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.
Source: ‘Zombie Prisons’: How ICE Detention Is Raising Troubling Facilities From the Dead
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