By late 1942, as the U.S. Army shifted the Provost Marshal General's Office toward guarding large numbers of Axis prisoners of war, the Department of Justice gave the Immigration and Naturalization Service broader authority to confine potentially dangerous Enemy Aliens, including American citizens, at camps across the U.S. Crystal City Family Internment Camp became the only Immigration and Naturalization Service camp established specifically for families, chosen in part because it was distant from major war production facilities and because the U.S. Government already owned much of the land, where the Farm Security Administration had earlier built about 150 structures for migratory agricultural workers during the Great Depression. Although the camp was first intended for people of Japanese ancestry and their immediate families, its first arrivals on December 12, 1942, were German Americans and German Enemy Aliens, followed on February 12, 1943, by Germans deported from Costa Rica, and on March 17, 1943, by Japanese American internees. Plans to move the German internees elsewhere were dropped after their spokesman asked that they remain because conditions there were better than at earlier confinement sites, and the camp developed into a multinational internment center whose wartime population included Issei and Nisei, German American citizens, German nationals, Italian nationals, Latin American Japanese, Germans and Italians, and a small group of Indonesian sailors. When it opened in December 1942, the site covered about 240 acres and included 41 small three-room cottages and 118 one-room shelters measuring 12 by 16 feet, with 12 cottages left outside the 100-acre fenced area for officials and their families; as the population grew, the Department of Justice seized 50 more acres, added a water well and sewer system, bought utilities from local and regional providers, and oversaw the construction inside the fenced area of 61 duplex, 62 triplex, and 96 quadruple barracks, 15 more three-room cottages, and later 103 Victory Huts. Most family housing provided individual cooking facilities, cold running water, and oil stoves, while the camp was enclosed by a 10-foot-high barbed wire barrier around the internee section, six guard towers, an armed fence patrol, and an internal security force in both the Japanese and German sections.