A Military Built for War, Now Jailing Migrants

Trump’s detention expansion puts the Pentagon’s might behind ICE’s mass deportation campaign.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is moving to use U.S. military installations to house thousands of immigrants in deportation proceedings, a decision critics say dangerously blurs the line between civil law enforcement and the armed forces — and revives some of the darkest chapters in American history.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this summer approved requests from the Department of Homeland Security to begin holding immigrants at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, Camp Atterbury in Indiana, and Fort Bliss in Texas, while also expanding migrant detention at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, according to correspondence obtained by NPR and confirmed by the Pentagon.

At Fort Bliss, ICE has already begun holding detainees in tent-like facilities, with capacity expected to reach 5,000 people — the largest civil immigration detention site in the United States. In Indiana and New Jersey, officials say the bases could soon accommodate between 1,000 and 3,000 people each. Together, the…