Plans for immigration detention center at South Jersey military base scrapped by Trump administration

The Trump administration has ended plans to build an immigration detention facility at a South Jersey military base, according to a new U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

The report, which audited the expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and immigrant detention, said the Defense Department “no longer plan to build detention facilities” on other military bases, as of October 2025.

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth informed U.S. Rep. Herb Conaway, in a letter, that Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Burlington County, along with Camp Atterbury in Indiana, had been approved for temporary use to house immigrant detainees. Federal officials estimated MDL could have housed up to 3,000 detainees.

Conaway, whose congressional district includes the base, and U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, met with base commanders more than a week later. According to the congressmen, at the time, commanders were “as much in the dark” as they were.

GAO noted in the report that ICE has not rescinded its request and that the Defense Department authorization remains active.

In a joint statement, Conaway and Norcross praised the administration for abandoning plans to house detained immigrants on the base, adding officials “shouldn’t have needed more than a year” to come to the decision.

“From the very beginning, we explained to the Administration that hijacking America’s only tri-service joint base as a ‘Garden State Gulag’ for immigrants was a cruel, wasteful idea,” the statement said. “It’s a positive step that Homeland Security and the Department of Defense finally seem to acknowledge the realities of their flawed plan as explained in the Government Accountability Office’s report.”