t was terrible,” Olivier Habimana* remembered about his first night at a small county jail in Indiana after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Born in Rwanda and educated in Belgium, he came to the United States to work as an operations manager for a French company based in Indianapolis that supplies parts for the big three auto companies. He was a middle-class professional, and he had never been in jail before. So, when he was arrested by ICE, it was a “huge shock,” he told Truthout.
Agents put him in the back of a van that made him feel like “an animal in a cage.” When he got to the small jail in Clay County, in rural Indiana, he was surprised. At the time, in 2022, it held about 50 people. “I was expecting the jail was going to be something much bigger,” Habimana said. “It almost looked like somebody’s garage.”
The first issue, he said, was the mattress. “You’re lying on a bare metal sheet and you’re given something that was supposed to be a pillow.”
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He had never heard of “chow time,” and when he was given a dinner tray, he thought to himself, “How can I eat this, is this even food?”
After the two-and-a-half years he spent in ICE detention, “these things became normal,” he said.
Related Story
Anti-Immigrant Agenda Means “Unprecedented Growth Opportunities” for GEO Group
On the company’s earnings call, one participant congratulated executives on “the positive news.”
By
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg ,
Truthout
August 6, 2025
The Clay County Jail is one of a largely invisible network of county jails in the vast interior of the Midwest. But the jails holding immigrants for ICE are already at capacity. The Trump administration would need more cages to hold thousands of people to carry out its proposed “mass deportations.”
President Donald Trump’s $45 billion plan for ICE detention, announced in April and approved by Congress in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” includes the reopening of two private prisons in the Midwest. One is the North Lake Correctional Facility, run by GEO Group, in rural Baldwin, Michigan, with a capacity to hold 1,800 people. It has already been opened and begun accepting its first detainees. The other is what is being called the Midwest Regional Reception Center, operated by CoreCivic, in Leavenworth, Kansas, which can hold another 1,000 people. A court decision requiring the owner to obtain a special permit is stalling its opening.
The capacity for immigrant detention in the U.S. is expected to grow to over 100,000 people, double what it was when Trump entered the White House for his second term. As so-called border czar Tom Homan envisions, “The more beds that we have, the more bad guys we arrest.”
“The Midwest has long been a critical site of resistance against ICE’s attacks on immigrant communities, and this time around is no different.”
These immigration prisons and jails in the Midwest present a distinct set of challenges different from the politics of the militarized border or the liberal east and west coasts. They are often located in rural areas in red states where support for Trump is high. Often, the jails are run by conservative sheriffs who are aligned with Trump’s policies. Located in towns with depressed economies, the communities are attracted by the promise of jobs and tax revenue. Still, organizers are developing creative ways to build solidarity with immigrants incarcerated in these places and mobilize local support.
“It is no surprise that ICE is expanding in the Midwest,” Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network and author of Unbuild Walls, told Truthout. “For years, local communities in the region blocked the expansion of a large immigrant detention center. ICE is circumventing these efforts by repurposing old prisons and using military bases to carry out their mass deportation agenda. But communities across the country are demanding to shut down detention centers and halt detention expansion. The Midwest has long been a critical site of resistance against ICE’s attacks on immigrant communities, and this time around is no different.”
It’s All About the Dollars
Leavenworth, Kansas, is a prison town best known for the federal prison which housed notorious figures like Machine Gun Kelly, James Earl Ray, and Tom Pendergast. It also housed Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly a decade there in the 1980s and 1990s, and was recently freed by President Joe Biden.
The private prison in Leavenworth operated by CoreCivic is less well known but has been plagued by problems. CoreCivic built the facility during the prison boom of the early 1990s to hold citizens pretrial in federal detention for the U.S. Marshals Service. It was shut down in 2021 after a judge deemed it a “hell hole.”
Biden signed Executive Order 14006, stating that the Department of Justice should not renew contracts with private prisons to “reduce profit-based incentives.” As it turned out, Biden’s order excluded immigrant detention centers, and left empty prisons like the one in Leavenworth an option for ICE. In March 2025, ICE awarded CoreCivic a $4.2 million contract over five years to reopen the prison.
CoreCivic emphasizes the 300 jobs the prison will create, promises the facility will generate $1 million in local tax revenue, and casts its critics as outsiders. A coalition of local, state, and regional organizations has come together to counter this narrative. It includes Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation (AIRR), based in Kansas City; the ACLU of Kansas, which previously fought to shut the prison down; the local Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth; and Loud Light, representing immigrants in southwest Kansas. Together, the groups have mobilized residents, organized local faith leaders, and courted former prison guards to their campaign.
“Private prisons are the only winners here,” Celia Sanchez*, a volunteer with AIRR, told Truthout. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and went to school at the University of Saint Mary, a Catholic university in Leavenworth.
CoreCivic has tried to “clean up their reputation,” Sanchez said, “but it’s the same thing.”
“The facility has been there for a long time,” she added, “and has a long history of abuses, neglect, violence, drug abuse, you name it. Hence, the Leavenworth community believes we can’t let this happen again. We don’t trust CoreCivic.”
Bill Rogers was a correctional officer at the CoreCivic prison before it was shut down. He grew up in nearby Wyandotte County, on the Kansas side of Kansas City, and commuted 20 to 25 minutes to work at the prison. When he started the job in 2016, he said, “I didn’t even realize that we had for-profit prisons.” It was not long before he learned that for CoreCivic, “it ultimately is all about the dollars.”
One man in custody died after experiencing a diabetic coma, who Rogers believed should have been taken to a hospital, but was denied care, because, Rogers says, it “cut into the bottom line for a private prison company.”
In 2018, Rogers was hit in the head with a dinner tray by one of the incarcerated men and received 14 staples. Days earlier, he emailed the warden about being short-staffed. The highest operational cost for a private prison is labor, he said, “so if you can start to cut down your labor costs, you start to increase your profits.”
