Cornyn called for Texas ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ within a day of news of El Paso immigration facility

AUSTIN (KXAN) — U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) earlier this week called for Texas to create its own “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility. The day after, reports surfaced that the U.S. government was planning to build a 5,000-person immigration detention camp in El Paso.

Cornyn chaired

a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration hearing on Tuesday and delivered about 12 minutes of opening remarks, in which he talked about “misinformation” and “false narratives” being spread about immigrants, his opinion on the importance of immigration enforcement, and praised the state of Florida for its immigration enforcement efforts.

“The State of Florida has stepped up to the plate recently, helping the administration to open a detention facility that’s come to be known as Alligator Alcatraz,” he said. “I’m hopeful that other states will step up to help in similar ways.”

“If we could find a way to make something like this work in Texas, I would strongly support it, and I’d encourage our Governor, as well as Secretary Noem, to explore the possibility of locating future detention facilities in Texas,” Cornyn continued.

On Wednesday, reports surfaced that the federal government had awarded a Defense Department contract to build what will be the country’s largest immigration facility at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

KXAN reached out to press contacts for Cornyn to ask if the senator was aware of the plans for the El Paso detention center when he made his remarks, or if the timing was a mere coincidence. We will update this story if we receive a response.

The Associated Press reported that procurement documents called the planned immigration camp a “soft-sided facility,” a phrase often used for tent camps. Similarly, Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz facility mostly consists of tents and trailers, per NPR reporting.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently said she’d been in talks with five Republican governors about building facilities similar to Alligator Alcatraz in their states.

Noem did not say which states, but spokespersons for governors in South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas told KXAN national media partner NewsNation they were ready to assist in President Donald Trump’s expanding immigration enforcement plans.

Texas has 26 immigration detention facilities, according to the Texas Immigration Law Council. That’s more than any other state.

Texas also leads the nation in the number of people being housed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

According to TRAC data as up-to-date as July 13, ICE held 56,816 people in detention facilities. ICE relied on facilities in Texas to house the most people during FY 2025, according to TRAC data as up-to-date as June 23. At that time, Texas’ detention centers were holding 12,813 people for ICE.

Toward the end of Cornyn’s remarks on Tuesday, he also mentioned that he planned on introducing a bill in the Senate that would require the HHS to conduct mandatory checks on unaccompanied minors entering the United States and to bar what he called “criminal alien sponsors” of those minors.