Author: nodetentioncentersmi

Press Release: Over 50 Groups Sign Open Letter Against Proposed Reopening of North Lake Prison in Baldwin as ICE Detention Center

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For immediate release: September 26, 2022

Contact: No Detention Centers in Michigan, NoDetentionCentersMI@gmail.com

Baldwin, MI – Today, over 50 organizations from around the state of Michigan and the country sent an open letter to President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Senator Gary Peters calling for an end to the expansion of immigration detention and for the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin to remain closed. This letter follows a recent proposal from Michigan Representatives Bill Huizenga and John Moolenaar to repurpose the facility as an ICE detention center.

“We are deeply troubled by this proposal,” the letter states, “because it follows a recent pattern of actions from the Biden administration contravening its stated goal of ending the use of private facilities for detention, because we know that ICE operates a system of abusive and inhumane detention centers across the country, and because the presence of this prison in Baldwin has been disastrous for decades.”

Drafted by the No Detention Centers in Michigan coalition, the letter details the troubled history of the Baldwin facility, currently due to close on September 30th, and the recent national trends that point to the possibility of its reopening with an ICE contract. The signatories include over 20 groups based in Michigan and over 30 nationally active organizations focusing on immigration and racial justice.

North Lake, a private prison owned and managed by the Florida-based GEO Group, has closed and reopened multiple times since its construction in 1999. In its most recent incarnation, from October 2019 through September 2022, the facility contracted with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to hold non-U.S. citizens convicted of federal crimes.

In keeping with the history of immigrant-only prisons run by the GEO Group, this period of less than two years has seen numerous accounts of inhumane conditions, medical neglect, and violent mistreatment endemic to the immigration detention system. Six documented hunger strikes took place at North Lake over the course of 2020, primarily led by Black immigrants demanding medical care, better food, and an end to discriminatory confinement in the Restricted Housing Unit. In May 2020, more than 45 relatives and loved ones of people incarcerated at North Lake signed a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons, demanding increased transparency and a recognition of the GEO Group’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis.

The Biden administration issued an executive order in January 2021 purporting to end the federal government’s use of private prisons, setting the stage for the facility’s closure later this month. But immigrant advocates have pointed to a pattern of similar facilities ending their BOP contracts only to reopen as detention centers, while the number of immigrants held in ICE custody has continued to rise since President Biden took office, despite campaign promises to curtail detention. Eighty percent of the immigrants detained by ICE are held at facilities run by private companies. In June, Michigan Representatives Bill Huizenga and John Moolenaar publicly requested that North Lake be converted into a detention center.

“In calling for an ICE contract to bail out the GEO Group in Michigan yet again,” the letter from NDCM affirms, “Huizenga and Moolenaar seek to capitalize on the human misery caused by the organized abandonment and exploitation of working people both within the United States and beyond its borders. […] We refuse to let ICE and GEO expand their violence further into Michigan, and we call on the Biden administration to extend Executive Order 14006 to explicitly prohibit the use of private facilities for immigration detention as a first step toward phasing out all ICE detention.”

“This prison has already caused enormous suffering and has never fulfilled GEO’s promises to the people of Lake County,” said Oscar Castañeda, a member of No Detention Centers in Michigan. “Now the federal prison contract is finally ending, but we’ve seen that GEO will exploit any opportunity to make a profit. When it comes to the immigrant detention system, the Biden administration has not kept its word. We’re not going to let ICE expand here without a fight. We want to make sure that the loopholes allowing for the expansion of detention are closed and that this time, North Lake stays shut down for good.”

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No Detention Centers in Michigan is a statewide coalition building power through collective action to abolish immigration detention and migrant incarceration in Michigan and beyond.

“It’s Getting Worse & Worse”: North Lake, July 2021

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Speaking on July 7th, 2021, an immigrant incarcerated at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin describes deteriorating conditions as the prison nears a potential 2022 closing date and GEO Group administrators cut more corners than ever. Recently, fearing a protest among the incarcerated population, the administration put the whole prison on lockdown for three days. We will continue to share updates as we get them.

