Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
04.26.2025
Opposition to an immigration detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas, illustrates a tension playing out across the country.
The CoreCivic corporate headquarters in Brentwood, Tennessee, in 2023. The private prison operator is proposing to run an immigration detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas.
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Leavenworth, Kansas, is a prison town.
The conservative city and the surrounding county of about 80,000 is home to a constellation of federal, state and military correctional facilities, including Leavenworth U.S. Penitentiary, which once housed infamous gangsters like Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. In 2023, then-Mayor Jermaine Wilson — who was once incarcerated himself — said prison facilities were a part of the city’s DNA.
But there’s one prison local officials aren’t interested in: An immigration detention center that private prison operator CoreCivic has proposed. The controversy over the proposal is indicative of a tension playing out across the country as the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda bumps up against practical limitations in detention bed space.
In Leavenworth, CoreCivic is working to reopen a facility that was shuttered in 2021, after a Biden administration executive order prevented federal agencies from renewing contracts with private criminal detention facilities. While it was open, under contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, the CoreCivic facility was plagued by allegations of violent and inhumane conditions, prompting one federal judge to label the prison “an absolute hell hole.”
Now, with immigration bed space at a premium, CoreCivic is looking to reopen the facility as the Midwest Regional Reception Center, and Leavenworth’s leadership has filed a lawsuit to halt its progress.
Officially, the legal dispute is about the permitting process, but it has triggered a broader local debate about immigration detention. Some residents worry that immigrants brought to Leavenworth might be released and stay there, or that the families of immigrants will flock to the city to be near their loved ones. Others have questioned the humanity and necessity of mass roundups, reported The Kansas City Star. Still others, largely led by former staff of the previous CoreCivic facility, have raised concerns about the company’s ability to run a humane detention center for either employees or detainees.
One county commissioner also expressed worry that there won’t be enough local workers to adequately staff the prison, noting that the nearby state and federal prisons are currently understaffed. CoreCivic says it has received over 1,000 job applications for approximately 300 expected openings at the center.
The nation’s detention facilities were maxed out last month, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and this week The Washington Post reported that in some overcrowded facilities, detainees are being forced to sleep on the floor. At the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, The Associated Press reports that staff fear an “uprising” as the population has soared to nearly three times capacity.
Despite the crunch, it’s not clear that communities around the country are clamoring to host facilities. In Lincoln County, Wyoming — where Trump won by nearly 70 points in 2024 — the local community has also rebuffed efforts to construct an immigration detention center in the area, at least in part due to concerns that the federal government has become a less reliable contract partner under Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts. “We can’t do it, and we don’t want it,” a local politician bluntly told WyoFile.
Efforts to reopen shuttered facilities around the country are well underway in Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere, often despite the concerns of local politicians and activists. The push is mostly being led by private prison companies as they jockey for new contracts. In March, The New York Times reported that private operators are attempting to double the nation’s immigration detention bed space to about 100,000 in the coming months. ABC News and other outlets have reported that the firms expect to see record profits in return.
As in Leavenworth, many of the facilities slated for reopening were closed after findings of abuse or dangerous conditions. Nowhere is that more clear than at FCI Dublin in California, a federal women’s prison that was closed last year after an investigation found a pervasive culture of sexual predation, on top of serious maintenance issues with mold, asbestos and sewage leaks. Nevertheless, according to El Tecolote, “all signs point to” Immigration and Customs Enforcement taking over the facility from the Bureau of Prisons and repurposing it as an immigration detention facility.
The bureau is also getting involved in immigration detention more directly, housing some detainees in existing federal prisons, as my colleague Shannon Heffernan explained in a prior edition of this newsletter. The bureau told The Marshall Project that as of this week, there are agreements with ICE to hold detainees at federal prisons in Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Leavenworth and Berlin, New Hampshire. The bureau did not provide numbers, but in Berlin, WMUR confirmed this week that the local prison is holding about 250 detainees. The Trump administration, for its part, has said it wants to streamline and supercharge its detention and deportation efforts, with ICE Director Todd Lyons saying earlier this month that he hopes the agency can achieve the efficiency of a business like Amazon Prime.
To make that happen, the administration is weighing detention options far beyond reopening shuttered prisons. Earlier this month, Trump officials selected the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, to construct a tent detention compound to hold up to 5,000 people. That’s twice the capacity of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, the largest immigration detention facility in the country. Like the facility CoreCivic seeks to reopen in Leavenworth, the Dilley center was also reopened after it had been shuttered under the Biden administration. The Fort Bliss effort rests on a $3.8 billion contract with the tent-building company Deployed Resources, whose entrance into the detention space was detailed by ProPublica earlier this month.
Defense contractor Erik Prince has pitched an even more expansive plan to the administration, one that could lead to the opening of a 40,000-100,000 capacity detention facility in El Salvador, reports Politico.
Unlike the administration’s legally controversial and contested efforts to deport people to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under the Alien Enemies Act, Politico reported that Prince’s plan would have Trump officials establish a U.S. territory within the Central American country, so that detainees would still technically be on U.S. soil.
In theory, this could free the administration from some of the due process claims that have slowed its prior deportation attempts, though legal challenges would certainly follow any such effort. It’s not clear if the White House is considering Prince’s proposal, but President Donald Trump has said he likes the idea of sending more people to El Salvador. “You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump told Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the White House last week.
