WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – Top federal officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, were in West Virginia on Monday for the grand opening of a new U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) training center, a facility that signals a major expansion of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.
The new facility, located in Harpers Ferry, will serve as a national hub for officer training and development. During a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Secretary Noem called it “a special day, not just for CBP, but for our country.”
“We see challenges ahead in this country and new threats emerging everywhere,” Noem said. “I believe that [CBP officers] will be prepared for them because of what we’re doing here to make sure that we’re resourcing and equipping them the way that we should.”
The center is expected to train hundreds of new recruits each year, providing advanced instruction to agents tasked with enforcing U.S. immigration laws at a time when the administration is aggressively stepping up border enforcement.
West Virginia officials praised the move, linking local public health crises to border security.
“We’ve lost too many to the scourge of fentanyl family members, church members, neighbors,” said U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia.
U.S. Rep. Riley Moore, R-West Virginia, also applauded the administration’s approach, saying, “Turns out that we didn’t need legislation to fix any of this. We just needed a new president.”
New Mexico Democratic Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury criticized the administration’s response to people protesting the president’s immigration policies.
“Deploying United States Marines and National Guard troops against our own people is unacceptable,” Stansbury said.
As the political debate over immigration intensifies, the new training center stands as a concrete symbol of the administration’s law-and-order approach and its long-term investment in reshaping border security nationwide.
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