Lawmakers angry over Trump plan to detain immigrants in South Jersey. Donald Norcross says he’s ‘never been shut out like this.’

Democratic U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross expressed anger and puzzlement toward the Trump administration on Friday after meeting with commanders at a South Jersey military installation about plans to confine immigration detainees there.

Norcross said he and the military leaders were being kept in the dark by the administration, which has not provided information about its intentions for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

Standing 800 feet from the base fence line, Norcross spoke after he and Democratic U.S. Rep. Herb Conaway, whose 3rd Congressional District includes the 42,000-acre base, conferred with the commanders.

Norcross and Conaway wanted to know when detainees might arrive, how many may come — and even if the proposal would go forward at all.

Norcross, who represents the 1st Congressional District, said it has been “dead silence” from the Department of Homeland Security.

“I have never been shut out like this by our government,” Norcross said, adding that the Trump administration “is shutting down transparency.”

”The fact that we’re not being briefed is inexcusable.”

Conaway said that so little information was being shared that “we’re not sure it’s actually going to take place.”

The congressmen acknowledged that they’d heard media reports that 1,000 to 3,000 detainees could be held at the base. But, they confessed, they couldn’t confirm that.

Conaway added that if a detention center were to be built, “I don’t want to see sloppy, unconstitutional, inhumane actions at the facility. How we treat detainees is the hallmark of the American nation.”

The Congress members both expressed concern that the base’s core mission, its mobility, and its lethality in projecting U.S. power would be compromised should a center be built to house immigrants.

They added that they wonder whether a detention center would affect the morale of military personnel living on the base.

Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst spreads through Burlington and Ocean Counties.

The news conference took place at the Wrightstown Municipal Hall, a building that was once a military barracks, located near base fences topped by barbed wire. As the congressmen spoke, military planes landed and took off at regular intervals.

Just before the media briefing, Wrightstown Mayor Don Cottrell said his town of 400 residents is contemplating the proposed immigrant housing “with great fear.”

People are worried about “civil unrest,” he said, adding, “I mean the riots that’ll come with this thing.”

Cottrell said that outsiders who’ll come to protest will turn his town “into LA and Newark,” where demonstrators clogged the streets to oppose Trump policies over detainment and deportation.

“I don’t have a police department in my two-square-mile town,” he said. “Where are all those people going to go when the time comes?”

Officials at the base did not respond to a request for comment. The Defense Department issued a brief statement that provided no new information.

“Updates will be provided as they are available,” the statement said.

Trump administration officials earlier approved the base to contain a deportation center, naming it as one of two sites in the country now certified to assist in the president’s plan to remove millions of immigrants.

The Defense Department said people would be confined in “temporary soft-sided holding facilities.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth approved the new use, alerting Conaway in a July 15 letter. The Air Force veteran sits on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Soon after the news became public, Conaway offered the operation a new and uncomplimentary nickname: the “Garden State Gulag.” It was a play on the Trump administration’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention center in the Florida Everglades.

Conaway said he opposed confining immigrants at the base “in the strongest possible terms.”

On Friday, he invoked Alligator Alcatraz as an example of the wrong way to run a detention center.

“How we treat detainees is a hallmark of the American nation,” he said. “I don’t want to see the things that we’ve seen.”

The other military base named was Camp Atterbury in Indiana.

People who live and work around the base offered varied opinions on Friday.

Asked if he was for or against a detention center, Oliver Schmitz, 54, who was folding towels at the Wrightstown Laundromat, said simply, “What’s there to be against? I have no problem with it.”

Schmitz, who immigrated from Germany when he was 29 to work as an IT engineer in South Jersey, said it’s “unfair to come here illegally.”

He added, “There was all that paperwork and worrying I had to do to get here the right way. They could do it, too — unless they were persecuted in their country and had to leave as refugees. That’s different.”

A woman named Rani, who asked that her last name and the name of the liquor store where she works be withheld, is also an immigrant — but has a different viewpoint than Schmitz.

“Detaining people on a base is unfair,” she said. “I came here from India to survive, like them, although I’m legal. I’m just worried if businesses will be damaged if protesters who don’t like people being housed here come and there are fights.”

Meanwhile, Tony Arroyo, who was shopping with his wife at Wrightstown Plaza strip mall near the base, had a question: “I know that the base doesn’t have any buildings for people,” said Arroyo, 68, a retired mechanic. “Where will they live, in soldiers’ housing?”

He favors sending undocumented immigrants back to their home countries, saying, “Coming in illegally, that’s not doing it the right way.”

New Jersey already is home to two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, Delaney Hall in Newark and the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth.

The administration is determined to find room to hold people, its goal of mass deportations challenged not only by Democrats but by logistics. The administration needs beds and space.

An effort to deport millions of people — about 13.7 million undocumented migrants live in the United States — requires a federal mobilization of people, facilities, and dollars. And the surge of immigration arrests under Trump is already crowding the detention system.

ICE had nearly 58,000 immigrants in custody as of June 29, up from about 39,000 the week after Trump was inaugurated in January. More than 70% of those held by ICE have no criminal convictions, statistics show.

ICE also tracks an additional 184,000 people through its Alternatives to Detention program, which allows immigrants to live freely while being monitored by electronic devices and check-ins.

Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is the Defense Department’s only tri-service base, a hub with global reach, responsible for providing mission support, airlift, air refueling, and combat airpower.

Defense officials earlier said the timeline for building the new holding facilities would depend on the requirements of the operation and coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.

The base was created by the 2009 combination of three installations: McGuire Air Force Base, once known as Rudd Field; the Army’s Fort Dix; and the Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst, perhaps best-known as the site of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

But the base has also served to house big, new populations — none of whom had been involuntarily forced onto a military installation to await deportation. That would represent a dramatic change, from housing people eager to start new lives in the United States, to confining those whom the government wants to kick out.

In 2021, amid the chaotic evacuation of Kabul as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, the base was one of eight U.S. military installations to serve as “safe havens” for evacuated war allies and their families. The encampment known as “Liberty Village” was basically a small town on a military base, home to 3,377 families, three times the size of Cape May.

To house the Afghan allies, some of the base’s existing brick housing was supplemented by what were called tents, though those structures were hardened and more resilient than canvas.

In 2010, the base served as a relief center for evacuees who arrived after a devastating earthquake in Haiti. In 1999, then-Fort Dix provided temporary shelter to hundreds of Kosovo refugees amid the Kosovo War. And way back during the Cold War, from 1955 to 1957, Fort Dix housed Hungarian refugees fleeing Soviet repression.

Trump has pledged to conduct the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, and recently achieved a huge increase in budgeting for ICE, from about $8 billion to roughly $28 billion, to help him do so.