This recording has been edited for length. A transcript is below.

#ShutDownGEO #FreeThemAll

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: “I’m pretty sure they know that they’re closing. People complain about it because the food is horrible, they give you less and less food, they don’t—they always, like, shorted us on toilet paper.

They never want to help. Like they never want to give you medication or anything like that. They just really, like, really trying to save money. A lot of people suffering from headaches and stuff like that because they never have enough stuff to give us. They give us a tiny little bit of food.

They give us like fake meat—I don’t know what kind of meat is that, but nobody eat it. It smells horrible.

They didn’t want to give me my medicine anymore. Because they say they sell it in commissary. The one in commissary doesn’t help. The commissary’s super expensive, way expensive, I mean, they want to make money out of us.

It’s pretty bad. And it’s getting worse and worse, like, they getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. We never have enough toilet paper. We always got to be begging them to give us toilet paper. We don’t have paper towels, we don’t have, like, anything that like a regular prison has.

The other day that we say we were going to protest, they lock us all down. For three days, everybody. The whole prison! They keep sending people to the SHUs. They don’t want you to say anything.”

Solidarity with the People of Colombia and Palestine

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No Detention Centers in Michigan stands in full solidarity with ongoing movements for freedom and dignity in both Colombia and Palestine that have faced massive repression and state violence in recent weeks.

These struggles are closely linked to the work of the NDCM coalition, not only because Palestinians and Colombians are among those affected by the violence of the detention and deportation machine in Michigan and across the United States, but because all movements against oppression and carceral power are connected. Though the recently announced Israel-Gaza ceasefire means some measure of relief for the occupied people of Gaza as they mourn over 250 killed, the harm of Israeli settler colonialism persists in the ongoing occupation. Expulsions of indigenous Palestinians from their homes in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan continue, along with a nationwide system of discrimination recently recognized as apartheid by Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem בצלם. In Colombia, under the rightwing regime of Ivan Duque, police forces have killed dozens of protesters and indigenous organizers who spoke out over the last month against neoliberal austerity measures and militarism. More than a thousand others have been arbitrarily detained, and hundreds have disappeared.

Administrative detention—the practice of incarcerating a person without charge or trial—has been a prominent feature of both Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and the Colombian government’s crackdown on activists. It is also a cornerstone of ICE’s policy in the U.S., another settler state that continues directly to enable and aid state violence against resistance movements in Palestine, Colombia, and around the world.

NDCM demands an end to the use of torture and administrative detention by the governments of Colombia, Israel, and the U.S.; the release of all Colombian, Palestinian and U.S. political prisoners; and an end to U.S. military and police aid to Colombia and Israel. In accordance with this last demand, we support Palestinian civil society’s call for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the Israeli state.

Please consider joining us in donating here to support urgent mutual aid efforts on the ground in Colombia. Another donation link organized by Colombian immigrants and disbursed directly to groups on the ground can be found here. For more information on the international anti-racist BDS movement for justice and Palestinian freedom from occupation, you can visit the BDS website.

#SOSColombia

#SaveSilwan

#BDS

#FreeThemAll

Vaccines at North Lake

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Immigrants incarcerated at the North Lake Correctional Facility finally received the COVID-19 vaccine last month, after a year of disastrous mismanagement and neglect on the part of the GEO Group which has resulted in extensive suffering and fear throughout the facility and at least two deaths. We continue to mourn the loss of Félix Repilado Martínez and Chi Cuong Hoang, who should never have been locked up in Baldwin in the first place and who passed away last year, as well as Jesse Jerome Dean, who died at the Calhoun County Jail in February almost immediately after being transferred away from North Lake.

