As soon as Shelly Keene heard rumblings that North Lake Correctional Center in rural Michigan would reopen as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, she got to work on a list of about 75 people who needed jobs and would be a good match.
Keene is the executive director at Michigan Works! West Central, a workforce development program. The detention center is in Lake County, one of the state’s poorest communities. She hoped the reopening would bring high-paying jobs, plus spillover economic benefits, to the area.
There was a reason her list of potential employees at the detention center was so long and so easy to compile: This is the fourth time the facility has opened in 26 years, creating a boom-and-bust cycle of layoffs and hiring blitzes. Since 1999, it has been a Michigan state juvenile facility, held adult prisoners for states that ran out space in their own systems, and served as a Bureau of Prisons facility.
North Lake is not an anomaly. The Trump administration has been desperate to find places to detain immigrants quickly, and it’s faster to open old facilities than to build new ones. The nation’s history of mass incarceration has meant that there is a glut of vacant buildings to use.
Prisons across the country have been closed in recent decades, sometimes because of poor conditions or criminal justice reforms that shrank incarcerated populations, only to be reopened in a different form. The zombie-like ability of these prisons to reanimate has been especially relevant for the Trump administration’s goals.
Zombie facilities intended to hold immigrants have been repurposed, or are under consideration, in Minnesota, Colorado, Tennessee, Michigan, California, Louisiana, Georgia, Oklahoma, Florida and Arizona.
These reused facilities show how deeply criminal and immigration enforcement infrastructures are entangled. They also illustrate how once prisons and jails are built, it can be difficult to ever fully close them.
Official government numbers don’t always provide a complete picture of how many immigrants are in detention. But according to ICE, the number of detained immigrants jumped to more than 59,000 as of Aug. 10. And the new federal budget has allocated $45 billion for immigrant detention, all but guaranteeing that the number of facilities will continue to grow.
Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the ACLU National Prison Project, said private companies and local economies have financial incentives to keep filling the cells they’ve already spent money creating. “How can we imagine ways to actually shutter these facilities for good?” Cho said. “Repurpose them and move the local economies away from a carceral economy to make sure that these aren’t detention spaces that can easily just be filled by new people.”
North Lake is run by GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the country. The center’s most recent closure happened after the Bureau of Prisons terminated its contract because of then-President Joe Biden’s executive order banning private prison contracts with the Department of Justice. The measure was celebrated by many people who pointed to a troubling history of abuse and neglect inside private prisons. But many of the buildings were left intact, and some are now reopening as ICE facilities.
In Louisiana, where many immigrants arrested across the country are being held, the state closed several prisons after sentencing and parole reform allowed it to shrink the incarcerated population. But those empty buildings were repurposed, and now, seven of the nine ICE facilities there are former local prisons or jails. Another is a jail still in use and renting out extra beds to ICE.
ICE is also considering reopening several closed criminal facilities in Colorado. And the expansion of Folkston detention center, in Georgia, is expected to make it one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country. The plan relies on repurposing the nearby D. Ray James Correctional Facility, which previously housed federal prisoners.
North Lake, in western Michigan, reopened earlier this summer as the North Lake Processing Center, just a few months after ICE signed a contract with GEO Group. It is expected to become one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the Midwest.
Immigration lawyers and activists are worried that the speed at which facilities are reopening, combined with many being in rural locations — limiting staff recruitment — will mean that they don’t have proper medical personnel, translation services, or legal support. “I think the rapidity of that reopening does speak to the chaotic environment that we always associate with the GEO Group and how they cut corners, and above all, they want to make money,” JR Martin, a member of No Detention Centers in Michigan, said.
In a written statement, a GEO group spokesperson said its facilities meet ICE detention standards, and that support services include medical care, access to legal visits and translation services. ICE did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Some local residents, however, welcome the return of North Lake. One former employee of the prison, who asked not to be named for fear of it affecting future job prospects, said she thought it would boost the local economy. She began working there when the facility held people for the Bureau of Prisons. The job allowed her to improve her quality of life and pay off bills. She said when the facility closed, she watched as some of her former co-workers lost their homes and cars.
But she wouldn’t reapply, after seeing it close and open so many times. “I loved the job. I loved working [there]. But I need that stability.”
Eric Lampinen works with local political and activist groups, including the Democratic Party in nearby Manistee County. He said GEO Group is preying on rural areas’ desperation for jobs. “While GEO promises economic growth, it produces only economic chaos,” said Lampinen.
Research on how prisons and jails affect local economies suggests benefits may be limited. A recent study suggests that while prisons may create some jobs, they don’t deliver a broader economic boost.
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, a coalition working to abolish immigrant detention, says that for people wanting to end detention, it’s essential to fully close facilities — not just to remove certain populations.
She points to the Etowah County Jail in north Alabama. ICE stopped detaining people there in 2022 because of “a long history of serious deficiencies identified during facility inspections,” according to an ICE press release. But the facility continued to hold people accused of crimes, and the jail never fully closed. And now, once again, it is housing ICE detainees. “Once the infrastructure is in place … there’s an incentive to keep those facilities full, to make money and justify their existence,” Ghandehari said.
