Trump administration to detain immigrants at New Jersey military base

By Victoria Valenzuela, Documented Publish Date: Aug. 25, 2025

U.S. Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey is set to become one of the nation’s newest immigrant detention sites. In July 2025, the Trump administration announced its plans to use the military base to hold thousands of people facing deportation.

But immigrant justice advocates are concerned that the military base, with its capacity to hold between 1,000 to 3,000 immigrants in detention, would be repeating a shameful history of America’s past when the nation used the military in civil immigration affairs to incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. The base currently serves the Air Force, Army and Navy.

The additional lack of transparency about how the facility will operate makes advocates even more worried as New Jersey contends with detention centers already in operation, including New Jersey’s Elizabeth Detention Center with 1,300 beds and the recently opened 1,000-bed center, Delaney Hall.

“The use of the military for interior enforcement is deeply concerning,” said Ami Kachalia, a campaign strategist with the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “What we’re seeing with Fort Dix is an overreach that we shouldn’t normalize when it comes to the use of military facilities or military resources for immigration detention.”

The use of the Department of Defense (DOD) resources, staff and facilities in civil proceedings, is fairly unprecedented in recent years, Kachalia said. ​​

“This action, in some ways, reopens a shameful chapter of U.S. history putting […] visa holders and long term residents in camps on a military base, harkens back to a dark era [of] Japanese internment, and we must make sure we’re learning from the past and not repeating it,” Kachalia added.

Christopher Purdy, director of the Chamberlain Network, an organization that “organizes veterans in defense of human rights,” said that the use of military bases to hold immigrants originated as a humanitarian effort from the Biden administration during the Afghan evacuation in 2021. Purdy, who served in Iraq in 2011 as a soldier and also formerly worked at the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, said they airlifted 100,000 people out of Kabul into military bases around the world — including Fort Dix — while they sought asylum. The Obama administration also held unaccompanied children at military bases until 2014.

Today, he says the Trump administration is doing the opposite. “Instead of taking people out of harm’s way, what they’re actually doing is putting people in danger.” Like Kachalia, Purdy believes the usage of military installations to conduct civil proceedings and detain immigrants echoes the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“Using the military to enforce civil law [and] immigration law is incredibly dangerous to this country,” Purdy said. “We have a clear separation between law enforcement and the military for a reason, and to use the military in this way is going to put a lot of people at risk.”

Kachalia said that she is concerned that the use of this infrastructure will result in even more enforcement that will impact New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware. She is concerned that the uncertain timeline of this operation calls into question many things such as conditions and access to sufficient food, heating and staffing.

Lack of transparency

 After numerous requests by the ACLU and members of Congress, the DOD and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have yet to provide information about the base, a fact that concerns advocates worried about the militarization of immigration enforcement and detention and what that will mean.

Sarah Mehta, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigration team, said that advocates are still trying to learn about the plans for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and hope to get more information about who the immigrant population to be detained there will be, how long they’re going to be in detention and if they will be deported from the base.

“These are not wartime operations,” Mehta said. “These are not national security operations.” 

She added that it was unclear if the military would still be able to use the base, or use the base for deportation flights. “We haven’t got a public answer about that yet,” she said, “but it could […] really shift the way that people are detained. It can speed up their deportations if they end up using the airfields.”

It is also unclear where detained immigrants will be housed in the base. Purdy said that there are modern barracks as well as World War II era barracks there, but he is unsure what kind of setting immigrants will be in.

He’s not the only one left out of the loop. 

Following the Trump administration’s memo announcing plans to detain immigrants at military bases, New Jersey Congressmen Herb Conaway and Donald Norcross said the administration has given them no information about the base, despite them requesting full transparency. 

They asked the DOD and ICE administrators to provide them a timeline for operations and information about facility construction and base operations, information about reimbursement and funding, detainee qualifications, and methods of coordination with local authorities by mid-August.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the decision by the Trump administration to use Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst as an immigrant detention center,” Congressman Conaway said in a press release. “This is an inappropriate use of our national defense system and military resources.”

Barriers in access to the facility

Among concerns of transparency, Purdy said that as members of Congress have been turned away from entering immigrant detention facilities in California and New York to exercise their oversight, questions remain about the possible additional blocks immigrants at the base will confront when trying to obtain legal counsel for their asylum or deportation hearings.

“This is just another barrier that’s going to be put up in front of their lawyers who are going to have to find ways to get onto posts, and go through another checkpoint that could be weaponized to keep lawyers out,” Purdy said. “If a member of Congress can’t access their legal rights in this environment, what would an asylum attorney be able to do?”

In addition to legal counsel, he believes there are also going to be barriers for protestors, who could be turned away from entering the base.

While protesting at the base might be difficult, there are still ways to oppose it. Mehta said that it is important for people to contact their members of Congress, the DOD, the DHS, and let them know that their communities don’t want the use of the military and their bases to be used in this way. She explained that Congress can exercise oversight and the public can still make their opposition known.

“I think it’s really important for there to be as much vocal opposition as possible, for people to make their feelings known to their local, state and federal representatives, and to try to push against this so that they won’t end up using this base,” Mehta said. “My understanding is it’s not currently in use, and there’s still hopefully a window of time to use public pressure to stop its activation.”

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