Citizens from across Michigan’s lower peninsula have traveled to Baldwin this spring, packed village council meetings, held demonstrations and called for officials to stand against the reopening of a nearby immigrant detention center. The 1,800-bed, maximum-security North Lake Correctional Facility, owned by the for-profit prison corporation Geo Group, is the largest such facility in the Midwest and second-largest in the nation. It reopened on June 16. The fact that the prison will most likely hold non-white immigrants stands out in this part of Michigan. Baldwin, a rural town of 900 with a large historically Black minority, is five minutes from the unincorporated community of Idlewild, which once thrived as a vacation refuge known as “Black Eden.”
