On July 28, Reps. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) and Herb Conaway (D-Delran) sent a letter to top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration asking for details on plans to use Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (JBMDL) in Burlington and Ocean Counties as an immigrant detention facility. They at last got a response this week – and it contains essentially no answers to their questions or any other information of real use.
The letter, signed by Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense M. Roosevelt Ditlevson, says the Department of Defense “greatly appreciates” the two congressmen’s interest in JBMDL and restates facts that have already been known for months about the department’s plans.
“On July 15, 2025, the Secretary of Defense certified that the provision of Department of Defense land at JBMDL, for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to house illegal aliens will not negatively affect military training, operations, readiness, or other military requirements, including National Guard and Reserve readiness,” the letter states. “DHS and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will ensure that facilities at JBMDL meet the current ICE National Detention Standards for Non-Dedicated Facilities.”
The letter goes on to say that the Defense Department “welcome[s] the opportunity to brief you in person,” but Conaway’s office said no such briefing has been scheduled. (The original July letter had requested an in-person briefing by August 15.)
The questions originally asked by Conaway (who represents half of the base in Congress), Norcross, and four of their Democratic colleagues – about how many detainees will be held at the base, about the timeline for beginning detention operations, about coordination with local authorities in the two counties and eight towns that JBMDL spans – went unanswered in the letter.
According to Conaway’s office, the Trump administration has not been forthcoming via other channels, either. Ditlevson’s letter is the first official communication the congressmen have received on the JBMDL plans; officials at the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who also received the July letter, have not responded or reached out in other ways.
“We are deeply disappointed in the Trump Administration’s failure to respond in a timely manner to our questions and concerns regarding housing undocumented immigrants at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst,” Norcross and Conaway said in a joint statement today. “The response we received this week did not answer any of our questions and provided no new information about how this plan would be executed.”
“We will be requesting an in-person briefing on this matter as soon as possible so that we can receive answers and ensure undocumented immigrants who may be housed at the joint base receive humane treatment,” they added.
If and when JBMDL does ramp up into an immigrant detention facility, it is set to become a major component of DHS’s deportation program in the Northeast, with a potential capacity of up to 1,000 detainees. Details throughout the process, however, have been hard to come by.
When Conaway and Norcross visited JBMDL in July, they said base commanders were “as much in the dark as we are” about plans for the base. And in February, when the possibility of utilizing the base as a detention facility was first reported, both Conaway and Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), who represents the other half of the base, said they had heard about it through news reporting rather than from the Trump administration itself.
Smith, however, has taken a far more supportive stance towards the JBMDL plans than his Democratic colleagues.
“I have represented parts of this great military facility for more than 40 years, and I am proud to have worked to expand, strengthen and save JBMDL from multiple attempted base closings and alignment rounds,” Smith said in July. “The DOD knows that our facility has been used successfully for temporary migrant housing in the past and, if called upon, will step up and serve our national needs with excellence once again.”
