 people.

That hub would be a model for tent-camp sites in more than a dozen states, including the installation that spreads through Burlington and Ocean Counties. Here is a look at how immigration and the local base could be impacted.

In short, it needs beds. And space.

An effort to deport millions of people — about 13.7 million undocumented migrants live in the U.S. — will require a federal mobilization of people, facilities and dollars. The surge of arrests under the Trump administration is already crowding the detention system, exceeding its capacity and causing ICE to release detainees, sometimes dozens a day, according to internal government statistics obtained by CBS News.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently confines about 42,000 people in a network of 190 detention sites around the country, including one in Elizabeth, N.J. Pennsylvania is home to the 1,876-bed Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, along with the Clinton County Correctional Facility and the Pike County Correctional Facility.

Last week the administration’s need for space became even more apparent, as ICE began holding immigrants at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. The Center City prison is one of two federal facilities in the Northeast United States being pressed into that use and will hold up to 125 detainees awaiting court hearings or removal to other countries.

The Trump administration also has held immigrants at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and even before the inauguration the Biden administration was exploring ways to add 600 beds in New Jersey.

Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is the Defense Department’s only tri-service base, “a vital hub for global reach,” as it describes itself, responsible for providing mission support, airlift, air refueling, and combat airpower.

It was created from the 2009 combination of three installations: McGuire Air Force Base, once known as Rudd Field; the Army’s Fort Dix; and the Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst, perhaps best-known as the site of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

The base stands 18 miles southeast of Trenton. And it’s huge, spanning 42,000 acres and covering 20 miles from east to west, host to more than 40,000 active-duty service members, civilians, and family members.

Asked about the possibility of holding immigrants at the base, Capt. Kitsana Dounglomchan emailed, “We do not have any information to provide.” This week the spokesperson referred questions to ICE, which did not immediately respond.

The specific needs, conditions, and regulations under which immigrants might be held remain to be seen.

But in the past the base has served big, new populations — none of whom had been involuntarily forced onto a military base to await deportation.

In 2021, amid the chaotic evacuation of Kabul as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, the base was one of eight U.S. military installations to serve as “safe havens” for evacuated war allies and their families. The encampment known as “Liberty Village” was basically a small town on a military base, home to 3,377 families, three times the size of Cape May, N.J.

To house the Afghan allies, some of the base’s existing brick housing was supplemented by what were called tents, though those structures were hardened and more resilient than canvas.

A decade earlier in 2010, the base served as a relief center for evacuees who arrived after a devastating earthquake in Haiti. In 1999, then-Fort Dix provided temporary shelter to hundreds of Kosovo refugees amid the Kosovo War. And way back during the Cold War, from 1955 to 1957, Fort Dix housed Hungarian refugees fleeing Soviet repression.

Yes. The Department of Defense can make military bases available to any federal, state, or local law-enforcement officials for law-enforcement purposes, according to the National Immigration Law Center, which works to advance the rights of low-income immigrants.

In 2014, amid a crush of migrants from Central America, President Barack Obama housed thousands of children who were fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras on military bases in Texas, Oklahoma, and California.

Congressman Herb Conaway, an Air Force veteran whose Third District includes McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, called any Trump administration use of the base where he once served “egregious.”

“We are not at war — there is no justification for using wartime resources or facilities for his inhumane mass deportation plan,” the Democrat said in a statement released Tuesday. “This decision is ill-advised and wrong.”

New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat who was previously the representative in the Third District, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, a Republican whose Fourth District includes part of the base, could not immediately be reached.