The planned migrant detention center that could hold thousands just off Interstate 10 in far East El Paso County faces a key constraint: a water system that local officials say isn’t prepared to serve the facility on the federal government’s timeline.
The Department of Homeland Security in January purchased three warehouse buildings on a 48-acre property within the Socorro city limits for $122 million with plans to convert them into a mass detention facility that could hold up to 8,500 detainees.
Though the federal government hasn’t confirmed when it expects to open the mega detention centers, national news outlets have reported on leaked ICE documents that show an initiative to convert warehouses into detention centers by Sept. 30 under the President Donald Trump administration’s mass deportation plan.
“From a technical standpoint, I don’t know how some of these timelines that are being talked about are going to be met,” said Gilbert Trejo, a vice president and chief engineer for El Paso Water. “Detention center in eight months? How? All this work needs to be done.”
The engineering work and infrastructure needed to incorporate a mega detention center into the utility’s water system may not be completed until after the November midterm elections – raising questions about whether Congress would rescind funding for the proposed detention center here and halt the project if Democrats win the House and Senate.
“I think DHS clearly wanted to get this up before the end of the year, because they’re also aware that there’s a potential, with a new Congress, that could totally jeopardize funding,” said state Rep. Vince Perez, D-El Paso. “I don’t think there’s any way that they are going to be able to get this done before the end of the year.”
Perez and other elected officials with the city and county governments oppose the new detention center and said the federal government hasn’t coordinated with them on the facility.
The water infrastructure isn’t in place to serve a facility that Perez estimates could use somewhere around 850,000 gallons of water per day.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the federal One Big Beautiful Bill expanded funding for ICE to establish new, massive detention centers. The agency is developing the mega detention center in El Paso, as well as similar facilities in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
“It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space,” the spokesperson said in an email, offering the same comment it has provided to the media for months. “These will not be warehouses — they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”
The Lower Valley Water District serves the area where the detention center property will be located, and the small utility purchases all of the water it supplies to its 21,000 customers from city-owned El Paso Water through a long-term contract. LVWD pumps about 6.5 million gallons of water to customers daily, compared with 110 million gallons that El Paso Water supplies to its customers in a typical day.
Trejo said El Paso Water and the Lower Valley Water District both have to conduct a comprehensive analysis of their systems and do a lot of engineering work to understand how an 8,500-person detention center would impact water supplies in the Borderland.
Some of the complexities Trejo laid out include figuring out which of the four points of connection between El Paso and LVWD would be affected by an increase in water demand in the Lower Valley. El Paso Water would have to figure out how to move water throughout the city to supply more to LVWD while also juggling supplies from different sources such as the Rio Grande, groundwater wells on the Westside and the desalination plant near the airport.
“We do all that, and then we will say, ‘All right, we are being impacted quantifiably in these ways. We know this is what is needed to serve you.’ Which translates to pipelines, tanks, pump stations, God forbid, a new water treatment plant,” Trejo said. “And then we would say ‘Lower Valley Water District, to meet your needs, this is what you’re going to have to pay for.’”
El Paso Water’s governing board earlier this month sent a letter to Gerald Grijalva, general manager of the Lower Valley Water District, asking the district to show whether it can meet demand from a big, new customer such as a detention facility.
“The Lower Valley Water District, I will say, they’re not set up for this type of demand. They are set up for being residential, with a very small commercial (customer base), very basic,” Trejo said. “When you start introducing manufacturing and industrial, it’s a whole different ballgame.”
“This type of engineering is not done in a couple of weeks or a couple of months,” he said.
The three warehouses that DHS bought were built within the last 15 years. LVWD put in a water line to the facility when it was built under the assumption it would be a commercial warehouse, not a large detention complex housing people around-the-clock.
“This was approved by us from the engineering standpoint as a warehouse, not necessarily a housing facility,” Grijalva said in an interview. “So, it became more occupancy than we expected. … And more water, obviously.”
Can water service be denied to the new ICE facility?
El Paso city and county leaders in early February formally opposed the proposed mega detention center, although they have limited authority over federal immigration policies.
Despite the opposition, neither El Paso Water nor the Lower Valley Water District can deny water service to the facility. They can, however, charge the federal government the cost of additional infrastructure necessary to provide service.
“Is it feasibly possible? Yes. Do they need to work to fix the flow? Yes. Are we going to deny it? We can’t,” Grijalva said. “If you have water and you deny it to somebody, they’re going to sue you. That’s all there is to it.”
And even though El Paso Water is city-owned, the city did not direct El Paso Water to try to deny service to the detention center, Trejo said.
Whether the federal government builds the detention facility or not, Trejo said El Paso Water had planned for months to ask LVWD to review its system before the two utilities renegotiate their water supply contract that’s been in place since 1989. It expires in a few years.
What’s the impact on Lower Valley water service and rates?
To accommodate the detention center, Grijalva said LVWD could place a large water tank on the property to store water and prevent a drop in water pressure for customers further down the water line. The utility last October had to issue a boil water notice to customers after a loss of water pressure in the system.
“We want to make sure that we have pressure all the way down the line to make sure that everybody here – not only the facility, the customers – are covered,” Grijalva said.
The federal government will have to pay the full cost of any new infrastructure LVWD has to build to serve water to the detention facility, Grijalva said, including the cost of a water tank.
“They’re going to have to,” he said. “We can’t be funding all this or that for free.”
The Lower Valley Water District hasn’t communicated with the federal government about a plan to develop water infrastructure for the detention center, he said.
“Right now, it’s a warehouse,” Grijalva said.
“We’ve yet to meet with somebody that’s going to tell us that, ‘We’re the contractor. We’ve got these engineers, we want to talk to you about a facility that houses 8,000 to 10,000 people,’” he said. “They haven’t talked to us about that yet.”
The most likely scenario, Grijalva said, is that the federal government or a contractor provides plans for the detention center to LVWD, which would then craft a list of projects and funding required to enable water service to the facility.
Alaska-based Coho Construction Management LLC on Jan. 16 was awarded a $4 million contract for inspection and engineering services to support an ICE facility in El Paso, government records show. The contract carries a seven-month term to end in August, with a potential total award of more than $13 million.
On Jan. 27, officials with the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to the Texas Historical Commission claiming the site isn’t home to important archaeological and historical artifacts.
To Perez, the letter showed the federal government proceeded with the detention center project well before elected officials, utility executives or the public in El Paso were aware.
“I think the letter demonstrates just how much work had already been done towards this facility, but there was zero coordination with local folks,” Perez said.
“They are doing things without any significant public input, without any local feedback,” he said of DHS. “And I think that’s the most concerning thing, especially for a facility like this that has significant implications for a community such as ours.”
The three parcels ICE purchased had an assessed value of $26.8 million last year, according to the El Paso Central Appraisal District. That’s almost $100 million less than the purchase price, although real estate market values typically far exceed assessed property values used by the CAD for taxation.
ICE in a statement said the facility’s construction will bring over 9,200 jobs to El Paso and contribute over $200 million in tax revenue. It’s not clear over what time that tax revenue would materialize. Also unclear is the source of that projected tax revenue; federal facilities are exempt from local property taxes, but employees working at the site could generate local sales and income tax revenue.
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