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 that 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 hadn’t even been 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 was 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 worked with the Detroit-based African Bureau for Immigrants and Social Affairs to raise Dieng’s bond. {read}