Army base used for WWII Japanese internment now nation's largest ICE detention center

Source: USA Today

Aug. 23, 2025, 8:44 a.m. ET


FORT BLISS, Texas – Americans of Japanese heritage say they hear echoes of their families' forced internment in the Trump administration's newest immigrant detention site.

Homeland Security officials say President Donald Trump's sweeping mass deportation campaign requires a build-up of detention centers to bridge the gap between arrests and removals. They've turned to the U.S. military and private contractors to get the job done, including erecting the nation's largest immigrant detention site on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

But stewards of Japanese American history, including the children and grandchildren of those who were held in detention, are criticizing the use of Fort Bliss and the plans to expand immigrant detention on American military bases. Fort Bliss was a "cog" in the United States Japanese internment machine, said Brian Niiya, a historian and content director at Densho, a nonprofit that chronicles Japanese American internment.

Niiya's own grandfather, the managing editor of a Japanese language newspaper, was arrested the night of Japan's Pearl Harbor attack, on Dec. 7, 1941, in Honolulu and held in six different internment camps over the next two years. "It’s important to look to this past to maybe try to understand what’s going on in the present and what the end results could be," he said.

Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/23/texas-army-base-japanese-internment-ice-detention/85767850007/