As part of its broader plan to use military facilities to house immigrants before systematically deporting them, the Trump administration is reportedly looking into creating a detention camp at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield.

We heard in February that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was taking a preliminary look around the shuttered federal women's prison FCI Dublin as a potential immigrant detention facility. But those plans may have been scrapped once officials learned how much it would cost to get the prison back into safe — and not potentially illegally decrepit — shape.

Not long after, the Trump administration indicated they were looking at using existing military installations and bases, including at Guantanamo Bay, to house migrants before processing them and putting them on planes back to their countries of origin.

On the list, in order to conduct mass deportations out of California, is Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, as KQED reports today. Based on some emails between Homeland Security and other federal officials obtained by KQED, the administration is looking to fast-track the review of Travis AFB among several military installations as potential locations for building a detention camp.

When reached by KQED, ICE neither confirmed or denied the plans, saying, "While we cannot confirm individual pre-decisional conversations, we can confirm that ICE is exploring all options in California to meet its current and future detention requirements, which include new detention facilities and possible support from partner agencies."

NPR reported in February that Trump officials were discussing the use of Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, Texas, as a "staging" area for migrants before deportation. The plans indicated that the base would at first house about 1,000 migrants at a time for up to 60-day periods, ramping up to 10,000 at a time.

As of February, ICE reportedly had about 41,000 migrants in custody, and its existing detention facilities were at capacity. That number has reportedly risen to around 48,000. And back in August, before Trump was even reelected, ICE was reportedly seeking new detention facilities it could use that were within two hours of San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, and El Paso.

East Bay Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat who's been an outspoken critic of Trump and who serves as a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, vowed to oppose any such use of Travis AFB — which lies in his district.

"Travis Air Force Base is absolutely inappropriate for an immigration detention facility," Garamendi said in a statement to KQED. "Travis has a critical national security role of providing worldwide transportation services for personnel and material around the world. An immigration facility would significantly hamper the national security work that Travis is responsible for."

Garamendi wasted no time issuing a public rebuke, one week after Trump's inauguration in January, over the use of military aircraft to transport migrants as part of the administration's nascent deportation efforts. He called the use of the military equipment, "deeply alarming, potentially unconstitutional, and a blatant abuse of presidential power."

He further cited the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of active-duty military in domestic law enforcement activities.

Jehan Laner, a senior staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, agreed and applied this law to any use of Travis AFB, telling KQED this week, "Our country is kind of turning towards authoritarianism when you have the military starting to do civil law enforcement. It becomes a very scary prospect."

The administration may be able to skirt the Posse Comitatus Act if it uses only ICE staff to run any new detention facility on a military base, but it seems like the whole point of using the base would be to use its aircraft transport capacity as well. And all that ICE staff still needs to be hired.

Still to come will be how Trump and his goons plan to fund all this mass deportation activity, with the bill for it all still needing to pass through Congress. As NBC News reported in early March, the administration already seemed to be rethinking its rushed plan to build a pop-up detention camp at Guantanamo for 30,000 migrants, the cost of which was quickly starting to balloon. The theatrical deportation of nine migrants to Cuba, escorted personally by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was said to cost the Pentagon about $23,000 to $27,000 per detainee.

And the Guantanamo camp hasn't even been completed yet. But officials indicated that a scaled-down version of what was proposed was likely to still move forward.

Related: ICE Might Be Looking to Use Shuttered Dublin Women's Prison as Immigrant Detention Center

Photo via Travis AFB