A for-profit company says it has an agreement to reopen an unused prison in northern Michigan as an immigration-enforcement facility.
“We expect that our company-owned North Lake Facility in Michigan will play an important role in helping meet the need for increased federal immigration processing center bedspace,” said GEO Group CEO George C. Zoley, in a statement issued by the company this week.
The 1,800-bed North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin closed in 2022, after then-president Biden signed an executive order ending contracts with for-profit companies to operate federal prison facilities.
That came after there were safety concerns for the detainees at the facility. The federal government had housed immigrants with criminal records at North Lake, but during the pandemic, some detainees staged hunger strikes to bring awareness to the conditions there.
“We did hear years ago from people incarcerated at North Lake who told us very explicitly that they had been in the federal prison system for decades and they had never seen a facility as bad as North Lake,” said JR Martin, with the group No Detention Centers in Michigan.
The GEO Group has said its facilities are safe.
Martin said his group would oppose the reopening of North Lake, even though the company said it already has an agreement in place with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the “immediate activation” of the facility.
The GEO Group said in the past that the facility was safe, and it says now it expects to reach a longer term agreement with the federal government that will result in annualized revenues for the company of more than $70 million.
Concerns about profits are one of the reasons JR Martin opposes reopening the facility.
“They want to exploit the suffering of immigrants and the poverty of Lake County to make money,” Martin said.
When asked about the timeline for hiring at the facility, and when new jobs would open up, a company spokesperson said they could not comment beyond the initial announcement. That announcement is available online.
