Traverse City immigrant joins hunger strike inside Baldwin ICE facility; local faith leaders pray, fast in solidarity
ICE detentions mount in Northern Michigan
Photos, clockwise: local clergy hold a prayer service for detained immigrants on April 27; the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin; a protest organized by No Detention Centers in Michigan last year in Grand Rapids; Lynn, her husband and son.
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
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. Beans and rice lacked texture and resembled slop; onion rings tasted like cardboard; pizza was served cold.
“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. She chose not to reveal the name of her husband, a native of Nicaragua who came to Michigan in 2022 following a wave of repression in his home country. 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.
“He started to get sick and his stomach cramped up,” Lynn said. “I could hear him moaning and in pain when we talked on the phone.”
Lynn’s husband, who is 47, stopped eating food supplied by the facility and relied instead on snacks like ramen noodles and Little Debby cakes which she purchased through a commissary account. Then he stopped eating altogether.
In mid-April, some detainees at North Lake launched a hunger strike to protest what they described as inedible food that lacked nutrition; cold temperatures and occasional electricity outages that left them in darkness, prevented toilets from flushing and TVs from working; a lack of adequate medical care and language interpretation services, and denial of their legal rights. Some have languished there for more than six months.
The facility in Baldwin, 75 minutes south of Traverse City, is owned by Geo Group, a private prison corporation that made over $250 million in profits last year, was a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024 and has benefited from his administration’s policies to round up and detain immigrants — including those who have spent years or decades living in the United States.
The North Lake Processing Center currently holds approximately 1,400 detainees and has a capacity of 1,800, making it the largest in the Midwest. Located in one of Michigan’s poorest counties, Baldwin and nearby Idlewild are also home to a sizable African American minority who reacted with trepidation when the prison reopened to house immigrant detainees in June 2025.
No Detention Centers Michigan (NDCM), a statewide coalition opposed to North Lake and other ICE facilities that have been proposed in the mitten state, began publishing press releases on April 21 about hunger strikes in Baldwin.
“The food here is pitiful,” Ahmad Alnajdawi, an immigrant from Jordan stated in a NDCM release. “I want the people outside to know, they’re treating us like animals. Everyone here has a family, a wife, a parent, a dad, a mom. Everyone here has people outside who care for them. We’re all humans.”
According to NDCM’s Ale Rojas, a man at North Lake attempted suicide earlier this month.
“These men have been going against their human instinct to eat and survive because they want us to know that they are being mistreated,” said Rojas in the media release. “Constant neglect and mistreatment have negative effects on mental health and overall feelings of belongingness which are essential to human survival.”
A Bulgarian national and longtime Chicago business owner named Nenko Gantchev died at North Lake on Dec. 15, 2025. He was among 33 people who died in ICE custody last year across the country, the highest total in two decades.
Many detainees were released earlier this year through habeas corpus petitions. But recent months have seen a steep decline in the judicial approval of bonds that would allow some to pursue their immigration cases outside of detention.
Feds deny hunger strike is happening, limit food access
Mutual aid advocates helping detainees and their families told the Sun that the strike — called a huelga de hambre in Spanish — was probably organized through conversations in the kitchen, where detainees from different pods of the detention center can sometimes gather and communicate.
It’s unclear how many currently are, or were, participating in the hunger strike. Advocates in contact with those on the inside say that some detainees opposed the strike. Some weighed any benefits from the hunger strike against the threat of being transferred to other detention facilities which are considered to have far worse conditions.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have denied the existence of a hunger strike at North Lake.
Nevertheless, beginning last Friday, April 24, detainees no longer received food trays delivered to their cells. They are now herded to the cafeteria in groups of approximately 20 where they are each given 5-7 minutes to eat.
“If you’re not done, they dump your food tray and make you get out,” said Lynn.
Guards also recently reinstated the “morning count,” when every detainee is locked in their cell around 9 am until a manual count of all prisoners is complete. According to one advocate, “it is a depressing act to the detainee.”
It’s unclear whether the morning count or limiting detainees’ mealtimes are punitive reactions to the hunger strike. Geo Group and ICE routinely refuse to respond to media inquiries, from this publication and others.
The ACLU of Michigan and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center called on Congress to require an independent investigation of North Lake, including a medical audit, an oversight visit, and a formal inquiry to ICE. The groups said they have been in contact with detainees who described “similar inhumane conditions” over the 10 months since the facility opened as an ICE detention center.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who previously visited North Lake in February, said in a statement the reports of a hunger strike are “deeply troubling and demand immediate detention.” Before going to North Lake, Stevens said she was required to give advanced noticed so ICE could prepare a “sanitized visit.”
“During my visit, I asked for clear answers about medical care and nutrition which were not provided,” Stevens said. “That lack of transparency is unacceptable. No one should be subjected to prolonged detention without basic care and dignity, and the hunger strike underscores the urgency of these concerns.”
Lynn worries about her husband’s mental health in conditions he described to her as “cold and dirty.” On their video calls, she always sees him wearing a jacket to guard against the cold. When the electricity goes out, sometimes for days at a time, he has suffered panic attacks.
