As ICE plans to move into Baldwin prison, residents hope jobs will stay

• North Lake Correctional Facility has been closed since 2022
• The private company that owns the prison is working to reopen it to house ICE detainees
• The prison has repeatedly opened and closed over the years, and residents wonder if the new jobs will last

Around 200 vehicles filled the parking lot of North Lake Correctional Facility, a private prison on the outskirts of the small town of Baldwin in Lake County, on the morning of the last Friday in May. 

About 10 men in white uniform T-shirts were busy outside, applying a fresh coat of paint to the front gate and using a propane torch to burn weeds in the gravel outside the detention center’s main entrance.

They were there for employee training as the shuttered prison prepared to reopen with a new client — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is desperately searching for beds for immigration detainees as President Donald Trump expands deportation efforts across the country. 

The prison has been shuttered since 2022. Prison leaders haven’t told local officials when North Lake will reopen, and neither prison owner GEO Group nor ICE could be reached for comment on this story. 

It will likely be the second-largest ICE detention center in the country.

GEO Group has been scrutinized for unsafe conditions at facilities across the country, including at ICE detention centers in California and Colorado. Recently, members of the public — many of them from outside the area — voiced their opposition to the reopening of the facility at county and village meetings. 

A protest is planned for June 21 in nearby Webber Township Community Park.

“I know there's a big outcry nationally about it,” said Lake County Commissioner Robert Sanders. “There’s a large portion of our country that doesn’t support ICE detentions. I try to keep that out of what our decisions are, because we don’t have any control of that.” 

He said he thought those coming into town meetings from outside the area needed to “step back and look at Lake County, what we have. It’s the poorest county in the state of Michigan … Don’t judge us. We’re trying to keep our schools, our seniors, and our people safe through the taxes that they capture from those facilities.”

GEO Group plans to hire as many as 500 people to reopen the prison, according to the local chapter of Michigan Works!, which is helping GEO Group recruit new staff. Leaders and residents said that would be a big deal to Lake County, the poorest county in Michigan, with an unemployment rate of 7.6%, compared to 4.2% nationally, and around 20% of residents living below the federal poverty line. 

For local residents, promises of new jobs are tempered by what has long been an on-again, off-again relationship between their community and North Lake, which has repeatedly opened with much fanfare only to shutter completely when a contract ends. 

Many residents doubt whether this contract will last. 

“In four years, are we going to have another president, another House of Representatives, and a Senate that is gonna change their stance on immigration?” Sanders said. “That’s the hardest thing for us.”

For locals, a familiar cycle continues

Baldwin is nestled in the middle of Manistee National Forest, a middle point between Grand Rapids and Traverse City at the intersection of M-10 and M-37. A small river snakes through the woods within walking distance of shops on the town’s main drag. 

When North Lake is closed, most of the economic activity in the area comes from recreation. It’s a well-known spot for trout fishing, celebrated by a 25-foot tall statue of a lake trout in the center of town.

North Lake is tucked away just 2 miles north of that statue. 

“When it first came in … I was against it and a lot of my friends were against it,” said Baldwin librarian Bonnie Povilaitis. “We thought, of all the things Baldwin does not need is a prison. But it brought in jobs. It gave money to the township for infrastructure.”

When North Lake is open, it’s the largest employer and taxpayer in the county. But the jobs the facility has created in its 25 years in Lake County have been anything but consistent. 

Julia Lemieux was born and raised in Baldwin and has lived in the town her whole life. 

She’s a bartender and waitress at Shoey’s Long Bar, a busy restaurant with a horseshoe-shaped bar that seats regulars whom Lemieux looks forward to seeing every week. 

“I know pretty much everybody,” she said. “I mean, people know your business before you do, sometimes.” 

She was in high school when the prison shuttered for the first time in 2005, just six years after it first opened. It was still a state-run facility then, for juvenile offenders. She remembers protesting outside her school to try to keep it open. At the time, her best friend’s mother was employed there. 

“I was part of that protest to keep it open,” she said. “There were a lot of people that worked there. Then it closed, and then it reopened.” 

She remembered thinking, “Is it gonna stay open? Is it gonna keep money coming in?”

The short answer was, it didn’t. 

The prison reopened in 2009 after GEO Group expanded it from 500 to 1,800 beds. It was used, at either partial or full capacity, to lock up out-of-state prisoners until 2017, when GEO Group terminated a contract with Vermont. Then, in 2019, it opened again under a federal contract to house non-citizens convicted of federal crimes. 

