As ICE detention center opens, ‘dangerous times to be an immigrant in Michigan’

• 1,800-bed prison facility in northwest Michigan reopens as ICE detention center
• Trump administration is converting private prisons in several states as it ramps up deportations, border security
• Prison brings job opportunities to rural Michigan, but critics fear isolation with mean less transparency about living conditions

BALDWIN — Hundreds of miles from any international border or federal immigration court, a rural Michigan village on the outskirts of the Manistee National Forest will serve as a temporary residence for thousands of detainees awaiting a final decision on their legal status in the US.

As President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up nationwide deportation efforts, the Florida-based GEO Group and other companies have inked multimillion-dollar deals with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reactivate shuttered private prisons for housing migrants the federal government claims are living in the country illegally. 

Among them: North Lake Correctional Facility, a privately owned 1,800-bed complex in Baldwin that previously housed juvenile offenders, out-of-state prisoners and, most recently, noncitizens convicted of federal crimes until its closure in 2022. 

GEO Group began accepting federal detainees at the northern Michigan facility on June 16. If operated at full capacity, it’s poised to be the largest detention facility in the Midwest, and company officials estimate it could generate $70 million per year in profits. 

Trump allies see the opening as an economic boon for northern Michigan — the facility is expected to create hundreds of jobs in Lake County, historically ranked as one of the poorest counties in the state — and a sign of commitment to securing the country’s northern border.

But immigration advocates fear the facility’s remote location will make it harder for families to visit detainees – and harder for them to observe operations, including whether migrants detained there have access to legal counsel and acceptable living conditions. 

“It's pretty easy for things not to be observed, because literally, there's no one up there to keep an eye on it,” said Julie Powers, executive director of the nonprofit group Immigration Law and Justice Michigan. “These are very dangerous times to be an immigrant in Michigan.”

The new detention center is nestled in the forests of Lake County, population 13,000 as of 2024, in the western half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. It’s a heavily conservative area — last fall, 65% of voters there supported Trump’s re-election bid. 

It’s at least 50 miles from any large Michigan city, and more than 200 miles away from each of the state’s three border crossings in Sault Ste. Marie, Port Huron and Detroit.

GEO Group has faced lawsuits over prison conditions in other states, and in 2020, inmates housed at the Baldwin facility reportedly went on a hunger strike to protest conditions.

Related:

• As ICE plans to move into Baldwin prison, residents hope jobs will stay
• Michigan sheriffs: We're too overwhelmed to help ICE round up immigrants
• Activists: ICE agents arrested migrants outside Detroit courtroom

Few guardrails exist to ensure the people housed there have access to basic necessities and legal counsel, said Liz Balck, a policy strategist for the ACLU of Michigan. The group is urging the state’s congressional delegation to tour the facility and keep tabs on its conditions.

“One of the biggest concerns for us is that lack of transparency and accountability,” Balck said. “It’s the lack of knowing what’s going on behind closed doors that we’re afraid of.” 

‘An unprecedented opportunity’

A GEO Group spokesperson declined to comment on the facility’s latest operations, instead referring a Bridge Michigan reporter to ICE. The federal agency confirmed the North Lake facility began accepting detainees June 16, but did not elaborate on the specifics of the Michigan contract. 

The facility allows visits by friends and family four days a week during 1.5-hour windows at times that are dependent upon the detainee’s classification, according to ICE. Attorneys can schedule separate visits, confidential phone calls or video teleconferencing. 

Speaking Friday in Detroit, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem touted the administration’s work to secure the country’s borders and disputed criticism of federal deportation tactics. 

“ICE has been following the law, doing due process, going after the criminals and the worst of the worst — exactly like President Trump has told us,” Noem said. 

The Baldwin center’s opening comes as the Trump administration pushes for more aggressive enforcement of the country’s immigration policies, setting an internal goal of 3,000 migrant arrests per day. 

Through early June, ICE officials had made more than 100,000 arrests during Trump's second term — nearly as many as the Biden administration made in all of fiscal year 2024. Michigan data is not yet available, but the chief agent for the Detroit Sector of US Border Patrol has announced dozens of arrests in Michigan, most recently detainment of a Mexican immigrant in Detroit. 

Trump has called for expanding operations even further in some of the country’s largest, Democratic-majority cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York “to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” he wrote on social media. 

To accommodate for increased arrests, ICE has quickly brokered new contracts or modified existing ones to reopen shuttered private prisons around the country without seeking competitive bids. 

In addition to the Baldwin facility, recent deals include facilities in Leavenworth, Kansas; California City, Calif.; Newark, New Jersey and Dilley, Texas, according to reporting from The Associated Press. 

