A New ICE Detention Camp in Kansas
In Leavenworth, Kansas, a for-profit prison company with a notorious record is quietly planning a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) concentration camp. CoreCivic – formerly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) – has submitted an application to reopen its shuttered Leavenworth private prison as an ICE detention facility.
Local officials confirm the company is seeking a special-use permit to detain immigrants at the site. Community members and civil rights groups are alarmed, given CoreCivic’s long history of horrendous violence, torture of those it incarcerates, and negligence in its facilities. “CoreCivic has never answered for the horrendous conditions and dangerous violence that peaked in 2021 and contributed to the closure of the Leavenworth facility,” warned the ACLU of Kansas.
As plans advance via backroom deals and minimal public input, thousands across the states of Missouri and Kansas are sounding the alarm that this new ICE facility would expand the prison-industrial complex’s reach – with devastating human consequences.
CoreCivic’s Track Record: Extreme Violence, Torture, Medical Negligence, and “Hell Hole” Conditions
CoreCivic is synonymous with torture, human rights violations and safety failures in U.S. detention facilities. Across the country, their prisons and ICE detention centers have been rife with mismanagement, Riker’s Island or Guatanomo Bay-like living conditions, medical negligence, violence, and abuse.
The company has been plagued by excessive use of force, prolonged solitary confinement, overcrowding, and even scandals like staff spying on and voyeurism against detainees. So egregious is CoreCivic’s record that in 2016 it rebranded from its tarnished CCA name – an attempt to escape decades of bad press without changing its profit-driven practices.
At the Leavenworth detention camp itself, conditions became so appalling that prisoners and staff described it as a “hell hole.” A 2017 Department of Justice Inspector General report found that efforts to maximize profit have led to CoreCivic packing cells beyond capacity – even hiding third inmates in two-person cells to fool inspectors.
Violence spiraled: “stabbings…are so routine…they are almost unnoteworthy,” reported federal public defenders in 2021. Prison doors didn’t even lock, and drugs, weapons, and contraband flowed freely. Medical care, food, and even showers were denied as “basic human needs” went unmet. These deplorable conditions directly caused deaths and trauma.
In one CoreCivic-run ICE center in Georgia – Stewart Detention Center – nine people have died since 2017 alone, earning it a reputation as “one of the deadliest” ICE facilities. Investigations into Stewart found “extraordinary levels of neglect and misconduct”: officials threw mentally ill people in torture chambers (solitary confinement), ignored pleas for medical help, and falsified records to cover up detainee deaths.
Such patterns are not isolated incidents but part of CoreCivic’s business model. As the ACLU notes, “CoreCivic’s priority is its profit. Its track record shows that the shortcuts it takes to make its quarterly financial goals – from severe understaffing to depriving residents of hygiene or medical care – [have] traumatized and directly harmed…decades’ worth of…residents”. In other words, abuse isn’t an accident, it’s a feature of how CoreCivic operates. Even CoreCivic’s own employees have spoken out.
Whistleblowers from a CoreCivic-run ICE facility in New Mexico recently alleged fraud and cover-ups, saying prison officials colluded with federal inspectors to falsify safety audits and hide unsanitary, dangerous conditions at the facility. From Kansas to Georgia, CoreCivic facilities have been “blood-soaked” by needless death and misery – all in service of the bottom line.
Profiting Through Political Influence and Backdoor Deals
How does a company with such a horrendous record keep winning government contracts? The answer: political influence, lobbying, and shadowy deals. Private prison corporations like CoreCivic have spent millions to buy friends in high places. They pour money into campaign contributions and hire armies of lobbyists to secure policies and contracts that keep their cells filled. It’s a strategy that has paid off handsomely.
“The private prison industry…spend[s] big money in politics to promote their business interests,” observes the Center for American Progress, “contributing millions to elect candidates who will support their lifeblood” . In return, politicians implement draconian immigration and criminal legal policies that deliver more people (and dollars) into private prisons. This cozy relationship is the epitome of the swampy “pay-to-play” system.
Under the Trump administration, CoreCivic reaped a bonanza. After candidate Trump demonized immigrants and promised mass detention, CoreCivic’s investments in lobbying and influence quickly bore fruit. Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly reversed Obama-era plans to phase out private prisons, causing CoreCivic’s stock to soar.
Within months, the company’s federal contracts spiked by 935% from 2016 to 2017. CoreCivic’s CEO jubilantly declared the political climate “the most robust…sales environment we’ve seen in 10 years.” In one telling example, CoreCivic secretly donated $500,000 to President Trump’s inaugural committee. Shortly thereafter, ICE and the Justice Department handed private prison companies a windfall of new contracts and expanded detention crackdowns.