At that time, Lemieux’s life became even more intertwined with the facility. Her father took a job there in 2020 as a corrections officer. But in 2022, then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order ending all federal contracts with private prisons, and he was laid off. 

Eventually, he found work in Big Rapids, about a half an hour away.

These days, Lemieux says she avoids watching the news. She is staunchly opposed to Trump and says things right now feel “terrifying.” She said seeing people she knows embrace ICE detentions makes her question the community she grew up in. 

“I am worried that the outside world is finally finding my corner,” she said.

Jobs, taxes, and dependence on GEO

Shelly Keene is the executive director at Michigan Works! West Central, which oversees employment and training programs for six counties and has an office in Baldwin. 

Back in 2019, Keene was just about six weeks into her job when her office got word of a new contract for North Lake. 

“All of a sudden, we got a 6 a.m. call that they were getting a contract,” she said. “We stopped, dropped and rolled and did everything possible for GEO.” 

But the closure just three years later left many hundreds laid off. Keene’s office went into crisis mode, offering services inside the prison itself to help people find work elsewhere or file for unemployment. 

She said many employees were sure their jobs would be back soon once the prison got a new contract. 

“From our perspective, at that point, we were like, oh man, these people have false hope,” Keene said. “But here we are, a few years later, and they're opened back up.”

Lake County officials say it’s a mix of locals and out-of-county people who work at the facility, which is currently hiring for a range of positions, including a facility administrator, doctors, dentists, and nurses. Most openings appear to be for detention officers, with a starting wage of $29 per hour. 

According to the superintendent, Baldwin Community Schools gets around $630,000 from North Lake’s property taxes every year — whether the prison’s open or closed doesn’t change that number. Private prisons, unlike public facilities, have taxable property values. 

GEO Group took the county to court a few years ago to lower that value. They won, and the school district had to pay around $1 million back to GEO Group. Then GEO Group filed another petition with the Michigan Tax Tribunal in May of last year, while North Lake was still closed, seeking to reduce the facility’s taxable value by more than $12 million. The prison now opening may affect their case. 

“They are the biggest taxpayer to our school district,” said Sanders, the Lake County commissioner. “They pay the 18 mills that go directly to the schools, the veterans funds, any mill that we collect. The road patrol, the ambulance millage, the 911 millage ...” 

Sanders says there aren’t many options for employment in Baldwin, or most of Lake County. He’d love to see some industry drawn to the area, but he says the county’s infrastructure isn’t good enough to support it. The huge swaths of state forest land mean there’s less room for agriculture. People come to town to fish, but not enough to support the local economy. 

Part of a national trend — which may be temporary

“Immigrant detention has increasingly become a central part of the private prison business model,” said Brett Burkhardt, associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University. “To the point where, nowadays, the big companies are generating 30%, or even closer to 40% of their revenue from immigrant detention contracts with ICE.”

He has studied the economics of private prisons. He said that, as prison populations declined starting around 2009, “we have seen more and more prison closures, both public and private.” 

ICE contracts, however, stayed very lucrative for companies like GEO Group. 

But, Burkhardt said, “although there is currently a very high demand for these immigration detention facilities, we just have no idea how long these policies will be in place, and we don't know how long these detention facilities will be needed … There is always the possibility — the very likely possibility — that some of these immigrant detention facilities will be closing in the not-too-distant future.”

Harold Nichols, Baldwin’s village president, worked as a detective for the county sheriff’s department for 25 years. He thinks Baldwin — and Lake County, overall — have more to offer than North Lake. 

“What we’re good at is we have the most lakes and the most rivers in any county around us. We have a huge national forest. We have the most trails for riding, the most snowmobile trails … Those are the things we should build on as a community,” he said. “That’s what I’m hoping we get into, instead of more industry, like prisons or factories or all those kinds of things that come and go.”

For other nearby residents, negative feelings about North Lake go deeper than just its economic instability. 

Roderick Holmes spends his summers in Idlewild, a historically Black resort town right next to Baldwin and just a few miles from North Lake. 

Holmes knows what it’s like to be imprisoned in a place like North Lake. He spent 25 years as an inmate in 17 different prisons in Michigan — he was released in 2020. He’s not looking forward to seeing the buses they use to transport detainees pull up to his corner gas station like any other bus.  

“You’re gonna see these buses coming in. You’re gonna have people sitting in there … shackles on, looking out the window, like where the hell are we?” he said. “I’ve been there, I know that feeling. I know exactly what that person is thinking, feeling … it’s not easy.”  

This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Project, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.