For Immediate Release: Tuesday, September 30th, 2025

Baldwin, MI — Immigrants imprisoned at the GEO Group’s privately owned North Lake Processing Center, as well as their families and loved ones from around the state and beyond, report that conditions inside North Lake have continued to deteriorate since the facility reopened in mid-June as the largest immigration detention center in the Midwest.

“They’re treating them worse now,” said one person whose loved one is detained at North Lake. “Before, they would lock them in the cells for just about 40 minutes for the routine count, but now it’s three hours. They’re not even taking them to the dining hall anymore, they just bring the food to the cells. At night it’s hard to sleep, too, because the lights get turned on in the middle of the night or officers shine flashlights right in their faces.”

Expressing similar concerns regarding procedures followed at North Lake by the GEO Group—the country’s largest ICE contractor, whose executives have heralded “unprecedented growth opportunities” under the second Trump administration—another relative of an immigrant held in Baldwin described a chaotic atmosphere: “They are locking down our families for hours now. They ‘lose’ people and punish everyone else for their mistakes. A detainee tried to kill himself a couple of weeks ago. The guards hurried and moved him away.”

Family members contacted No Detention Centers in Michigan, a coalition advocating for immigrants detained around the state, to share these reports, but requested anonymity for fear of retaliation against their loved ones.

Although exact numbers are difficult to locate, hundreds of men and women have been transported to Baldwin in recent weeks for indeterminate incarceration as the federal government pursues an immense expansion of its detention and deportation machine. Immigrant organizers in West Michigan have continued to pressure local government officials to adopt sanctuary policies, citing alarming escalations in ICE tactics and reports of plans to purchase more office space in Grand Rapids for immigration enforcement in the coming months. In Lake County, organizers with ties to Witness at the Border have called on supporters to join them in observing the operations of the North Lake facility and defending the rights of the community members held inside. On Saturday, September 27th, the GEO Group responded to the announcement of a peaceful gathering of witnesses outside the detention center by cancelling family visitation for the day.

“We are here to observe, to let the community, the staff, and the incarcerated people know that we will never look away,” said Marjorie Ziefert, a coordinator for Witness Baldwin. “Witnessing sheds light on acts that are being committed in the dark. The GEO Group’s decision to block vital family visits, supposedly in response to a group of us on the outside exercising our First Amendment rights, represents nothing but a continuation of the heartlessness they have practiced for decades in their pursuit of profit and an effort to further isolate people who are caged in this facility from those on the outside who support them. We do not want to be intimidated by the GEO Group’s cruelty.”

First built in 1999 as the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility, North Lake has closed and reopened four times in the last three decades. It was last open under a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to hold people who were not U.S. citizens and who had been convicted of federal crimes. After three years of turmoil, including multiple deaths and hunger strikes, North Lake shut down in 2022 following an executive order from the Biden administration that ended the use of private prisons by the Department of Justice.

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No Detention Centers in Michigan is a statewide coalition organizing to abolish immigration detention and migrant incarceration in Michigan and beyond.