A Massive ICE Prison Just Reopened in Michigan
Advocates are pushing for the release of a Senegalese immigrant whom they say was arrested in Detroit despite work papers. The GEO Group-run detention center has also sparked civil rights concerns in a historically Black community just a few miles away.
Jacob Wheeler
BALDWIN, MICH..— A village council meeting was unusually packed on May 12 as people across the lower peninsula called for officials to stand against the reopening of an immigrant detention center just north of Baldwin. The 1,800-bed, maximum-security North Lake Correctional Facility, owned by the for-profit prison corporation Geo Group, would become the largest such facility in the Midwest and second-largest in the nation.
Several were concerned that an increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence would hurt Michigan agriculture. Others spoke of habeas corpus and humane treatment. “We really don’t want Michigan to have a Dachau,” said another, referencing the Nazi concentration camp.
“I understand everyone’s concerns,” Harold Nichols, Baldwin village president, assured the room before stating the village council had little power to stop Geo Group, which operates 16 ICE facilities across the United States and was a large Trump donor. The federal prison wasn’t even on the council’s May 12 agenda, and Nichols suggested those gathered might have better luck taking their case to neighboring Webber Township, which needed to complete a sewer upgrade before the prison could reopen.
On June 16, just over a month after the meeting, the facility officially reopened, and the first detainees disappeared behind its walls. The advocacy group No Detention Centers in Michigan says that among them is Mayib Dieng, a Senegalese immigrant whom the group says was arrested last month in Detroit despite a work permit and a pending asylum status. No Detention Centers in Michigan is working with the Detroit-based African Bureau for Immigrants and Social Affairs to raise Dieng’s bond.
The fact that the prison will likely hold mostly non-white immigrants like Dieng stands out in this part of Michigan.
Baldwin, a rural town of 900 with a large historically Black minority, is 5 minutes from the unincorporated community of Idlewild in Yates Township, which once thrived as a vacation refuge known as “Black Eden,” catering to African-American performers and audiences during Jim Crow. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington played there, as did Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. W.E.B. Du Bois vacationed there. The local motel was listed in the Green Book.
Black Eden faded after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation in public places, but the memory of the freedom fight lingers. A homemade sign on a house across the street from Baldwin High School offers a nod to John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman and Freedom Rider, with the line: “Make Good Trouble.” That legacy informs the opinions of some here about the North Lake prison.
Barbara McGregory, the Yates Township clerk — and the great-great-granddaughter of abolitionist Dred Scott — opposes the facility. “Why are they putting them in prison — you’re saying every one of them are criminals?” she says. “My frustration is with the presidency. … The person in the White House has 34 felonies. He’s more of a criminal than the people he’s trying to put in jail.”
The detention center has also drawn fire from advocacy and legal-aid groups across the state. Susan Reed, an attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, told local TV station WMMT that she fears the new facility will feed into an escalation of ICE activity in Western Michigan. ICE agents recently arrested six immigrants at routine check-ins in Grand Rapids.
When the reopening was first announced, the No Detention Centers in Michigan coalition and the Detention Watch Network organized a “Communities Not Cages” action at the ICE field office in Grand Rapids in April that drew a crowd of more than 200.
A subsequent demonstration held by the Manistee County Democrats drew 250 people to a township park north of Baldwin on a scorching hot June 21. Two days later, No Detention Centers in Michigan protested a hiring fair in Baldwin by the state employment agency Michigan Works, which included a table manned by Geo Group.
Geo Group has promised 300 to 500 jobs at the North Lake prison (though it has no local-hiring guarantee), and No Detention Centers’ Cam Brown estimates that about 250 have been filled.
At the May 12 council meeting, village president Nichols made a joke, to uncomfortable chuckles: “How about a correctional-themed Airbnb [instead]?”
The quip betrayed an inconvenient truth for some in Baldwin, the seat of Lake County, among Michigan’s poorest. Here, 32% of children live in poverty, nearly double the state average. Upon reopening, the North Lake facility immediately regained its title as the county’s largest employer and taxpayer.
This wild region prides itself as a paradise for fishermen, hunters, canoers and snowmobilers, and motorcyclists who flock to Baldwin every May for the “Blessing of the Bikes” celebration. Meanwhile, house trailers and broken-down cars pockmark lots along M-37, the highway through town. North of Baldwin, a Confederate flag hangs visible from the road and some front lawns still sport Trump-Vance signs.
“I want good things for this county,” says Bonnie Povilaitis, director at Pathfinder Community Library in Baldwin, of the prison reopening. “We want to bring kids here. We want to have a better school.”
The North Lake prison has opened and closed multiple times since 1999, when Geo Group (then Wackenhut Corrections Corporation) originally opened it to house juveniles. It opened for immigrant detention during the first Trump administration, then closed in 2022, under President Joe Biden. During that time, hunger strikes led by Black detainees exposed mistreatment.
Following the council meeting, Lake County Commissioner Clyde Welford, who is Black, lingered. “People are saying [this prison is] about economics and creating jobs, but you’re running up one group of people,” Welford says. “These people have a right to flee a burning house. … some of them were fleeing atrocities and gangs and people being murdered. They wanted a better way of life. These [Geo Group] guys are going to make money on these people.”
He adds, “[It’s] just about money, and that’s why I’m opposed to it.”
Jacob Wheeler is a former In These Times assistant editor. He edits and publishes the Glen Arbor Sun in Leelanau County, Mich.
