North Lake Correctional Facility, just outside of Baldwin in Lake County, re-opened in mid-June as Michigan’s newest ICE detention center.
But how many people are in there? IPR tried to figure that out and found a complicated formula that makes it hard to tell.
How counts are tallied
Immigration Customs and Enforcement posts datasets about all of their detention facilities every two weeks. But each of those datasets has a two week delay, so every time they publish the spreadsheet, it's with data from two weeks ago.
On July 7, new data was uploaded to show the numbers as of June 23, after North Lake had reopened. But North Lake was still missing.
That's because ICE does not report the population count at each center on the day they upload the data. They report the average daily population, since the start of the fiscal year on October 1.
This is how Congress tells them to do it.
“They take ... the number of people that have been detained [at each facility] since October 1, add it up, and then divide by the number of fiscal year days,” said Adam Sawyer, who specializes in immigration enforcement data at his research firm Relevant Research.
If that formula doesn’t yield an average greater than one detainee per day of the fiscal year, the facility won’t show up.
For North Lake in Baldwin, the data was updated as of June 23, and the facility opened on June 16. June 23 is the 266th day of the fiscal year.
“[So] the total number of people staying over all the nights has to be greater than 266," Sawyer said. "If people started coming in on June 16, and you only had 10 people for June 17, 18, 19 and 20, you're not going to get up above the number 266.”
Sawyer breaks it down to simple algebra.
"ICE provides us with the average over the year. We know the number of fiscal days, where we are in the year, so we just have to solve for x," he said.
We worked out that since North Lake didn't appear in the most recent data, it likely had less than 38 people detained there on average, per day, in its first week being open June 23.
The fact that ICE is counting from October 1 obscures the numbers from later on in the year.
Why use this formula?
This is how ICE has reported detention statistics since a 2019 law, including under the Biden administration.
“When Congress put together the bill back in 2019,” Sawyer said. “They asked for the total count nationwide, but they didn't ask for the total population on a facility-by-facility basis. They only asked for the average daily population at each facility.”
Reporters aren’t the only ones trying to figure out how many people are inside North Lake.
A group called No Detention Centers in Michigan has been working with immigrant justice groups in Grand Rapids to gather information about the facility.
In a recent press release, they quoted one woman who said her husband was detained at North Lake. She said had been in the U.S. for 10 years, since he was a minor.
The American Civil Liberties Union is watching, too. They say there is another way to get more information about ICE detention centers.
“Members of Congress have the legal right to visit immigration detention facilities without providing any prior notice,” said Ewurama Appiagyei-Dankah, a fellow at the ACLU of Michigan. “We're really hoping that members of Michigan's congressional delegation will help us with oversight, because they have access in a way that most people just don't."
Meanwhile, she said the ACLU of Michigan is working to confirm that detainees at North Lake have access to legal counsel and the right to contest their detention or order of deportation.
What this means for North Lake
North Lake Correctional Facility has 1,800 beds spread out in multiple wings, but neither GEO Group, the private company that owns the facility, nor ICE has said how many of those beds ICE is paying for.
GEO Group did announce the deal was a multi-year contract and estimated it would bring in $70 million in its first year.
“It's very difficult to get the contract number of price-per-bed from each of these facilities,” said Adam Sawyer with Relevant Research, partly because private facilities can call that a trade secret.
So, when it comes to finding the number of detainees at North Lake?
There’s the data from ICE, there’s the chance a member of Congress would go in and look, and Sawyer says there’s one other way to have an idea: local reporting.
"Just to know if what I'm seeing in the administrative data is consistent with what other people who are on the ground are reporting,” he said.
So Sawyer is looking to local reporters, and local reporters are looking to him. Maybe, if the number of people in North Lake grows enough, the data will tell us both.
