Feds plan to build nation’s biggest migrant detention center at Fort Bliss

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The federal government plans to spend $1.26 billion to build the country's largest immigration detention center at Fort Bliss, an army base in El Paso, according to a contract announced in July.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced that Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics LLC was given nearly $232 million up front to build and run the 5,000-bed tent camp. The federal agency said work on the facility is expected to be completed by September 2027. According to the ACLU, the Trump administration started to detain people there on Aug. 17.

The contract is one of the biggest for Acquisition Logistics, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the contract. But the company does not appear to have experience running detention centers.

Using tents in the sprawling West Texas to detain migrants has been a long-time concern for immigrant rights activists because of scorching desert heat.

The Trump Administration has promised to carry out “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America” by arresting more than 1 million immigrants a year. It has set an aggressive goal of arresting 3,000 people a day.

Now, the administration is faced with the task of creating more detention space for the people they’re arresting. That effort already has brought allegations of unsafe conditions by watchdog groups.

The nonprofit Human Rights Watch claimed it found “abusive practices” at three detention centers in Florida in a report released earlier this year. It found that some people were “shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets.” Detaineers were also being “forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting.”

Earlier this summer, the administration opened a tent facility in a Florida swamp dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” which has already drawn criticism about detainees' health.

In Texas, during Trump’s first administration, the government built a sprawling tent city to house detained migrants at Tornillo, a border town in El Paso County just 40 miles southeast of Fort Bliss. It became a focus of criticism after it opened in 2018 with capacity to house around 2,500 people, including women and children.

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