President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seeking to house and detain up to 12,000 illegal aliens in Department of Defense facilities.

In a letter to the Defense Department, DHS officials have asked that enough detention space be made available for the agency to detain up to 12,000 illegal aliens, specifically border crossing family units.

DHS officials say that if the Defense Department does not have the facilities to house that number, DHS is requesting that the agency identify land space to build “semi-separate, soft-sided camp facilities capable of sheltering up to 4,000 people, at three separate locations,” the letter states.

Preferably, DHS officials say they want these tent cities built in regions closest to the U.S.-Mexico border, in either Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, or California.

At the least, DHS officials are requiring that facilities be found and converted or tent cities be built in the next 45 days to accommodate 2,000 illegal aliens.

For weeks, the Trump administration has worked closely with the Pentagon to find more detention space for border crossers in order to at least temporarily end the process known as “Catch and Release,” where illegal aliens are released into the U.S. while they await their immigration hearings.

"Detaining the asylum-seekers and border-crossers in tent cities… would speed up the court process… most significantly, the construction of tent cities would, at least temporarily, end Catch and Release." https://t.co/uExGiVgnVA — John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) April 25, 2018

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already asked the Defense Department to find detention space to detain 20,000 unaccompanied alien children who crossed the southern border alone.

For months, Breitbart News and immigration experts have noted that DHS could deal with the ongoing illegal immigration surge at the border by having deployed troops build tent cities on the border.