These vaccines should have come much earlier; and, given GEO’s long record of secrecy, abuse and deceit, we strongly doubt that the numbers of COVID cases and deaths that have been reported at North Lake reflect the reality of the situation. As the article linked above also notes, COVID cases at the facility don’t factor into the Lake County totals, though vaccinations do. While we welcome this overdue news, there is no way to deny the immense harm that North Lake has caused both the people incarcerated there and the wider community in Lake County, and this facility can’t be shut down soon enough.

#ShutDownGEO

#FreeThemAll

Rest in Peace, Jesse Jerome Dean, Jr.

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Along with Detention Watch Network, we are mourning the loss this month of Jesse Jerome Dean, Jr., a victim of entrapment by the federal government who served 30 years in prison on drug-trafficking charges and who consistently professed his innocence. He was recently imprisoned at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin until December 31st, 2020, and was then seized by ICE and held in immigration detention at the Calhoun County Jail until he died on February 5th. In their press release announcing his death, ICE misspelled his name.

“Despite […] very detailed showings of both my actual and legal innocence and the fraud that was perpetrated upon me and the court,” Jesse wrote in 2008, “I remain imprisoned; each and every court that has reviewed my claims has denied me relief, ignoring their own laws, the facts and the truth!” His full statement can be read here.

The North Lake Correctional Facility had already claimed at least two lives in the last year. Now another immigrant barely made it out of North Lake only to die a month later in ICE detention at a Michigan county jail. This terrible news comes as a reminder not only that shadow prisons like North Lake must be shut down, but that the entire immigrant detention apparatus of which North Lake is a part must be dismantled. #FreeThemAll

North Lake Must Be Closed Now!

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Joe Biden’s recent executive order reinstating the Obama administration’s plan to phase out federally operated private prisons reflects only one small part of the struggle against incarceration and immigrant detention. The order doesn’t affect private immigrant detention centers (which Biden’s pre-election platform also singled out for closure). Shutting down private prisons alone, moreover, will not address the crisis of mass incarceration. But it is nevertheless essential that private prisons like the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin be closed—and not just when the GEO Group’s contract runs out years from now, but immediately.

The horrors of the past year and the courageous organizing efforts of immigrants locked up in Baldwin have made this very clear. “This place is unbelievable to humankind,” one person incarcerated at North Lake told us last spring. “We’ve begun to be sentenced by death,” another said. Our playlist of recorded calls from the facility in 2020 includes testimony from multiple hunger strikes and reports of medical neglect, staff refusing to take COVID concerns seriously, vindictive use of solitary confinement and water shutoffs, sick people disappearing from units with no one knowing their fate, guards using pepper spray to force the ending of a peaceful strike, and more.

Between April and November 2020, prisoners at North Lake launched at least six separate hunger strikes to demand adequate food, medical care, and an end to racist abuse, in part due to the Bureau of Prisons’ and the GEO Group’s utter mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. This has resulted in at least two deaths at the facility so far. Terrible working conditions have led staff to quit in large numbers, making the atmosphere even more chaotic.

In an article from January, Village President Jim Truxton of Baldwin acknowledges none of this. He praises GEO and claims that “none of [his] friends and acquaintances complain that they feel they’re in danger.” But Truxton personally profits from this immigrant incarceration, because, by his own admission, he owns GEO stock. His statements and the GEO Group’s claim that Biden’s executive order is “a solution in search of a problem” are obscene.

People who have experienced the immense violence of this facility, along with their families and loved ones, have been trying to alert the world ever since they got there. In addition to the testimony of the many calls and letters NDCM has received, Felipe De La Hoz detailed this pattern of violence in an August 2020 article for The Intercept. The article describes the life and illness of Félix Repilado Martínez, who wrote “I need to see the doctor soon is possible” a month before he died from complications of COVID-19. GEO lied about the circumstances of his death. His blood is on their hands.

In the fight against the carceral state, closing private prisons is just the beginning. But there’s no question that facilities like North Lake need to be closed.

