The Trump Administration is seeking construction companies to build additional immigration detention units in as many as 14 different locations in the United States, documents show—including the Virgin Islands and Guantanamo Bay.
A request for construction proposals published on Friday shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is set to expand a detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border in Port Isabel, Texas. It also lists more than a dozen other potential targets for new or expanded facilities. The tentative list includes plans to revive a detention facility in El Centro, Calif., which was closed in 2014, and to build a facility in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which does not have any ICE detention facilities.
It also includes a new facility in Guantanamo Bay, the military base in Cuba where Trump announced plans to open an ICE detention facility in January 2025. Trump, at the time, claimed that Guantanamo had “30,000 beds” and promised it would be used to hold “the worst criminal illegal aliens.” But the Administration has so far struggled to deliver on such plans. In May, CBS News reported that the Administration was spending $73 million to operate the immigration detention facility annually, despite it holding only about 400 beds, and fewer than 2% of which were occupied.
Other locations listed for potential facility expansion include Miami; Honolulu; Florence, Arizona; Batavia, New York; Broadview, Illinois; Oakdale, Louisiana; El Paso, Texas; Huntsville, Texas; and Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. It is unclear how ICE will decide which the facilities will ultimately be expanded. One of the documents says the construction plan will move forward "if it is in the government's best interest."
The contract is expected to be awarded by the end of September this year, the document says. TIME has reached out to ICE for comment.
The plan to rapidly expand detention facilities follows a renewed push by the Trump administration to increase immigrant detentions by ICE. A source familiar with the matter tells TIME that the Trump administration recently set a new goal of making 2,000 daily arrests, after failing to meet a goal of 3,000 daily arrests set last year.
A concept of the new detention building in Port Isabel, Texas put out by ICE in its bidding proposal —Immigration and Customs EnforcementBut ICE’s initial building spree hit multiple legal and political hurdles, despite Congress appropriating the agency more than $100 billion billions to ramp up its arrests and deportations. ICE previously spent $1 billion purchasing nearly a dozen commercial warehouses in an attempt to convert them into detention facilities. Most of those projects have been stalled by lawsuits challenging the plan's environmental impact on local communities.
A recent surge of new detainees has exacerbated the overcrowding problem in ICE facilities nationwide. ICE is currently detaining more than 60,000 people, according to data from the watchdog organization Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Over the past year, various problems have been reported at some of the facilities including a measles outbreak, expired food, air conditioning failures, and medical negligence.
In April, a federal judge halted the construction of an immigration detention center in Williamsport, Maryland, citing severe sewage concerns. Similar lawsuits are also ongoing in Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan, prompting the agency to sell or give away seven of the warehouses, according to reporting by the New York Times.
All of the potential expansions listed in ICE’s request for proposals share the same construction plan, which includes a one-story building consisting of 26 detention cells. The initial floor plan shows security cameras will be installed in each of the detention cells. Detainees in the 26 cells would share three showers spread across the building. The expansion buildings are each estimated to cost between $24 million and $40 million, with ICE capping total facility expansion spending at $10 billion.
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