PRESS RELEASE: Amidst Nationwide Condemnation of ICE, GEO Group Rushes to Reopen Infamous North Lake Correctional Facility as Immigration Detention Center

June 17, 2025June 17, 2025 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

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.

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.

No kings, no cages, no detention centers in Michigan

June 16, 2025August 15, 2025 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

Members of No Detention Centers in Michigan attended #NoKings events on Saturday in Traverse City, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Big Rapids and Ann Arbor to spread the word about the GEO Group’s unacceptable plans to reopen the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin for ICE in the coming days. Our friends in Movimiento Cosecha GR also spoke to the recent escalated ICE terror in Grand Rapids and the need to free Carlos Menjivar, who was kidnapped from his ISAP appointment on June 4th and whose family stayed in sanctuary at Fountain Street Church before leaving the country over the weekend.

To support Carlos and his family: tinyurl.com/FreeCarlosM

To sign up for updates on the fight against North Lake: tinyurl.com/NorthLakeUpdates

#FreeCarlos and free them all! No kings, no cages, no detention centers in Michigan or anywhere.

PRESS RELEASE: Grand Rapids Participates in National Day of Action for the Dignity of Immigrants, Denouncing Trump’s Mass Detention Agenda and the Reopening of a Notorious Prison in Baldwin

April 17, 2025June 16, 2025 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

For Immediate Release: Thursday, April 17th, 2025

Grand Rapids, MI — Today, over 200 immigrant justice advocates in Michigan participated in Detention Watch Network’s “Communities Not Cages” National Day of Action. Hosted nationally by the American Friends Service Committee and the Immigrant Justice Network, the Day of Action denounced the Trump administration’s cruel detention and deportation agenda in over a dozen states. In Michigan, approximately 230 community members joined together in a rally and vigil to demand sanctuary in Grand Rapids and to speak out against the planned reopening of the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin as an ICE detention center.

Advocates say a focal point of Trump’s agenda is a multi-layered detention expansion plan, which if fully enacted will triple the amount of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Just this month, ICE issued a solicitation for “Emergency Detention and Related Services,” which could spend up to $45 billion over two years for new ICE jails and related operations. This is the latest move in the Trump administration’s cruel plan, which includes invoking an antiquated wartime act and partnering with authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele to outsource incarceration to El Salvador. Trump has also proliferated ICE operations into other government agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Defense, using military bases as deportation hubs and growing ICE partnerships with local sheriffs and county jails. The administration has expanded surveillance, brought back family detention, and increased neighborhood and workplace raids that destabilize communities and disappear people—including students specifically targeted for their solidarity with Palestine—into ICE’s network, often sowing fear and confusion with facility transfers.

In Michigan, advocates are concerned by the threat of the GEO Group’s North Lake Correctional Facility reopening as the largest detention center in the Midwest, and the incentives it would provide ICE to expand its already devastating operations in the area. North Lake was previously in use from 2019 through 2022 as a federal prison exclusively 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 organized by predominantly Black immigrants in 2020 alone. In Grand Rapids, organizers with Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have continued to stress the urgent need for city officials to declare sanctuary status and enact protective policies for the safety and dignity of immigrants and their loved ones and communities throughout the region.

Advocates who participated in the national day of action issued the following statements:

Ewurama Appiagyei-Dankah from the ACLU of Michigan said: “The Trump administration has put a clear target on our immigrant friends and neighbors, which the GEO Group is exploiting for greed. The North Lake Correctional Facility has a well-documented and heartbreaking history of abuse, much like other detention centers throughout the country owned and operated by GEO. Reopening North Lake under the guise of creating jobs in Baldwin is a problematic distraction from GEO’s clear goal: bending to the will of the Trump administration, tearing families apart, and putting profit above all else.”

Gema Lowe from Movimiento Cosecha GR said: “It is crucial that we continue to speak out against detention centers—facilities that give ICE even more reach to harm immigrants in our communities. We must also demand that our local authorities stand with our immigrant communities to prevent further family separation. Our tax dollars are being funneled into public and private prisons, allowing them to profit off the pain and suffering of immigrant workers. Together, we are strong. Together, we resist. And together, we will win dignity, respect, and protection for all immigrants.”

