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How a Small Kansas City Became a Critical Hub for Trump’s Deportation Regime Against Its Will

Leavenworth fought ICE’s reopening of a CoreCivic-run prison to detain immigrants through every available avenue. It still wasn’t enough.

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.”

“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 moves detainees and staff between smaller facilities — the “spokes,” which include facilities such as regional jails — and a larger facility as a center of operations — the so-called “hub.” Using this model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights out of the country.

“Leavenworth’s capacity is going to be that hub in the Midwest, to draw down from Minnesota, Chicago, Indiana, to house all that detention,” Sharma-Crawford said. Two other immigration attorneys who represent clients in the region corroborated the operational pattern through their own clients’ transfers and named additional “spoke” facilities feeding the pipeline.

Using a hub-and-spoke model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights.

Using a hub-and-spoke model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights.

The Midwest Regional Reception Center, as it’s now known, in Leavenworth is a critical site for the Trump administration, whose promises of 100,000 beds for immigrant detention stalled out at around 66,000 in July and had run into multiple obstacles across the Midwest. In Illinois, a 2021 state law ended immigration detention statewide. Minnesota remained a possible location for a hub, but the process moved slowly; CoreCivic’s shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton had long sat idle before its recent sale, and ICE needed to get a Midwest hub up and running immediately. Proposed sites were contested one after another: A potential warehouse for up to 10,000 detainees in south Kansas City was killed by community opposition, and facilities were either blocked or contested in Shakopee, Minnesota; Romulus, Michigan; Hudson, Colorado; and McCook, Nebraska. The Midwest’s largest operational ICE detention center, GEO Group’s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, is geographically isolated, hours from any major airport, and has been mired in controversy over a hunger strike, a death in custody, and hundreds of unlawful detention rulings. 

Leavenworth, a town with a corrections history stretching back over a century, seemed to offer the path of least resistance.

“Aggressive and Unlawful”

The City of Leavenworth fought the facility in court for months. CoreCivic countersued, and the Department of Justice intervened on CoreCivic’s side, accusing Leavenworth of “aggressive and unlawful” interference.

In the meantime, the fight threatened to bankrupt the city. Records obtained through the Kansas Open Records Act show the city paid roughly $820,000 in legal fees to Spencer Fane LLP over 12 months, about 6 percent of its general fund. The bill was a drain, but not a death blow. The city’s foremost concern was the takings clause, which allows the government to seize private property for public use, City Manager Scott Peterson said. A state judge had directed CoreCivic to follow the permit process, and if Leavenworth denied the permit, CoreCivic could argue bad faith, claim the city had effectively seized its property, and sue for damages, Peterson said, leaving Leavenworth to choose between greenlighting a facility it opposed or gambling on a lawsuit it might not survive. The alternative, Bauder, the mayor, said, was the federal government acquiring the building, which would eliminate local oversight entirely.

Both the city and county rejected the facility early on, local officials said. Residents protested its reopening and offered impassioned testimony against it at public hearings.

CoreCivic structured the $1.5 million impact payment in part to reimburse the city’s legal costs from the company’s lawsuit. When asked about the arrangement, CoreCivic instead reiterated its promised $1 million one-time impact fee, $250,000 a year to the city, and $150,000 a year to the police department.

Mayor Pro Tem Rebecca Hollister, who cast the sole dissenting vote on the 4-to-1 decision, explained her objection was procedural and understood it had no bearing on the outcome: “It was an inevitability.”

On January 14, two months before the vote, CoreCivic detention officer Brittany Williams reached out to city leadership........

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