CoreCivic’s own CEO, Damon Hininger, openly anticipated an “increased need for detention capacity” after the 2024 election and bragged to investors that the company was “activating every single bed we’ve got” in preparation. The message is clear: policy is up for sale, and corporations like CoreCivic are buying.
Many of these deals happen behind closed doors. ICE often uses opaque contracting methods – like Intergovernmental Service Agreements (IGSAs) – that allow private prisons to secure contracts via local government intermediaries with little transparency. These backdoor arrangements evade open competition and public scrutiny, effectively letting ICE and companies cut deals in the shadows.
Watchdog groups note this “pass-through” contracting lets local counties pad their budgets with a cut of ICE payments while shielding companies from accountability. Leavenworth’s situation is a prime example: CoreCivic’s proposal to repurpose its empty prison for immigrants only came to light because community advocates filed records requests and FOIA lawsuits. New documents obtained by the ACLU in late 2024 exposed that ICE was actively soliciting private prison proposals in Kansas – including CoreCivic’s bid for the Leavenworth facility – despite public denials.
In other words, even as Kansans loudly opposed the plan, ICE and CoreCivic were plotting behind the scenes. “The community of Leavenworth has made it clear multiple times that ICE and CoreCivic are not welcome to wreak havoc here – and local leaders do not have to give in,” said Micah Kubic, ACLU of Kansas director, urging officials to reject these secret dealings.
ICE Detention: Criminalizing Immigrants for Corporate Gain
The explosive growth of ICE concentration camps in recent years has been a goldmine for private prison operators – and a nightmare for immigrant communities. CoreCivic and its peers have aggressively pivoted into immigration detention as their new profit engine. Under the Biden administration, ICE detainee numbers actually surged, reaching record levels of both detention and “alternatives” like ankle monitors – contracts dominated by private companies.
Today, roughly 90% of all people in ICE custody are held in for-profit facilities, an all-time high up from ~80% under Trump. In fiscal year 2021, CoreCivic raked in over $550 million from ICE contracts alone, and by 2022 ICE detention made up 30% of CoreCivic’s entire revenue. These companies have pocketed billions in taxpayer dollars by turning human suffering into a revenue stream.
ICE detention is ostensibly civil, not criminal, but in practice it functions like a prison system specifically targeting immigrants. People awaiting asylum hearings or immigration proceedings – many with no criminal record – find themselves locked in facilities indistinguishable from prisons, often in remote locations far from legal help.
This “crimmigration” pipeline deliberately frames migrants as criminals to justify their mass incarceration. As one immigrant rights advocate noted, “Racial profiling is very real, especially in the area of immigration”, and detention centers are the ultimate culmination of that profiling. The new Leavenworth ICE lockup would exemplify this trend – profiteers and politicians working together to criminalize immigrant families and communities of color for profit.
Karla Juarez, a Kansas City immigrant advocate, fears the trauma it will inflict: “We don’t want [our] families to go through [the] trauma because of a detention center,” she said, emphasizing how detention tears apart communities and causes lasting psychological damage.
It’s no coincidence that anti-immigrant policies and for-profit detention have expanded hand-in-hand. Private prison lobbyists have pushed harsh immigration laws and quotas that guarantee a steady supply of detainees.
For example, CoreCivic’s and GEO Group’s very first federal contracts in the 1980s were to detain immigrants, and ever since, their powerful lobby has played an “integral role” in expanding the immigration detention system. From Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant SB1070 law to federal “zero tolerance” family separation, private prisons have often been lurking in the background, funding nativist politicians and reaping the rewards in contracts.
As Freedom for Immigrants puts it, these corporations have “built a multi-billion dollar business off the caging and suffering of mostly Black and brown immigrants,” driven by “inhumane financial incentive to lock up as many people for as long as possible.” Every person behind those barbed-wire fences is a dollar sign to CoreCivic, an asset to monetize under the guise of “law and order.”
Modern-Day Concentration Camps: Parallels to History’s Darkest Chapters
The image of thousands of people penned in detention camps has drawn unavoidable comparisons to history. In fact, many historians and experts make clear that ICE’s detention network meets the definition of a “concentration camp system.” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, notes that “mass detention of civilians without trial” is precisely what defines a concentration camp.
“We have what I would call a concentration camp system [at the U.S. border],” Pitzer says – camps designed to segregate a despised minority (in this case, undocumented immigrants) simply for who they are. Waitman Beorn, a Holocaust historian, emphasizes that “things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz… [they] are designed – at the most basic level – to separate one group of people from another because [the detainees] are deemed…undesirable in some way.”
Under this broader historical lens, ICE detention centers unmistakably echo the concentration camps of prior eras: mass civilian detention, based on group identity, with no trial or due process, resulting in enormous suffering and death.