Jose Rodriguez from GR Rapid Response to ICE said: “GR Rapid Response has been working directly with Movimiento Cosecha since 2017, mobilizing people who have been trained to directly intervene and prevent ICE from apprehending immigrants in Kent County. We also offer a whole range of mutual aid and solidarity support to families impacted by ICE violence. We oppose the GEO Group’s plan to transform the prison in Baldwin into an ICE detention facility, and we are committing to be part of the efforts to shut it down.”

Immigration attorney Richard Kessler said: “I have been an immigration lawyer for over 43 years and I cannot believe the current outrageous enforcement actions against immigrants that are taking place. I have visited the detention facilities—families are being ripped apart. The GEO Group is known to mistreat immigrants in order to make as much money as possible. We must wake up, stop the racist deportation machine, realize the social benefits of immigration and not allow big businesses to benefit while destroying our families and communities.”

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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.

PRESS RELEASE: GEO Group to Reopen Shuttered Michigan Prison as an ICE Detention Center – One of the Largest ICE Facilities in the Country

March 20, 2025March 20, 2025 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

For Immediate Release: Thursday, March 20, 2025

Contact: Detention Watch Network, media@detentionwatchnetwork.org //
No Detention Centers in Michigan, NoDetentionCentersMI@gmail.com

Baldwin, MI — Today, the GEO Group announced a new contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the GEO-owned North Lake Correctional Facility (North Lake) in Baldwin, Michigan. North Lake closed in 2022 as a result of Biden’s executive order to end the use of private prisons by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). With a capacity to detain 1,800 people, North Lake will become one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country. North Lake is among several shuttered BOP private prisons that have been converted into ICE detention centers over the years. This news is the latest development in Trump’s massive immigration detention expansion plan, which is attempting to triple the immigration detention system’s capacity.

North Lake was previously used by the BOP as a segregated immigrant-only prison. The reopening of the facility shines a light on a critical flaw of Biden’s 2021 executive order which excluded the largest share of privately operated detention facilities in the federal system: ICE detention centers. A 2023 report by Detention Watch Network and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center detailed how jails and prisons nationwide will close for one purpose, only to reopen and incarcerate a different group of people, creating a “Carceral Carousel.”

“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. Trump’s cruel detention and deportation agenda proliferates across government agencies and the private sector, as immigrants are locked up in abysmal conditions in local jails, federal prisons, military bases, and privately owned facilities, continuing an infinite loop of profit and cruelty at the expense of people’s lives.”

The group No Detention Centers in Michigan, composed of immigrant justice advocates from across the state, have documented inhumane conditions at North Lake and previously called out how GEO Group targets rural communities to deepen their dependency on carceral economies, including Baldwin. In 2020, two years before the facility’s closure, there were six documented hunger strikes and the tragic story of Jesse Dean. Dean spent 26 years behind bars, including time at North Lake, before he was transferred into ICE custody in 2020. Weeks later in ICE custody, after repeatedly notifying detention staff of severe pain, he died of a bleeding ulcer and hypertension.

“In the most egregious way, Dean’s case illustrates how medical neglect is inherent to incarceration, whether it’s BOP custody, ICE custody, or a combined partnership. The ‘Carceral Carousel’ that people are forced to endure can be deadly,” said JR Martin with No Detention Centers in Michigan. “Lives are in jeopardy. We denounce the reopening of North Lake and know that our communities are worth more. There is a crucial need to transition communities reliant on jails and prisons away from carceral economies and toward sustainable, well-paying, and dignified industries that will provide meaningful work and resources, without causing harm and furthering Trump’s cruel anti-immigrant agenda.”

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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.

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

September 26, 2022March 20, 2025 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

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

July 9, 2021 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

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

June 2, 2021 / nodetentioncentersmi / 1 Comment

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.

Vaccines at North Lake

June 2, 2021 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

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.

February 17, 2021 / nodetentioncentersmi / 1 Comment

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!

February 17, 2021February 17, 2021 / nodetentioncentersmi / Leave a comment

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.