For Immediate Release: Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Baldwin, MI — Today, less than three months after the formal announcement of plans to reopen, the GEO Group began to operate the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan as an ICE detention center.

“This facility is an abomination and it’s been an insult to Michigan since the first stone was laid,” said Shelley Cichy, a member of No Detention Centers in Michigan. “What the GEO Group cares about is making a profit. By reopening North Lake for ICE, this corporation is cashing in on Trump’s expansion of a cruel and inhumane detention system while pretending it’s about helping Lake County. GEO profits off of their disregard for human life and their contempt for the people of Michigan. As long as our fellow human beings are held inside this awful place, we will work to support them.”

Built in 1999 by GEO, the largest private prison corporation in the United States, North Lake last closed in 2022 as a result of Joe Biden’s executive order ending the use of private facilities by the Department of Justice. With a capacity to detain 1,800 people, it is now set to function as one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country. The facility is one of several shuttered private prisons to have changed hands from the Bureau of Prisons to ICE in recent years, a pattern which began during the Biden administration.

“GEO Group and other private contractors are teeming over Trump’s continued expansion of ICE detention and particularly at the prospect of cashing in on their vacant prisons, like North Lake, that were recently forced to shutter,” said Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director of Detention Watch Network. “The perverse financial incentives are glaring as GEO Group stands to generate in excess of $70 million in annualized revenue from North Lake, at the expense of people’s lives and a small community that has been forced to rely on a carceral economy.”

North Lake was previously in use from 2019 through 2022 as a federal prison for people who were not U.S. citizens and had been convicted of federal crimes. From October 2019 through the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, No Detention Centers in Michigan and other groups documented medical neglect, discriminatory restricted confinement, inadequate food, and other unsafe conditions at North Lake, which led to at least six separate hunger strikes in 2020, organized by predominantly Black men held in the Restricted Housing Unit. Working conditions at the facility were also tumultuous, with reports of staff shortages and labor disputes.

“At first, the GEO Group said they needed 300 people to run this prison again,” said Cam Brown, another member of No Detention Centers in Michigan. “Now they’re saying it’s 250. This rushed opening means it will have minimal staff and we’ll likely see the same kinds of chaotic conditions that caused those hunger strikes in 2020, if not worse. But whatever the staffing numbers are, GEO and ICE’s industrialized imprisonment will be a stain on the state of Michigan for generations to come. We don’t want the name of Baldwin to carry the same historical weight as Dachau. We ask everyone, legislators and advocates and everyday people, to do their part to shut this down.”

The reopening comes at a moment of national upheaval, as working people continue to mobilize in massive numbers against ICE and Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Trump’s approval ratings are down after his attempts to use the National Guard and the Marines to quell rebellions against immigration raids in Los Angeles, and after “No Kings” demonstrations on June 14th which saw millions around the country take to the streets against his policies. At the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in New Jersey, after a contested reopening, intolerable conditions led to an uprising this month in which four people escaped. Delaney Hall, like North Lake, is operated by the GEO Group. 

Cities across Michigan have felt the impact of recent escalated ICE raids to meet the Trump administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests per day, with communities mobilizing in defense of immigrants who have been targeted at court hearings in Detroit and at pre-scheduled check-in appointments in Grand Rapids. Members of Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have been accompanying immigrant neighbors to their appointments at the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, and have noted that this program is also operated for profit by a GEO Group subsidiary.

“Every day ICE is violently targeting and disappearing people. Trump’s immigration enforcement operations—targeting, detention, and deportation—are designed to sow confusion, separate loved ones and destabilize communities,” added Brooke Merrifield with No Detention Centers in Michigan. “Recent protests in Los Angeles, throughout Michigan and across the nation have once again shown that people do not want ICE agents and detention centers in their neighborhoods. Immigrants are our family members, neighbors, friends, coworkers, caretakers and more. They are vital and valued members of our community, and we are called to stand with them.”

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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.

Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.