In mid-June, ICE opened an immigration detention center at North Lake Correctional Facility, a former prison north of Baldwin, in Lake County.
The detainees there are being processed for deportation. They can’t go in and out, but their attorneys can.
“I've been in the facility since it reopened. I think I've been inside four times,” said Richard Kessler, an immigration lawyer in Grand Rapids. He represents people in deportation cases. Some of his clients are currently detained in Baldwin.
“I was able to just arrive there and see the clients without pre-scheduling, which is what some facilities have,” he said.
Attorneys can visit seven days a week, and they can talk for as long as they want, which he said that’s as it should be in allowing people to see their attorneys.
He can’t speak to what the cells are like since he hasn’t actually seen them. But, he’s seen other parts of the facility.
“I've been in the kind of a lunch room area where we can be a visitation and some special visitation rooms. They're typical, institutional-type rooms. I wouldn’t say they're particularly dirty or anything. The temperature has been okay.”
He mentions the temperature, because, he said, immigration detention centers can be notoriously cold.
“I wish it was only a joke,” he said, but ICE facilities are referred to as “ICE boxes” down in Texas and in other parts of the U.S. In a different Michigan detention center, in Calhoun County, Kessler has found “it’s extremely cold most of the time in there. I always have to wear a special jacket or something.”
But, his bigger concern is that his clients are being held in detention at all. Many of them would have been released on bond before this summer, when President Donald Trump's administration changed longstanding policies.
"These are civil violations," said Kessler, about his clients' immigration cases. "At North Lake, they're subject to all kinds of controls. They're behind bars," he explained. "All the typical things that happen when someone's put into a prison facility," like for a criminal conviction, he said.
‘We need to have time’
Attorneys have other issues, too. Sometimes, people are processed for deportation faster than their lawyers can keep up.
“In order for us to represent them, we need to have time to review their case and their documents,” said Christine Sauvé, Manager of Policy & Communication for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC). Sometimes they have to get the detainee's signature.
Her organization’s number is posted inside North Lake and other detention centers in Michigan because they offer free legal services. Detainees can call MIRC for free, unlike other calls that they are charged for. Sauvé and her colleagues estimate the facility now houses around 600 detainees, which is hard to confirm from ICE data which only reports averages over time.
“Unfortunately, what we see is some of those individuals are moved very rapidly out of state to what's known as a staging facility,” she said, and at that point it gets harder to contact them to continue working on their case.
“These are essentially like warehouses attached to airports, and there are hundreds of people housed in these facilities,” she explained.
At any time, they might be deported from the United States.
Sometimes, before groups like hers have a chance to get the person’s case in front of a judge. The law allows for that in some cases, but not all cases, and the Trump administration is facing legal challenges over how it carries out deportations.
She said North Lake has better conditions than some of the other facilities she’s heard about, including the Butler County Jail in Ohio where many of the initial detainees at North Lake were transferred from. However, the general experience of being detained for an immigration violation is sometimes dispiriting enough that people don’t want to fight their deportation orders in court.
“They just want to be released and returned to their families or move on with their lives rather than staying in those conditions,” said Sauvé.
Protests continue
At the beginning of September, the group No Detention Centers in Michigan organized a protest outside the facility.
Spokesperson JR Martin told IPR that GEO Group cancelled any family or attorney visitation on the Saturday of the protest. IPR reached out to GEO about this, who referred questions about this to ICE. They did not respond in time for publication.
Martin has come up from Grand Rapids to Baldwin many times to protest at the facility, and driving through the woods, he’s often hit with the same thought.
“I think I'm often struck by the beauty of that area and how facilities like this prison are so often built in these areas," he said. "The contrast between the landscape and what it feels like to go through Baldwin and Lake County, and then this facility where people are held inside, it's really striking.”
He said he hears from people who don’t want Baldwin to be always mentioned in the same sentence as this facility, as a base from which the federal government is expanding its deportations.
