FORT SMITH — Fort Chaffee will not be used at this time to house Afghan refugees.
Arkansas National Guard Lt. Col. Brian Mason on Tuesday confirmed the military base hasn’t been selected to house refugees, citing the readiness of other sites in the United States to take them. Mason said the site could be used in the future if the refugee population becomes too great for the selected sites.
At his news conference on Tuesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said “the information that I have was that the sites in Arkansas have been evaluated.
“They are not in the top tier of installations for receiving large numbers of Afghan refugees, so I don’t anticipate that happening, he said.
“What you got to look at in the future is if you have 10,000 refugees coming to one particular installation in Wisconsin, they are going to be processed there but then where are they going to go, so I think there is another layer that you could have Afghan refugees come into more rural areas. But we just don’t know that yet,” Hutchinson said.
Military officials on Friday through Sunday assessed Fort Chaffee to house refugees, said Bob Oldham, public affairs specialist for the Arkansas National Guard. The military base is a training site for the Arkansas Army National Guard and Air National Guard. It has housed refugees from Southeast Asia, Cuba and New Orleans in decades past.
“We are in a back-up position that if other states are not able handle it at the installations and we are receiving more refugees than anticipated, it could be an overflow. But we are not on the front line on that,” Hutchinson said. Afterward, Hutchinson said he was only referring to Fort Chaffee.
“We only have 1,300 beds, refugees that we could take, and so they are looking at larger numbers. They are looking at larger installations that would have full capacity, so I think that’s a reason we are not in the top tier,” he said.
Fort Chaffee was the only location being assessed for refugees in Arkansas, according to Shealyn Sowers, communications director for the governor.
This story has been updated. It was originally published at 11:26 a.m.