Pentagon teams studying alternative lockups to Guantanamo Bay visited Fort Leavenworth in Kansas this past week and head to the Charleston, S.C., brig this week as part of spadework for a proposed closing plan that swiftly stirred opposition in Congress.

“Not on my watch will any terrorist be placed in Kansas,” Sen. Pat Roberts, K-Kan., said in a statement issued Friday afternoon. He and Sam Brownback, when he was a senator, first opposed the use of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth for war-on-terrorism captives in 2008, and for a time put a hold on the 2009 appointment of Army Secretary John McHugh over consideration of moving Guantanamo captives to Kansas.

Now Brownback is Kansas governor and still opposes the idea. “The citizens of Kansas do not support moving terrorists to the heartland of America,” he said Friday. And Roberts is championing legislation that would make it tougher to repatriate any of Guantanamo’s last 116 captives or resettle them in other countries, including the 52 long-held prisoners approved for transfer with security arrangements.

Current law forbids bringing any of Guantanamo’s captives to the United States for any reason — neither for trial nor for medical care — an embargo the White House blames for soaring costs of the detention center staffed by more than 2,000 troops and federal contractors.

The U.S.-government funded Voice of America first reported about the revived interest in Fort Leavenworth on Thursday. At the Pentagon, Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross said Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter ordered the South Carolina and Kansas site surveys “as part of our broader and ongoing effort to identify locations within the United States that can possibly facilitate military commissions and can possibly hold detainees currently at Guantanamo Bay.”

The analysis will primarily focus on finding humane, maximum-security confinement, Ross said, but will also include costs at a time when the military is trying to plan for long-term medical expenses of a population of foreign captives ages 30 to 67.

Ross also said civilian sites were under consideration but did not specify which ones.

Saturday he added that two newer Pentagon detention facilities in California and Virginia were not on the survey list.

In 2011, San Diego’s Joint Regional Correction Facility, also known as the Miramar Consolidated Naval Brig, grew to accommodate 600 prisoners after a contractor added a $27.6 million, 99,000-square-foot, 200-cell addition to the existing brig with a new health services unit, a kitchen, a visitor’s center and entrance lobby. That same year, the Navy opened a $64 million, 400-cell brig in Chesapeake, Va.

Disclosure of the site survey uncorked a new round of not-in-my-backyard press releases reminiscent of the opposition members of Congress mounted in the early years of the Obama administration, when the Pentagon held twice as many captives at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. Cascading legislation through the years has effectively thwarted President Barack Obama’s pledge to close the detention center, and new legislation supported by the House of Representatives to limit transfers abroad would make it even more difficult.

“There is no plan or study that shows transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to South Carolina or any other domestic location will make America safer,” said Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. He called it “unbelievable that the president believes they need to assess whether the Naval Brig, which is right next to an elementary school and a residential neighborhood, as well as just a short drive from one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, is a better option for housing dangerous terrorists than Guantanamo Bay.”

Under the developing plan for closing Guantanamo, the Defense Department would transfer at most 64 captives to the United States. Meanwhile, the State Department would find nations to resettle the 52 who are currently cleared for transfer with diplomatic deals that satisfy a series of offices inside the Pentagon — the general counsel, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, ultimately, the secretary of defense.

But just one release is expected later this summer.

The Pentagon survey team travels to Charleston this week, which Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently called unsuitable. Military sources, however, have for years described the base as the provisional site of any trials by military commissions in the United States. Trials by military commission are now held at Guantanamo.

Only one of Guantanamo’s 116 captives has been convicted of a war crime, but the verdict was reversed by civilian courts. Nine other captives are charged with war crimes, with the alleged 9/11 and USS Cole bombing plotters awaiting death-penalty trials complicated by their years in CIA custody before they got to Guantanamo.

Six others may one day be charged at the war court, according to internal documents. But the rest are held as war prisoners, most captured in 2001 and 2002, stemming from suspicion they were associated with the Taliban or al-Qaida at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.