“It was terrible,” Olivier Habimana* remembered about his first night at a small county jail in Indiana after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Born in Rwanda and educated in Belgium, he came to the United States to work as an operations manager for a French company based in Indianapolis that supplies parts for the big three auto companies. He was a middle-class professional, and he had never been in jail before. So, when he was arrested by ICE, it was a “huge shock,” he told Truthout.

Agents put him in the back of a van that made him feel like “an animal in a cage.” When he got to the small jail in Clay County, in rural Indiana, he was surprised.
President Donald Trump’s $45 billion plan for ICE detention, announced in April and approved by Congress in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” includes the reopening of two private prisons in the Midwest. One is the North Lake Correctional Facility, run by GEO Group, in rural Baldwin, Michigan, with a capacity to hold 1,800 people. It has already been opened and begun accepting its first detainees. The other is what is being called the Midwest Regional Reception Center, operated by CoreCivic, in Leavenworth, Kansas, which can hold another 1,000 people. A court decision requiring the owner to obtain a special permit is stalling its opening.

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