“They Want to Keep It Under the Rug”: Conditions at North Lake, Fall 2020

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As the political situation beyond prison walls fluctuates day by day, conditions at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin remain unacceptable, and even continue to deteriorate. Last week one of the immigrants incarcerated at North Lake told us the food was getting worse and worse; the coffee tastes “like rotten wood”; medical issues take weeks to receive attention; and staff have been talking about at least one incarcerated person “getting super sick again.” The number of COVID-19 cases reported at North Lake on the Bureau of Prisons’ online resource page has not changed for months, but this by no means indicates an absence of cases. Sometimes days have passed without the BOP even adjusting the date.

They want to keep these conditions under the rug, but we will keep exposing and challenging the horrors of this prison until it’s closed down and the people held inside are free.

A transcript is below. The recording has been edited for length.

#FreeThemAll #ShutDownGEO

TRANSCRIPT:

“I don’t know, it’s—they say it’s breaking down again, because they separated the people again. And the problem that a lot of people are having here, they’re not given enough food. We, like, been complaining about it—they refuse to give us real food. It’s getting out of control, you know, a lot of people get headaches. But they don’t … they just don’t care. The food is just getting worse and worse, every day that goes by. I don’t know if they’re running out of money, I don’t know what’s going on, but the food is getting worse and worse. And you cannot protest with them, because they always threaten you: ‘Don’t do this, because you’re gonna make it worse for yourself.’

They try to give us coffee, the coffee taste like dried wood. Like a rotten piece of wood, that’s the taste of the coffee.

The staff members over here are not trying to help you, they never, like, have an answer for you. They just—they isolate us, and we don’t have a voice over here, pretty much.

They say somebody got super sick again. That’s what the staff are saying, and they’re really short on staff, you know what I’m saying, they don’t, I mean—it’s pretty horrible here. We get treated like we’re not human beings.

Like, a person would have like a high fever. And you go and ask them for some Tylenol, and like, ‘Get a sick a call,’ and then the sick call take about a week, for them to get you to medic. They isolate us, they don’t care—like, they never have an answer for you. They refuse to give you the right information; they don’t want to.

Pretty much they’re using this prison like a big warehouse over here, you know what I mean? We don’t have none of the stuff that we’re supposed to have. Our voices are not heard. People like really mistreat us.

They say they’re not making move-ins, but they still bringing in people to the prison. Yeah, they’re still bringing people. We spend a lot of time in our cells because it takes them so long to count, you know what I mean?

I also talked to a lot of people that quit here. They straight-up told me to my face that the reason why they were quitting is because they don’t want to be punished for something, ’cause it’s like, a lot of the people here are, like, not bad people. And it’s not humanely, the way we’re being treated, and I don’t—like I said, we don’t have a voice. They don’t want nobody to know what’s going on over here, they don’t want nobody to know. They want to keep it under the rug.”

North Lake: A Year of Resistance

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Though it may feel like much longer, it’s now been one year since October 2019, when in spite of community opposition the GEO Group reopened the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan as a federal immigrant-only prison. In the year since its reopening, reports from inside have confirmed and exceeded the fears of people in Baldwin and of immigrant advocates around the region and the country: this facility is a terrible threat to the life and safety of everyone inside and near it, exhibiting conditions that are, in the words of one prisoner, “unbelievable to humankind.” It needs to be shut down. But we are also inspired by the action and organizing undertaken by people incarcerated at North Lake over the last year.

