The Trump administration is seeking construction companies to expand or create immigrant detention centers in up to 14 locations within the United States and its territories, including the naval base at Guantánamo in Cuba and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to documents obtained by the magazine Time.
The formal request for proposals was published on Monday on the federal portal sam.gov by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and confirms the expansion of the Port Isabel, Texas facility, near the border with Mexico, as the first concrete step of the plan.
The list of potential locations includes Miami, Honolulu, Florence (Arizona), Batavia (New York), Broadview (Illinois), Oakdale (Louisiana), El Paso and Huntsville (Texas), Aguadilla (Puerto Rico), St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands —which currently has no ICE center— and El Centro, California, a facility that has been closed since 2014 and which the plan intends to reopen.
Each expansion building would consist of a one-story structure with 26 detention cells, security cameras in each cell, and three shared showers for all inmates.
The estimated cost per unit ranges between 24 and 40 million dollars, with a total spending cap set at 10 billion dollars. The contract is expected to be awarded before the end of September.
The plan also includes the construction of an entirely new facility in Guantánamo, reviving a promise that Trump made in January 2025, when he stated that the base would have "30,000 beds" to house "the worst illegal criminal immigrants."
The reality has been very different. According to CBS News in May, the operational cost of the military component of the Guantanamo center amounts to 73 million dollars annually, despite the facility having only about 400 beds and less than 2% of them being occupied.
As of May 11, only six detainees remained at the base, all of Haitian nationality.
The expansion responds to a crisis of overcrowding in ICE centers, which currently hold over 60,000 people detained, according to data from the monitoring agency TRAC.
The Trump administration recently set a new target of 2,000 daily arrests, after failing to meet the previous goal of 3,000 daily arrests.
The path to expansion has not been easy. ICE had already spent nearly $1 billion purchasing almost a dozen commercial warehouses to convert them into detention centers, but most of those projects were halted due to lawsuits related to environmental impact in Maryland, Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan.
In June, the agency began to sell or transfer seven of those warehouses.
The conditions in the existing centers have also raised alarm. In 2026, a measles outbreak was reported in Arizona, along with expired food, air conditioning failures, and cases of medical negligence.
The mortality rate in ICE facilities has reached 88.9 deaths per 100,000 detainees so far this year, the highest level in 22 years, according to Human Rights Watch.
The ICE document warns that the construction plan will proceed only "if it is in the best interest of the government," a clause that leaves open the possibility that several of the 14 projects may not come to fruition.
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