Feds Drop Plan for Ice Detention Facility at Joint Base Mcguire-Dix-Lakehurst

A plan to house immigration detainees at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is no longer moving forward.

The proposal had been under consideration since last year and could have brought between 1,000 and 3,000 detainees to the base, which sits across Burlington and Ocean counties.

According to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, federal officials considered building detention facilities at the New Jersey base and at Camp Atterbury in Indiana.

Those plans were eventually dropped.

The GAO says the Department of Defense decided in October 2025 that it no longer planned to build additional detention facilities on military bases. Officials from both the Pentagon and ICE later confirmed that the New Jersey and Indiana projects did not move forward.

The idea had drawn questions from New Jersey lawmakers and nearby communities about what a detention operation of that size could mean for the base and the surrounding area.

There is one part of the story that is still open.

ICE has not formally withdrawn its broader request for military support with immigration detention. That agreement was still active as of August, according to the GAO.

So while the detention facility proposed for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is off the table, the broader federal arrangement involving military support for immigration detention still exists.

The Joint Base proposal was part of a much larger effort by ICE to expand detention space across the country.

The GAO says ICE spent about $1.07 billion buying 11 warehouses it planned to convert into detention facilities.

By June, the agency was already trying to sell seven of them.