Posts

Traverse City immigrant joins hunger strike inside Baldwin ICE facility; local faith leaders pray, fast in solidarity

,

Soon after Lynn’s husband arrived on March 5 at the North Lake Processing Center — the mammoth ICE detention center in Baldwin, Michigan — the food began to make him sick. “I haven’t seen an orange the whole time I’ve been here,” the husband told Lynn, a U.S. citizen and Traverse City resident who shared their family’s story with the Glen Arbor Sun this week. The couple, who have a 2.5-year-old son, worship at Guadalupe Chapel in southeastern Leelanau County, where local clergy held a prayer service and press conference on Monday to illuminate the plight of detainees in federal custody. Lynn’s husband is one of several immigrants detained, as ICE detentions mount in Northern Michigan.

Read more
/by

From Black Eden to Migrant Prison: ICE’s second largest detention center nationwide opens 80 minutes from Leelanau County

,

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.”

Read more
/by