WASHINGTON – With detention beds at full capacity, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is eyeing a long-shuttered prison in Appleton, Minnesota, as part of a massive expansion plan.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Appleton city officials have known that the Prairie Correctional Facility, a 1,600 private prison that has been shuttered since 2010, could be repurposed to hold detained immigrants.
Appleton City Administrator John Olinger said he’d been in talks about the future of the prison with Kelly Durham, managing director at CoreCivic, the company that owns the facility and 38 others across the United States.
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Olinger said Durham told him last week that CoreCivic had not yet signed a contract with ICE that involves the Prairie Correctional Facility. But he said she also told him CoreCivic has “aggressively been pursuing something.”
Olinger also said CoreCivic had procured building permits and is in the process of refurbishing the facility.
An ICE takeover of the Prairie Correctional Center could greatly increase the number of immigrants in detention in Minnesota.
Currently, ICE does not run a detention facility in the state but has entered into arrangements with at least four local jails to hold detained migrants, including the ones in Freeborn, Kandiyohi and Sherburne counties.
ICE’s coffers full
ICE has plenty of money to expand operations, in Minnesota and across the nation.
The budget reconciliation bill signed into law last month provides $80 billion for internal immigration enforcement, including $45 billion for ICE detention centers and $14.4 billion for ICE transportation and removal operations.
The United States has reached capacity with about 50,000 immigrants under detention. But the Trump administration wants to more than double that number to 107,00, according to a recent story in The Washington Post.
The Post obtained an ICE “road map” that was last updated on July 30. It shows that ICE intends to expand immigrant detention to new parts of the country – including Minnesota and the Appleton facility — nearly doubling its number of large-scale, mega-detention centers and relying increasingly on makeshift “soft-sided” structures that can be built in a few weeks and taken down just as easily.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests from MinnPost for information about the plan.
CoreCivic declined to answer questions about its plans for the Prairie Correctional Facility, which at full capacity would have a higher population of inmates than town residents. According to the U.S. Census, Appleton had 1,352 residents last year.
But CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin said his company “stays in regular contact with ICE and all of our government partners to understand their changing needs.”
“Concerning our facility in Appleton, we continue to explore opportunities with our government partners for which this site could be a viable solution,” Gustin said.
‘Exciting period’ for private prisons
In a February earnings call, CoreCivic’s then-President and CEO Damon Hininger said his company is proposing to provide ICE with 28,000 detention beds.
He called Trump’s second term “truly one of the most exciting periods” of his career, saying the first bill Congress approved and Trump signed into law, the Laken Riley Act, would greatly boost the fortunes of operators of private prisons.
Named for a University of Georgia nursing student killed by an undocumented immigrant, the law requires ICE to detain immigrants if they’ve been accused of or arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting or assaulting a police officer. That shifted their custody from local jails to the federal system.
Since that earnings call, CoreCivic has entered into new agreements or expanded current agreements with ICE in Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma and Mississippi.
Another large private prison company, the GEO Group, has also benefited from Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Before it closed due to declining prison population, the Prairie Correctional Center was the only privately run prison in Minnesota. It did not seem to have much of a future for many years as states like Minnesota became increasingly wary of placing inmates in those facilities.
Related: Minnesota sheriff’s departments seek to cooperate with ICE
A state law implemented in 2023 bars sheriffs from placing inmates in private prisons.
And former President Joe Biden issued an executive order in his first days in the White House that directed the attorney general not to renew U.S. Justice Department contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities.
But Trump moved quickly after his inauguration to rescind Biden’s executive order. That dramatically changed the fortunes of companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group and their stocks soared.
Julia Decker, policy director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said there have been discussions over the years about the possible reopening of the Prairie Correctional Center.
“I don’t think it’s a surprise to see it discussed as a possible location to be used by this administration, which has made it clear they want to use as many locations as possible to detain as many people as possible,” Decker said.
A criticism of the Appleton correctional center when it housed inmates for the state is that its location near the South Dakota border was challenging to families and attorneys of the incarcerated to visit. That will continue to be a challenge for attorneys representing immigrants if the former prison becomes an ICE detention center, Decker said.
But immigration lawyers are already facing major obstacles in trying to meet with their detained clients.
As an immigrant detention center, the facility would likely hold those seized by ICE in Minnesota, as well as ICE detainees from other states that lack capacity to hold them.
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