The GEO Group and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have both shown themselves to be utterly negligent and mercenary in their mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. In the early days of the pandemic, when they had a chance to save lives by committing to a serious mass release plan, the BOP instead neglected to follow their own stated policies and transferred hundreds of people across state lines to a packed facility that could never safely hold them, allowing infections to multiply unchecked. For months people incarcerated at North Lake struggled to obtain facts regarding the virus and the threat it posed, as prison staff ignored their requests, gave them false information and even mocked their concern for safety. Family members and loved ones searched for answers on a website with a national prison map where North Lake at first didn’t even show up. More than a hundred incarcerated people and twenty staff members are confirmed to have gotten sick, and two incarcerated people are confirmed to have died, with prison staff shown to have lied about the circumstances of one death. Those are just the cases we know of, and there’s reason to believe the numbers could be much higher. The BOP’s online records for North Lake haven’t changed in months and show signs of simply no longer being updated.

This has also been a year of determined resistance and courageous inside organizing. To our knowledge, 2020 alone has seen six hunger strikes take place at North Lake—one of them in the general population in response to medical neglect, and the other five in the Restricted Housing Unit, where a group of primarily Black men were cruelly and arbitrarily confined from early spring to mid-autumn. Their strikes were met with pepper spray, denial of necessary sanitary supplies, and vindictive restrictions on access to clean water in the middle of a pandemic, but strikers didn’t back down. Their organizing has won conditional but nevertheless important victories. Donald Emerson, the original warden since last October, who showed an especially callous disregard for the safety of people held in the RHU and throughout the facility, has been fired and replaced. And the men held in the RHU have started to be transferred out to other facilities in the BOP system, as they had demanded since March. None of this would have happened without their persistent and brave efforts.

This shadow prison should never have reopened, but as we reflect on the last year we are committed to maintaining support for those held inside North Lake and working toward the closure of this facility and the abolition of immigrant detention and incarceration in Michigan and throughout the region.

An Account of the GEO Group’s Use of Pepper Spray to End a Hunger Strike at North Lake

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“I told them I was gonna move and they still come and sprayed me.”

In a phone call from Wednesday, August 19th, a hunger striker in the Special or Restricted Housing Unit at the GEO Group’s North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin describes being assaulted with pepper spray as a result of his participation in the most recent strike which ended on Monday, August 17th. Strikers have continued to demand an explanation for their prolonged confinement to this unit, as well as the restoration of phone access which has been denied in violation of GEO’s own policies. The recording has been edited for length.

TRANSCRIPT:

“While we was on the hunger strike, they come and pepper-spray me, and also write me an incident report for not wanting to move, when I never refused to move. I told them that I was gonna move. Twelve o’clock, they come and tell me that we have to move to 224. Three o’clock, they come back and tell me, no, we ain’t gonna move to 224 no more, they gonna move us to the hallway. So I was like, ‘The hallway is not a part of the SHU! So why you want to move me there?’ So I was like, ‘If you want to move me, all right, move me to where I should be, at administration detention.’ While I was in there, we wasn’t moving, they come and pepper-spray us and pull us out.

They dragged me out, take me to the shower, and the nurse come and see me, wash up—they threw something in my eye, I don’t know what is it, to wash out the pepper spray, ’cause they pepper-sprayed my eye, I could not really see. My nose—I could not even really breathe with it.

I never really do nothing, I never really fight them or anything, ’cause with pepper spray I can’t really do nothing, so I just put my hands behind my back and they cuff me and take me out.

The incident report said that I ‘refused to work’—then, after, they scratched that and said I ‘refused to move.’ It was all—they’re just doing it because retaliation, because the shot doesn’t really match with what they said.

I’m simply telling them that we are not fighting for nothing that we’re not supposed to have. If you don’t want to give us the phone, give us the phone privilege, we are not going to eat, because you are not giving us what we should really get. Because in the GEO rulebook, it says inmates in administration detention should [be] entitled to the same privilege as inmates in general population. And what really happened—they haven’t do that. When every time you get locked up, and you come into prison, the first thing that they tell us—they say it’s your right to know the rules and regulations. To respect staff and expect staff will treat you with respect. But we know the rules, they try to treat us bad. My old place, I never get a shot. Since I’m here, within less than two weeks, they write me five different incident reports.

