Riots and abuse troubled these former prisons. ICE plans to reopen them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/09/07/ice-detention-prisons-immigrants-trump/
The Trump administration plans to reopen several former prisons and detention centers that were closed by the federal government years ago over concerns about violence, medical neglect and systemic understaffing, as part of the president’s plan to carry out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.
Three of the facilities, in Texas, Kansas, and Georgia, are on a government list of detention centers that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to reopen or expand by the end of this year, according to an internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. All three would be operated by the companies that ran them previously.
Congress has approved $45 billion to expand immigrant detention over the next four years. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has stripped away oversight measures and provided limited details on how they plan to address chronic issues that led to past problems at these facilities, including understaffing in remote areas.
The troubled facilities were closed during the Biden administration after serious incidents, and in some cases, years of recurring problems.
At the sprawling Reeves County prison in West Texas, which could hold more than 4,000 people, inmates rioted to protest poor medical care, food and the use of solitary confinement, causing $20 million in damage.
A Senate investigation found that a physician affiliated with the 1,000-bed Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia appeared to have performed “excessive, invasive and often unnecessary gynecological procedures” on dozens of women detained between 2017 and 2020.
And at a prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, with capacity for about 1,000 inmates, understaffing led to such a level of violence and chaos that one federal judge characterized the facility as “an absolute hell hole.”
“The facilities that have been closed in prior administrations were closed for good reason, generally after a lot of thought and negotiation and consideration,” said Deborah Fleischaker, former acting ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden. “And to reopen those without really, really clear mitigation plans and oversight and staffing models is just a recipe for more harm to detainees.”
Reeves was overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Irwin by ICE and Leavenworth by the U.S. Marshals Service. Representatives for the private companies that operate the Reeves and Irwin detention facilities — Geo Group and LaSalle Corrections, respectively — did not respond to requests for comment.
Steve Owen, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the owner of the Leavenworth facility, said in an email that the company meets or exceeds government standards at all its 42 correctional and detention facilities across the country. He said that the Kansas prison faced security challenges related to understaffing during a short period of its 30 years in operation, and that the company has seen a positive response from job seekers as it lays plans to reopen the facility.
“As with any difficult situation, we sought to learn from it,” he said. “Staffing was the main contributor to the challenges, and the COVID-19 pandemic compounded the labor issues.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement that ICE detention centers abide by higher standards than most prisons. She also said that the internal planning document is still subject to changes, and the agency may ultimately decide against issuing certain contracts. DHS noted that funds for staff that would be responsible for medical and detention standards compliance were included in Congress’s spending bill.
The Trump administration said in March that it was closing two watchdog agencies that oversaw detention centers and investigated detainee complaints. DHS reversed course, but lawyers for immigrants and nonprofit advocacy groups assert that deteriorating conditions at some locations are festering unchecked. A federal judge in New York ruled last month that ICE needed to improve conditions at a Lower Manhattan immigration holding facility, where detainees claimed they were held without beds, showers or medical support and received only two small meals a day.
Unlike criminal detention, immigration detention is not meant to be punitive. A Supreme Court ruling and ICE’s website state that those facing civil violations should not be held as a form of punishment; rather, detention for immigration offenses is meant to ensure people show up for proceedings.
Detainees at some facilities are housed in dormitory-style rooms with bunk beds and limited access to a recreational area at certain times during the day. But Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, says detainees are increasingly being locked in cells with little access to bare necessities.
“Punitive conditions can take place in a number of ways,” Cho said, including “deprivation of medical care, deprivation of access to counsel; abuse of force; severe overcrowding.”
Remote locations, isolated detainees
Many of the facilities that ICE plans to reopen are in remote, rural areas where, historically, few people have been willing to work a difficult job that requires frequent overtime shifts. Many state and local prisons are already experiencing a staffing crisis, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who researches private prisons as a senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, a nonpartisan law and policy organization affiliated with New York University’s law school.
Nearly 90 percent of ICE detainees are held in facilities run by contract companies in the private sector. These firms shifted away from holding people in federal prisons over the past decade after Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden ordered the Bureau of Prisons to phase out contracts with privately run prisons, citing federal research showing such facilities were more likely to have security problems and do not substantially save taxpayers money.
Trump has reversed these policies, but federal prison contracts have continued to wind down and private prison companies now own many empty facilities. This year, ICE started working with contractors to convert a few of these prisons into immigrant detention centers, including in Michigan and Tennessee, and plans to issue many more contracts in the coming months.
The Reeves County Detention Center, located in the remote Trans-Pecos region of West Texas, was so hard to staff when it received a contract in 2007 to house migrant men that officials eliminated the minimum required staffing levels determined by the federal government, according to a 2015 audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The unusual concession meant Reeves was rarely — if ever — fully staffed.
Reeves’s remoteness contributed to a sense that guards “can act with impunity,” said Lisa Graybill, former legal director for the ACLU of Texas, who sued the federal government and the administrators of the prison over the death of an undocumented immigrant who was denied medical care at the facility. Graybill, who litigated the case on behalf of his survivors, said that he was epileptic and put in solitary confinement merely because he was demanding medication.
Geo Group claimed legal immunity and said it had acted in “good faith" in court filings. The case was resolved in a monetary settlement awarded to the detainee’s family.
“The understaffing was astounding even in a system that flourishes and profits on what I would call planned understaffing,” she said.
These factors contributed to a series of riots in 2008 and 2009 in which inmates set a mattress on fire and destroyed property, demanding better food, medical care and living conditions. Three inmates were hospitalized, according to a CNN report at the time. Graybill described the events as an act of “desperation.”
Two of the three units at Reeves closed in 2017, after the government did not renew its contract. The third unit closed in 2022 after the Biden administration issued its executive order phasing out Justice Department contracts with private prisons, saying they provide “incarceration that is less humane and less safe.”
ICE plans to award Geo a new contract to reopen Reeves by October, and eventually house up to 5,700 immigrant detainees there, according to the internal planning document obtained by The Post. That includes 2,000 beds for unauthorized migrant parents and children, which would make it one of the largest family detention centers in the country.
'Gynecological abuse’
The Irwin County Detention Center is in the tiny town of Ocilla, Georgia, which is more than 100 miles from the nearest major city and has a population smaller than some high schools. In 2020, former Irwin detainees complained that they’d undergone nonconsensual and unnecessary gynecological procedures by an outside doctor that Irwin’s medical staff had referred them to.
Sarah Owings, a Georgia-based immigration attorney who represented some of the women alleging mistreatment, said the facility’s location “in the middle of nowhere” likely constrained its ability to hire qualified medical staff, as well as the failure of authorities to see what was happening to the women there.
“There’s no oversight,” she said. “When you combine that with the absolute powerlessness of the people you are talking about detaining, that makes it possible for bad things to happen in the dark.”
Studies have shown numerous deficiencies in the health care that ICE and its contractors typically provide detainees, from ineffective mental health screenings to improper surgical procedures. One report last year by the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights found that over 95 percent of the deaths that occurred in ICE custody between 2017 and 2021 could have been preve
