After Roxbury, will Burlington County be next? ICE plans remain hazy - New Jersey Globe

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plans to expand New Jersey’s immigrant detention capacity took a big step forward last month with the purchase of a warehouse in Roxbury Township, over the fervent protests of local residents. But ICE’s intentions at another potential detention site – Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a huge military installation in Burlington and Ocean Counties – remain hazy.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a letter dated September 29 that her department was assessing the viability of using the base for use as a detention and staging site and had “no firm timeframe” for whether or when operations might begin. Since then, the department has provided no public updates on its plans, and local members of Congress say they haven’t heard anything, either.

“We’ve heard zippo,” Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) said last week; Norcross and Rep. Herb Conaway (D-Delran), whose district includes part of the base, both serve on the Armed Services Committee. “If it wasn’t for Herb and myself making inquiries, there would be nothing.”

An ICE spokesperson declined to confirm whether an assessment of JBMDL for use as a detention site is still underway or what the timeframe might be, saying only that “the only announcement at this time is Roxbury.” JBMDL’s public affairs office did not respond to a request for comment.

Two local mayors whose towns overlap with the base also said they’ve gotten no information besides what’s been in the news. “I’m in the dark like all the rest of us,” said Wrightstown Mayor Doanld Cottrell; “I know what you read in the newspapers, maybe less,” said Springfield Mayor Dave Frank.

That echoes what happened in Roxbury, where the local mayor and township council said that ICE did not respond to any of their inquiries before announcing that it had purchased a warehouse for purposes of conversion into a detention center. (Or, more accurately, announcing it had purchased the warehouse, retracting its statement a few hours later, then re-confirming the purchase two days after that.)

There are some key differences between the situation in Roxbury and at JBMDL, however – the most important being that JBMDL is federal property, and local and state politicians have far less of a say over (or even insight into) what happens there. The base is already home to a low-security federal prison, FCI Fort Dix, with around 4,000 inmates.

“While we may have opinions about it, ultimately the federal government is sovereign there,” Frank said of the joint base.

The prospect of using JBMDL as a detention facility first arose early last year, when the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was considering using a number of military bases, JBMDL among them, as detention facilities. The earliest phase of the plan involved Fort Bliss in El Paso, which began detention operations last August (and which, despite being located on a military base, will be privately constructed and operated).

In July, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent a short letter to Conaway confirming that JBMDL might be used “to house illegal aliens.” Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), who represents the other half of the base in Congress, received a briefing on the plan shortly afterwards, at which he was told the base could be used to house up to 1,000 detainees if space at other facilities, particularly an expanded Fort Bliss, was insufficient.

Smith also noted at the time that JBMDL had been used for temporary migrant housing before, including during the Biden administration when it hosted more than ten thousand Afghan evacuees at a temporary housing site called Liberty Village. (Those examples, though, focused on instances of refugee housing rather than immigrant detention.)

After repeated questioning from Norcross and Conaway, Noem sent a follow-up letter in the fall – the letter was dated September 29, but the congressmen said they didn’t receive it until mid-November – laying out more details about the plan. Noem confirmed that her department was “working with [the Department of Defense] to assess the viability of establishing a site at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey to ensure that illegal aliens are securely detained,” but said there was “no approved construction plan” for such a facility and did not say what the timeline for the process might be.

Also going unmentioned in the letter is any indication of where, exactly, on the base a detention facility would be located. The base spans two counties, eight municipalities, and 42,000 acres; there have been suspicions that a detention facility would be located in the base’s westernmost areas in Burlington County, but nothing has been confirmed.

Some local protests have sprung up against the potential facility, and Cottrell, a Republican, said he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea. (Frank, also a Republican, said he didn’t want to take a definitive stance as long as so many details remain unknown.)

The scale of the response, however, has been muted compared to the ongoing uproar in Roxbury. Conaway said that he hopes that the negative attention other detention facilities around the country have received will convince the Trump administration to ultimately back down.

“I hope that all the public condemnation against the establishment of these detention facilities – I call them gulags – will not only work … but will also influence DoD not to involve themselves with Homeland Security in placing one of these facilities on our base,” he said.