For Immediate Release: Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026

Contact: No Detention Centers in Michigan, info@nodetentioncentersmi.org

Baldwin, MI — After declining food for two full days in protest against medical neglect, unsafe conditions, and legal delays often resulting in extended confinement, immigrants imprisoned at the GEO Group’s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin confirmed on Wednesday that many were continuing their hunger strike.

“Today marks the third day without food,” said one participant in a translated statement on Wednesday afternoon. “As a result of our hunger strike—staged to fight against the violation of our rights—they are now also taking away our recreation time. We remain steadfast here; our unit has gone without eating for three days now, and we will continue to hold out.”

Around 50 advocates gathered on Tuesday afternoon outside the privately owned detention center, the largest facility of its kind in the Midwest, to express solidarity with the hundreds confirmed to be participating in the collective strike and to hear statements from men and women inside, who likewise expressed their support for the protest. Those detained in one unit held handmade signs to show through the windows, including one crying out ‘SOS.’

“We have no answers to our questions, and everyone here has questions,” said Ahmad Alnajdawi, an immigrant from Jordan, in a message shared on Tuesday afternoon. “I have a lot of people here who speak Arabic, and this is very hard for them. They cannot talk to the case managers; they cannot talk to ICE officers; they cannot talk to anyone. The food here is pitiful. I want the people outside to know, they’re treating us like animals. Everyone here has a family, a wife, a parent, a dad, a mom. Everyone here has people outside who care for them. We’re all humans.”

At a time of unprecedented expansion of the federal government’s detention and deportation machine—with ICE seeking to grow its detention capacity in Michigan further via the recent contested purchase of an industrial warehouse in Romulus—the collective action at North Lake also echoes reports of a similar ongoing hunger strike at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, in response to inadequate food and medical care. Like North Lake, Moshannon Valley is a privately owned GEO Group facility which had ended a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons within the last five years, only to reopen soon after as an immigration detention center.

“The ongoing hunger strike at North Lake reflects the awful history of this prison, which should never have been built in the first place; and along with strikes at Moshannon Valley and other facilities around the country, it is also a reminder that immigration detention is not safe for anyone,” said Ale Rojas of No Detention Centers in Michigan. “This courageous collective action is a response to the dehumanization and abuse that are endemic to ICE detention, where immigrants are used as scapegoats so corporations like the GEO Group may continue to build their profits unchecked. Centering our humanity and the humanity of every person who has been kidnapped by ICE is the only way forward.”

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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.