To be clear, ICE detention centers are not extermination camps – but that is a dangerously low bar. “Not every concentration camp is a death camp,” Pitzer notes; often death and suffering come as a result of “insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions.”
In 2020, ICE detention deaths hit a 15-year high amid the pandemic and grossly inadequate care. People held in these camps endure extreme mental trauma – separated from their families, unsure if they will ever be free – just as victims of past concentration camps did. Chilling historical rhymes abound.
In 2019, news broke that the U.S. government planned to use Fort Sill, an Army base once used to imprison Japanese-Americans during WWII, to detain 1,400 migrant children. “Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder,” one report observed.
The parallels to the authoritarian playbooks of history are undeniable: rounding up “undesirable” populations, confining them en masse in isolated facilities, and normalizing this with bureaucratic euphemisms (“processing center,” “family residential center”) to sanitize the reality.
Scholars warn that this is exactly how the road to genocidal fascist dictatorships are paved. “The Holocaust did not begin with extermination camps,” explains Boston University professor Michael Zank.
“It began with [a regime] consolidating all power under one party…eliminating freedom of the press, and establishing concentration camps for political opponents.” In other words, the existence of camps – whether for political prisoners or immigrant families – is an ominous sign of authoritarian infrastructure. They create a zone where normal rights don’t apply, where cruelty is concentrated and hidden from public view.
This is why activists say “Never Again” must mean never again for anyone – the Leavenworth facility is not just a local issue, but part of a dangerous authoritarian trend that must be stopped in its tracks.
“Business as Usual” – State Repression in the USA
The proposed CoreCivic ICE camp in Leavenworth crystallizes larger national trends of state repression. It sits at the intersection of mass incarceration, anti-immigrant crackdowns, and the corporate profiteering off both.
In the post-9/11 era, and especially in the last decade, the U.S. government has increasingly blurred the line between the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement – to the detriment of civil liberties. Policies like 287(g) agreements (deputizing local police as immigration agents) and ICE’s Secure Communities program have fed more immigrants into detention, treating border-crossers and refugees as threats to be neutralized rather than people seeking better lives.
The rise of militarized ICE raids and family separation under Trump was a particularly stark display of state violence against a civilian population. And while President Biden campaigned against these abuses, in practice his administration continued to rely on private ICE jails and even oversaw an increase in immigrant detention to over 50,000 people in custody – nearing Trump-era records.
President Biden also quietly broke his promise to end for-profit detention; his DOJ stopped using private criminal prisons, but ICE (under DHS) was exempt and kept signing deals. This allowed companies like CoreCivic to keep profiting, illustrating how deeply the for-profit prison lobby is entrenched in the halls of power.
Meanwhile, state repression extends beyond immigrants. The same private prison corporations have profited from the mass incarceration of Americans, disproportionately Black and brown, during the War on Drugs and decades of “tough on crime” policies. CoreCivic, for instance, operates dozens of prisons and jails nationwide with well-documented abuse of prisoners’ rights.
The prison–industrial complex they are part of thrives on expansion: when crime rates fell and some criminal legal reforms gained traction, these companies simply shifted to new markets – immigrants, electronic monitoring, even re-entry programs – to keep the cycle of surveillance and control going. It’s a self-perpetuating machine: wealth and power are extracted from the oppressed (incarcerated people) and reinvested into lobbying for more laws to oppress more people.
The planned ICE facility in Leavenworth is a textbook example – a vacant prison is lost revenue, so CoreCivic “yearned to fill” it again. The Constitution grants certain rights to criminal defendants, making it a bit harder to profit from U.S. citizen prisoners; immigrants in detention, however, lack many legal protections, so they become the next targets. CoreCivic admitted as much: when faced with President Biden’s private prison phase-out (limited to DOJ), the company turned eagerly to ICE detention as an “easier money maker.”
In doing so, they are effectively helping construct an alternative system of incarceration – one that operates with even less oversight and due process – amounting to a parallel gulag for non-citizens.
Whistleblowers and Witnesses: Inside the ICE Concentration Camp Nightmare
The human toll of these detention centers has been laid bare by countless whistleblower accounts, lawsuits, and survivor testimonies. From inside CoreCivic’s facilities, a consistent story emerges: rampant abuse, medical neglect, and dehumanization.
In Kansas, Michael Good – a Leavenworth resident who was held at CoreCivic’s prison – described it as a ticking time bomb. “It was really rough… There were drugs everywhere, alcohol, weapons,” Good recalls. “It was really dangerous…I don’t know how that would change if CoreCivic keeps the contract.” His fears are shared by many who’ve lived through ICE detention. One asylum-seeker likened his time in a private ICE facility to “a daily nightmare…a slow death.” Doctors who have inspected these centers report detainees “stacked in filthy cells without adequate water,” diabetics denied insulin, and “psychological abuse so pervasive that many consider suicide.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE detention became even more deadly – the death rate in 2020 doubled compared to the previous year as ICE and private wardens ignored basic pandemic precautions. Whistleblower nurses from a Georgia ICE jail (operated by another private contractor) even exposed that women were subjected to forced sterilizations and gynecological procedures without consent, a horror that drew comparisons to eugenics experiments.
