The Trump administration is seeking construction companies to expand or create immigration detention centers in up to 14 locations within the United States and its territories, including the naval base at Guantanamo Bay 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), confirming the expansion of the Port Isabel facility in Texas, 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 that the plan includes reopening.
Each expansion building would consist of a single-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 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 be realized.
The plan includes the construction of a completely new facility in Guantánamo, which revives a promise made by President Donald Trump in January 2025, when he stated that the base would have "30,000 beds" to accommodate "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 Guantánamo center amounts to 73 million dollars annually, despite the fact that the facility has only about 400 beds and less than 2% of them were 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 the ICE centers, which currently holds more than 60,000 people detained, according to data from the oversight agency TRAC.
The Trump administration recently set a new target of 2,000 arrests per day, after failing to meet the previous goal of 3,000.
The path to expansion has not been easy. ICE had already spent nearly 1 billion dollars purchasing almost a dozen commercial warehouses to convert them into detention centers, but most of those projects were stalled due to lawsuits related to environmental impact in Maryland, Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan.
In June, the agency began to sell or lease seven of those warehouses.
The conditions in existing centers have also raised alarm. In 2026, a measles outbreak has been reported in Arizona, along with expired food, air conditioning failures, and cases of medical negligence.
The mortality rate in ICE centers reached 88.9 deaths per 100,000 detainees so far this year, the highest level in 22 years, according to Human Rights Watch.
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