We not eating is a problem to them, and they tried to do everything to get us to eat. But I was like, I was not gonna eat until either I pass out—I was really trying to get to pass out. I think if I had gone like until Monday or Tuesday, I would have passed out.

Everyone is tired here because we are not supposed to be in the SHU this long. It’s over 90 days now and Obama did pass a law that we’re not supposed to be in the SHU this long. And I haven’t even done nothing to be back here. I keep begging them, ‘Send me back to the compound.’ They refuse to send me back to the compound. I haven’t do nobody nothing on the compound. I haven’t said nothing to no one on the compound. I keep telling them, ‘Send me back to general population if you’re not gonna give me what I’m supposed to get back here.’ Because—at least have some sympathy on us. We are here, we can’t talk to our families due to coronavirus, and you’re gonna take the phone from us?

Everything we do, they write us a shot—incident report. From all the incident reports that they write me, I ask them, ‘Give me—call the Jamaican consulate, let them translate for me, because me English is very very bad.’ They haven’t do it one time as yet. So that’s the thing they do up here, they’re always writing us shots. They write us all the shots back here. And I know it’s all retaliation, for the hunger strike.

I never refused no direct order. I told them I was gonna move and they still come and sprayed me, and the incident report, what they write also said something different.”

#ShutDownGEO #FreeThemAll

PRESS RELEASE: As New Warden Imposes Harsh Conditions at Baldwin’s Immigrant Prison, Hunger Strikes Grow Larger in Restricted Unit

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For immediate release: 8/12/2020

On Wednesday, August 5th, more than two dozen people held in the Restricted Housing Unit (or RHU) at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan launched the largest hunger strike to have taken place in that unit since the prison’s reopening last October. The strike, which has continued into the current week, came in response to longstanding discriminatory treatment as well as strict rules imposed by the facility’s new acting warden, Angela Dunbar. Appointed this summer as a replacement for Warden Donald Emerson, Dunbar has implemented harsh limits on phone access at a time when those in the RHU face an urgent need to communicate with loved ones.

“Initially there was only three inmates in the Restricted Housing Unit that wasn’t participating,” one of the strikers said on Monday, August 10th. “Latinos as well as Black as well as white. Everybody’s on the hunger strike for the purpose of [addressing] human rights violations. We got kids, we got brothers, we got sisters, mothers, fathers that we need to touch base with, and friends. Instead of making some accommodations allowing us to communicate effectively with our families, they have taken those rights away from us.”

North Lake is a private facility owned and managed by the Florida-based GEO Group on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, holding non-U.S. citizens convicted of federal crimes. A group of around a dozen Black men have been confined to the RHU since March, following a fight in which they were not involved. This is the fifth hunger strike in which they have taken part over the last six months in response to racist repression, unacceptable living conditions and religious discrimination, and the sixth hunger strike to occur at North Lake overall in that time. Two people from the unit have been placed on suicide watch within the last month.

Strikers strongly suspect that Warden Emerson’s departure from the facility is connected to public awareness of their mistreatment and Emerson’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis, yet they say the new warden is trying to make conditions even worse. “The warden has made changes with the phone. But it is her rules and not GEO’s rules,” another participant stated last week, referring to a new policy limiting those in the RHU to one 15-minute non-legal call every 30 days. “In the inmate handbook it states that inmates in general population and inmates in Administrative Detention should have the same privileges. The warden took away those privileges, and I have not done anything to lose those privileges.” (The inmate handbook for North Lake affirms: “To the extent practical, inmates in Administrative Segregation shall be provided with the same general privileges as inmates in general population.”)

“We’re demanding to be transferred; if they can’t transfer us, then to accommodate us in a way where we could deal with this a little bit better under the circumstances,” one of the men in the RHU said on Monday. “I feel like I do deserve the same rights as any other human, the same rights as any other prisoner across the country. Under no circumstances will I eat, unless they can accommodate us or get us out of here.”