A former maximum-security
prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, is now a critical hub in the Trump administration’s immigration detention machine, transforming in just a few months from a facility shuttered for its inhospitable conditions to a privately run jail holding hundreds of immigrants.
This is the story of how — and why — it happened.
The deal had been in motion for more than a year before the Leavenworth City Commission conceded to the controversial project, one that would allow the private-prison operator CoreCivic to reopen its notorious prison and fill it with immigrants. They did so after a protracted battle with the company, one that made them cogs in a vast deportation machine.
“I don’t want them to be in jail,” Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder said of the more than
500 immigrants
held at the facility as of August, the last publicly available count. “I think it’s horrendous. My moral objection to this is very strong.”
“They just bought their permit.”
But as the Trump administration and CoreCivic carried out an aggressive campaign to expand the federal detention network, city officials said they concluded they couldn’t afford to fight it. They tried to sue to stop the project, but instead spent more than a quarter-million dollars fighting it in court, draining city funds, before CoreCivic offered a $1.5 million impact payment to reimburse the city’s legal costs and pledged $400,000 a year to the local government.
“They just bought their permit,” said Michael Sharma-Crawford, chair of the Missouri/Kansas chapter of the
American Immigration Lawyers Association
, or AILA.
ICE Revives Former “Hellhole” Prison — And Hires the Same Company To Run It
The Leavenworth facility, for years marred by an
ugly history of overcrowding and understaffing
, is now the Midwest hub for the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. Under this
hub-and-spoke model
, which has gone little noticed by the public even now, ICE mo
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