CoreCivic did not respond to Truthout’s request for a comment about Rogers’s allegations.
In July, a District Court judge approved an injunction keeping CoreCivic from opening the Leavenworth prison until obtaining a special use permit from the city, which could take several months.
Building Inside/Outside Solidarity
The GEO-run North Lake Correctional Facility is located in one of the poorest counties in Michigan. The county is also politically conservative, with 65 percent of voters supporting Trump in the last election. GEO Group is the largest taxpayer in the county, making Lake County heavily dependent on the revenue to fund its schools and services. The prison formerly operated as a “CAR” prison (Criminal Alien Requirement), managed by the Bureau of Prisons, which held immigrants convicted of felony reentry — reentering the U.S. after previously being deported. It’s now taking anyone recently arrested, another indication of Trump’s political escalation.
The coalition No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM) has maintained an energetic campaign to close the prison. On New Year’s Eve 2020, activists organized a noise demonstration outside the prison, broadcasting a loud message in English, Spanish, and Arabic with a phone number for those inside to call for assistance.
ICE is shifting people around to several county jails, which are often hidden out of sight. Local residents may not even know their towns are holding people for ICE.
“It felt really good to be there for that demo,” NDCM member JR Martin told Truthout. “But ultimately, what led to some of the most important connections was that we continued to spread the word about this facility and tried to make sure people knew they could reach out to us. In the spring of 2020, people [on the outside] started to send messages to say that their relatives, a group of predominantly Black men, had been forced together into the Restricted Housing Unit against their will. Loved ones had lost touch with them and were very concerned for their safety. Linking up with those family members was essential as we started to get a picture of what was happening inside.”
Shortly after, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and spread rapidly inside prisons. A series of hunger strikes was organized primarily by these Black immigrants, exposing the poor conditions inside. News of the hunger strikes was shared with organizers on the outside through these communication networks. The attention helped to build a groundswell of opposition which pressured Biden to phase out the federal use of private prisons. The Baldwin prison was closed in early 2022 when the contract expired.
After hearing news of the prison’s reopening, NCDM joined a “Communities Not Cages” day of actionorganized by the national organization Detention Watch Network, along with others across the country, including those in Leavenworth. On April 17, 2025, 200 people held a rally at the ICE offices in Grand Rapids.
The North Lake prison opened in mid-June and is reported to already be holding more than 100 people. Activists with NDCM, as well as the group GR Rapid Response to ICE, are organizing fundraising campaigns for families who have loved ones incarcerated in North Lake.
Cash Cows
Until the prisons in Michigan and Kansas get up to full speed, ICE is shifting people around to several county jails, which are often hidden out of sight. Local residents may not even know their towns are holding people for ICE. There is a network of county jails in the Midwest that includes Chase County, Kansas; Greene County, Missouri; Ozark County, Missouri; Phelps County, Missouri; St. Clair County, Michigan; Boone County, Kentucky; Kay County, Oklahoma; Butler County, Ohio; and Dodge County, Wisconsin. Sheriffs in these counties are paid to jail individuals for ICE at rates from $70-$105 per person per day, which is often used to make up for local budget shortfalls.
As the Prison Policy Initiative revealed in a recent report, detention figures for these local jails are not reported among ICE statistics and account for an additional 45 percent of detentions, making the total number of immigrants detained around 83,400.
In 2021, after Illinois passed a bill banning county jails from entering into contracts to detain immigrants, ICE started utilizing the jail in Clay County, Indiana, across the state border line: About 200 miles from Chicago and 60 miles from Indianapolis, it is well-situated. The county approved a jail expansion, a battle which activists fought but eventually lost.
Lawyers with the National Immigrant Justice Center filed a lawsuit in federal court in 2022, claiming Clay County was using immigrants as a “cash cow” to purchase an air conditioning unit, give raises to jail staff, and keep taxes low. The suit argues that after the jail failed two inspections, it should cease being used by ICE to detain immigrants, according to a provision established by the Department of Homeland Security. The lawsuit against Clay County was dismissed by a judge, but the lawsuit against ICE is moving forward.
Clay County has since completed an expansion of the jail to increase its capacity for ICE from 50 to 250 people.
The group Indiana Assistance to Immigrants in Detention has been organizing monthly visitations at the Clay County jail and building relationships with those inside. Truthout spoke with one of the members of the group, Robin Valenzuela, in June, just days after ICE agents cracked down on protesters in Chicago following several immigration arrests. She said the population at the jail had swelled to around 323 people. Many of those people were likely from Chicago.
“They put people on the floor. They use bunk beds. They’ll throw people in the rec room. They will definitely exceed capacity,” she said.
A professor at Western Kentucky University, Valenzuela has been conducting her own informal research at the jail. She met Olivier Habimana while he was incarcerated for several months in Clay County. They developed a friendship and he became her “theoretician from the inside,” she said.
While his immigration case was slowly moving through the courts, Habimana was sent to the jail in Dodge County, Wisconsin, where he was held for a year. He vividly recalled being put in a van with other immigrants and driven some 600 miles to Kay County, Oklahoma, with no chance to use the restroom. One man relieved himself in the van. Habimana remembered the driver referring to them as “sheep.”
After Trump took office, Habimana immediately noticed a difference. “There was a big influx between Biden and Trump,” he said, “in terms of who came in and their status and even nationalities.”
Rwanda refused to take him back, Habimana says, but the country’s government did not want a fight with the Trump administration, so his travel documents were approved and, in February 2025, he was promptly deported back to Rwanda.
“All these human rights are being violated in the country that’s supposed to be a champion of human rights,” Habimana concluded. “It’s not right that it happens.”