At CoreCivic’s facilities, staff have tried to silence those who speak out. The company “tried to silence journalists” who exposed its role in Trump’s family separation policy and abusive conditions. In Leavenworth, officials illegally recorded detainees’ phone calls with their attorneys, breaching fundamental rights in an attempt to boost prosecutions. And in New Mexico’s CoreCivic-run Torrance County Detention Facility, multiple employees blew the whistle in 2022 on egregious health and safety violations – from lack of drinkable water and mold-infested cells, to leaving suicidal detainees unmonitored.
These whistleblowers revealed that instead of fixing issues, the private operator falsified documents during federal inspections to cover up the problems. Such systemic corruption and retaliation make it nearly impossible for detained people to have their suffering addressed.
As one advocate put it, “ICE’s detention system incentivizes incarceration for maximum profits… [while] people trapped in this system suffer severe human rights abuses.” Every level of oversight has failed them – ICE’s own inspections are a sham, and companies like CoreCivic operate with impunity and immunity in the shadows of our legal system.
Follow the Money: Lobbying and Greed Behind the Leavenworth Deal
Why would anyone consider allowing CoreCivic back into Leavenworth given this track record? Follow the money. CoreCivic has a mothballed 1,033-bed facility there that is currently generating $0 in profit.
To Wall Street investors, an empty prison is wasted capital. Internal filings show CoreCivic has been “yearning to fill” the Midwest Regional facility back up to “hit those quarterly financial goals.” The company has openly warned shareholders that if it can’t replace its lost federal prison contracts with new ICE contracts, it would hurt their profits. So it’s no surprise CoreCivic is pulling out all the stops – lobbying local officials, pushing ICE behind closed doors – to secure a deal that will guarantee millions in revenue at the expense of immigrants’ freedom.
Leavenworth’s City Commission was invited to a slick “informational” open house by CoreCivic reps, painting rosy pictures of jobs and economic boosts. The company is likely dangling promises of hundreds of jobs and even vague benefits like lowered taxes to sway a community that has long lived under the shadow of prisons. But many see through this. “CoreCivic’s priority is profit…We haven’t forgotten.
We cannot trust CoreCivic to keep us safe – and we cannot afford to let it run roughshod over our communities again,” the ACLU of Kansas declared emphatically.
There are also questions about ICE’s motivations. Under pressure to increase deportations (especially with a president ramping up mass raids), ICE is seeking any available bed space – even reactivating facilities with terrible safety records.
The Leavenworth plan fits a broader pattern: ICE’s own FOIA-revealed documents show it was considering expanding detention in Kansas and five other states as of late 2024.
Who benefits? Follow the money upstream: Congress has kept ICE’s detention budget bloated (nearly $3 billion in 2021 for over 200 detention sites), due in no small part to lobbying by private prisons and their law enforcement allies.
Local governments, for their part, often get a cut via IGSAs – effectively a financial incentive to collaborate in jailing immigrants. Leavenworth’s leaders have to decide: will they sell out the community’s values for a share of ICE’s blood money? Some officials have already voiced that they “could see an economic benefit” and that Leavenworth is “known as a prison city” anyway. But community activists counter that any short-term gain would be dwarfed by the moral and social cost of becoming complicit in this for-profit concentration camp scheme.
“Not here,” says Juarez of AIRR, echoing many locals’ sentiment. Residents have started organizing, determined to fight this deal and stop CoreCivic’s expansion. As one organizer put it, “we can show that people are opposing the detention center” – a reminder that public pressure can still influence the outcome.
Resisting the Prison-Industrial Complex in Our Backyard
The plan to open a CoreCivic-run ICE detention facility in Leavenworth is far more than a local zoning issue – it is a battle line in the broader fight against the prison-industrial complex and the forces of authoritarian repression.
At stake are the lives and dignity of immigrants who would be confined and even killed there, and the soul of a community being tempted to trade humanity for profit. The evidence is overwhelming: CoreCivic’s business model, like all prisons, is incompatible with humane treatment. Its prisons and detention centers have left a trail of bodies, broken families, and traumatized survivors in their wake.
To allow this company to lock up immigrants in Leavenworth – under concentration camp conditions – is to sanction “business as usual” in a system of mass suffering for money.
This struggle in Kansas mirrors a national and global reckoning.