For Immediate Release: Saturday, July 5th, 2025

Baldwin, MI — Yesterday, on Friday, July 4th, over 200 members and supporters of No Detention Centers in Michigan, a statewide coalition, and partners including Cosecha Michigan, GR Rapid Response to ICE, and Lakeshore Rapid Response to ICE gathered outside the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin to demonstrate solidarity with the immigrants held inside and opposition to the GEO Group, the Florida-based private prison company that owns the facility.

North Lake was last open under a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate people who were not U.S. citizens and who had been convicted of federal crimes. After a chaotic three-year term in keeping with the prison’s troubled history and with the GEO Group’s extensively documented record of human-rights abuses, the facility shut down in 2022 as a result of an executive order from the Biden administration ending contracts between private prison companies and the Department of Justice. It then reopened weeks ago, in mid-June, as the largest immigration detention center in the Midwest.

The rally included music and reflections on rapid-response organizing in solidarity with immigrant communities in West Michigan, as well as statements from the wife of a man currently detained at North Lake and from the group Asamblea Popular Detroit. Members of the latter group recently mobilized in defense of Marcos, a Honduran immigrant whose house was violently raided by ICE working in concert with the FBI, the DEA, and Detroit police. Noting that the tax bill which had passed the previous day in the U.S. House of Representatives would make ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the United States, organizers and advocates spoke out on Friday against the Trump administration’s enormous expansion of detention and deportation, the history of colonial violence that undergirds it, and the GEO Group’s long-standing exploitation both of targeted immigrant communities and of economic hardship in rural Michigan.

Participants issued the following statements:

A representative from Asamblea Popular Detroit said: “We all need to step up and be brave for our families. Especially on July 4th, a day when many are celebrating the creation of this imperialist state, we have to rise up together against fascism, violence, and racism. We have to show that we the people do not want more detention centers. We want communities to be cared for, families to be able to work, play, worship and learn in safety and peace. Join with us in fighting for this world. Join with us in defending Marcos and others with similar stories. We need all of us to win!”

A woman whose husband has been detained at North Lake since late June said: “My husband has been here for 10 years since he was a minor. He is a loving, caring, hardworking husband, father, uncle, and friend to many in our community. I appreciate everyone for listening to our story. I do not wish this on anyone because it is the most terrifying and traumatizing experience to not be able to help my husband.”

Gema Lowe from Movimiento Cosecha GR said: “For more than 500 years of colonization, this nation’s history has followed the same cruel playbook. The only thing that’s changed is that capitalism has evolved to find new ways to profit from our fear, our pain, and our humanity. They make money from our detention, our incarceration, and our suffering. And private detention centers, like the North Lake Detention Center from the GEO Group, are nothing but businesses built on human vulnerability. What we’re witnessing is not new, but we have the power to decide when it will end.”

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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.