​​​​​​For immediate release: Tuesday, August 5th, 2025

Lansing, MI – Today, over 30 organizations predominantly based in Michigan sent an open letter to Governor Gretchen Whitmer calling for a public commitment to reject funds recently made available to states by the federal government for the construction of new immigration detention centers.

Drafted by the No Detention Centers in Michigan coalition (NDCM), the letter comes in the wake of the announcement last month of a “detention support grant program” operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), with $608 million available for the construction of facilities modeled after the recently built prison camp in the Everglades. This Florida camp has already seen multiple lawsuits challenging rights violations, with immigrants imprisoned there reporting inhumane conditions including a lack of access to water, insufficient food, and religious discrimination.

“Conditions such as these,” the letter notes, “are endemic to the U.S. immigration detention system. They will only worsen as the Trump administration continues its push for an unprecedented expansion of the detention and deportation machine, with increasing reports nationwide of death, medical neglect, discrimination, abuse, and punitive transfers. […] We know that whatever new prisons are built will come with their own incentives to be filled, and that the continued growth of this cruel apparatus represents a key facet of an emboldened white nationalist program.”

The ongoing expansion of the immigration detention system has involved the allocation of over $150 billion for immigration enforcement and the reopening of many previously shuttered carceral facilities, including the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin. After a chaotic and deadly stint as a federal immigrant-only prison beginning in October 2019, North Lake shut down in 2022, only to reopen with an ICE contract in June 2025 as the largest detention center in the Midwest and one of the largest in the country. Immigrant advocates in Michigan have continued to report escalated raids and abductions by ICE over the course of recent months in connection with these broad trends and with the reopening of the Baldwin prison. NDCM’s letter accordingly highlights further concerns regarding Governor Whitmer’s record on immigration justice, including the collaboration under her leadership between the state-funded Michigan Works! agency and the Florida-based GEO Group on hiring staff for North Lake.

“The Trump administration’s current attempt to weaponize FEMA as an additional tool of mass imprisonment and deportation,” NDCM’s letter to Governor Whitmer states, “is emblematic of a white supremacist agenda that prioritizes the sadistic scapegoating of immigrants over the provision of resources needed for all people’s safety and flourishing. We urge you to reject this agenda by making a public commitment not to participate in FEMA’s detention grant program, and we call on you to ensure that Michigan Works! will no longer collaborate with the GEO Group to cage human beings in Michigan for the profit of GEO’s shareholders.”

“The last thing Michigan needs is more prisons for immigrants or for anyone else,” said Richard Kessler, a member of No Detention Centers in Michigan. “It’s already unacceptable that Michigan Works! is funneling taxpayer money and resources toward the GEO Group so they can cash in on tearing families apart and locking up our immigrant neighbors in Baldwin. The news about FEMA is another reminder that private prisons aren’t the only problem. What allows companies like GEO to swoop in and profit from suffering is the agenda set by the federal government. And it’s very clear to us that this administration will go after immigrants with whatever methods they can. We hope the governor will take a strong position against ICE and the GEO Group’s attacks. Either way, our communities will keep fighting back together.”

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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.