It’s unclear whether the Baldwin facility is destined to operate at full capacity, and data on the number of detainees in North Lake — or where they’re coming from — isn’t yet available. But the 1,800-bed North Lake complex has the capacity to become one of the largest detention facilities in the country, according to ICE data tracking average population rates. 

In a May 7 quarterly earnings call, GEO Group CEO David Donohue estimated the Baldwin facility could generate $70 million annually for the company once it’s fully up and running, predicting a multi-year contract under negotiation would be finalized in the third quarter of 2025. 

“We believe we have an unprecedented opportunity to assist the federal government in meeting its expanded immigration enforcement priorities,” Donohue told investors.

ICE in Michigan

The Baldwin facility is not the first ICE contract or detention center in Michigan, but it’s by far poised to be the largest.

Four local jails in Calhoun, Chippewa, Monroe and St. Clair counties currently house migrants awaiting deportation or court dates. Collectively, those facilities held 346 detainees between May 27 and June 9, the latest available ICE detention data.

Other ongoing federal grants involving ICE awarded to Michigan entities include: 

• A $9.4 million grant with Marquette-based Satellite Services Inc. for operations and maintenance services at Florence Service Processing Center in Arizona 
• A $43,000 grant to Oakland County for access to the Court and Law Enforcement Management Information System (CLEMIS) database
• $44,400 for rental of Blue Steel Ranges, LLC, a gun range in Port Huron, for training purposes

As of June 9, the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, was the largest ICE detention center in the country, with an average daily population of 2,166 over a two-week time frame. The Stewart Detention Facility in Lumpkin, Georgia followed, with an average daily population of 1,828. 

The North Lake facility, which could hold as many as 1,800 detainees, has had a rocky history in Baldwin, opening and closing multiple times since it first opened as a juvenile detention center in 1999.

After the juvenile detention center was shut down in 2005, the building was reopened and expanded in 2009 to house out-of-state prisoners until GEO Group’s contracts ended in 2017. It was last used between 2019-2022 to house non-citizens convicted of federal crimes but was shuttered after an order by then-President Joe Biden severed ties with private prisons. 

At the time, Republican US Reps. Bill Huizenga and John Moolenaar requested federal officials consider turning North Lake into an ICE detention center, but the idea hadn’t taken hold until Trump took office. 

Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, R-Porter Township, said Trump’s decision to reinvest in the facility is a win for a region of northern Michigan that’s long suffered from high unemployment and poverty rates. 

“President Trump hasn't even been in office for six months yet…and now his immigration policies are not only making our state safer, but creating jobs as well,” Nesbitt said. 

Because the federal government contracted directly with a private company, there’s little local governments or state-level public officials can do to keep tabs on the facility or otherwise intervene. 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, in 2019 opposed the sale of a state-owned prison facility to a private operator for an immigrant detention center, citing concerns that the company involved wouldn’t guarantee to not detain adults who are separated from their children or immediate family. 

At the time, a Whitmer spokesperson told several media outlets that the governor “believes that building more detention facilities won’t solve our immigration crisis, and she also believes that separating families doesn’t reflect our Michigan values.” 

Whitmer hasn’t weighed in on the Baldwin facility’s reopening as a detention center, and her office did not respond to Bridge requests for comment on this story. 

Protests

On Saturday morning, protesters lined the shoulders of Highway 37 just down the road from the North Lake Correctional Facility, vowing to continue standing up against what they view as inhumane treatment under Trump. 

“People have disappeared. I see it happening in America, and I can't support that,” said Samantha Deyo, a Big Rapids resident who attended the weekend’s protest. “This is not the country I grew up to believe in that would do this.”

Protests over the Michigan facility have been far smaller than ICE-related demonstrations in other parts of the country, most notably in Los Angeles, where Trump activated the National Guard to quell unrest over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

On Saturday in Baldwin, local law enforcement patrolled the area, but did not interfere.

Nesbitt, the West Michigan Republican lawmaker, said the community should be celebrating the hundreds of jobs and national security benefits the facility provides, chalking the protests up to “nonsense.” 

But Maggie Doyle, a Muskegon resident and volunteer with the group No Detention Centers in Michigan, was encouraged by the turnout and said they don’t plan to stop fighting. 

The group has other protests planned, including a protest of a local job fair marketing GEO Group positions. 

She’s hoping more fellow progressives, elected officials and locals who don’t like the idea of migrants being detained locally will come around to the cause. 

“This is not about Republicans or Democrats, this is about human beings, human dignity,” Doyle said. “We don’t want a future built on barbed wire and mass abuse.”