“My husband is a strong man,” she said. “But there’s more screaming, yelling, banging, and crying when the lights go out. There’s nothing to distract them.”
ICE arrests grow in Northern Michigan; clergy speak out
Detentions of immigrants in Northern Michigan, or those living in our region, have increased this spring. Lynn’s Nicaraguan husband was detained by ICE agents during his immigration interview near Detroit on March 5.
In mid-March, a Turkish national who had worked legally for a Leelanau County restaurant since 2022, but overstayed his visa, was detained by agents from different federal agencies and is currently at North Lake in Baldwin. According to the Turkish man, his detention was orderly and calm, and he holds no ill will about the way he was apprehended, or the way he is treated at North Lake. He has not taken part in the hunger strike.
On April 20, according to local clergy with knowledge of the situation, ICE agents detained four Mexican nationals near Kingsley. The men, who had all lived and worked in Northern Michigan for more than a decade, had no criminal records. At least two of them are detained at North Lake in Baldwin. The location of the other two is currently unknown.
The Nicaraguan and the Turkish man also had no criminal history. According to ICE’s own data, 86 percent of those detained at North Lake have no criminal record.
More than a dozen area religious leaders held a prayer vigil at Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel in Elmwood Township on Monday, April 27, to share Lynn’s husband’s story and illuminate the plight of detainees at North Lake.
“We join together in prayer for a community that typically remains voiceless,” said Father Wayne Dziekan of the Diocese of Gaylord’s Hispanic Ministry. “We pray for detainees at all detention facilities … and we pray for those who staff them.
“We pray that immigration reform would be comprehensive so that people will be able to realize their right to remain at home, the right to not have to leave their home.
Rev. Julie Delezenne, of Traverse City’s Presbyterian Church, said this wasn’t a political issue.
“No matter our political leanings, our feelings about the work of ICE, our understanding of our government’s policies around immigration, no matter any of that, we are called to stand with the least of these. We are called to treat all people with dignity.”
Faith leaders announced at the Guadalupe Chapel that 80 clergy members across Michigan have committed to join North Lake detainees in their fast.
“Where is papa?”
Lynn’s husband fled Nicaragua in 2022 during a wave of arrests and suppression of free speech in the Central American nation run by the Ortega regime. According to Lynn, her husband’s mother and brother both had serious illnesses, but because they opposed the Nicaraguan government, their access to clean water was taken from them.
[The Sun covered the arrival of several Nicaraguans to Northern Michigan in 2023, including of priest José Luis Díaz Cruz, who is now studying at the Vatican in Rome.]
Lynn and her husband met in August 2022 when he stayed at a hotel in Traverse City where she worked as a receptionist. They married the following March. For the last 18 months they have attended mass at Guadalupe Chapel.
When the March 5 immigration hearing in Troy, Michigan, approached, their priest Father Wayne Dziekan warned Lynne’s husband of the dangers. ICE agents were lying wait at courtrooms in Detroit and around the country and preying on immigrants who showed up to hearings they thought were routine.
But the Nicaraguan wanted to follow the law and play by the rules.
“My husband is a well-mannered man,” Lynn said. “He wants to do things right. A couple of his friends also told him, ‘Don’t go to the interview.’ But he said, ‘I need to do this the correct way’.”
Lynn said they prayed together before they entered the immigration interview. She remembered sharing the room with a man taking notes and a female interpreter. Seven minutes into the interview, the officials announced they needed to leave to “make a color copy of the passport” — a statement she found confusing.
Then she saw in a window the reflection of two men waiting in the hallway who didn’t look like anyone else in the building. “Bounty hunter clothes,” she said.
Lynn grabbed her husband’s hand and said “Amor” (my love) as two ICE agents walked into the room and announced they planned to detain him. As they handcuffed him, she sobbed and protested that they were taking the steps for him to secure legal status to remain in the United States. Lynn managed to hug her husband as he was taken away.
To add insult to injury, an official approached her afterwards and said, “The good news is that your I-130 was approved.” The I-130 form is the mandatory first step for U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents to help eligible foreign national relatives immigrate and obtain a Green Card.
“I told him, ‘There’s no good news’,” Lynn said. “You’ve just taken my husband.”
The Nicaraguan was taken to North Lake in Baldwin, and while Lynn has spoken with her husband by telephone every day, she has only been able to visit him four times. During one visit, their child refused to sit still and chased things around the prison’s visitation room. An officer approached and chastised her. “You need to get your kid under wraps,” he said.
“‘But he’s just a toddler,’ I told him.
“All they have in that room is plastic furniture for the children. It’s hard to chase him around when we’re visiting with papa—and my husband was supposed to stay seated.”
The last time Lynn tried to visit North Lake, she was turned away because she was told she “wasn’t wearing appropriate pants.”
Their child, who turns 3 in November, wakes up most mornings asking for his papa, said Lynn. Sometimes he dreams about his father and looks under the couch for him.
“He’ll have bad days when he looks out windows, screaming, ‘Where is papa?’”
