Like many people in Leavenworth, Kan., Jeff Fagan spent his career working in prisons.
The son of a corrections officer at Fort Leavenworth’s military prison, Mr. Fagan described going to work as a young man in Leavenworth’s silver-domed federal penitentiary. He later got a job at the state prison just outside city limits, where he said he spent nearly four decades as an officer.
So when Mr. Fagan heard about plans for a private company to run an immigration detention center in his city, it seemed like a natural fit. Leavenworth is a prison town, after all, and the company was offering a starting wage of more than $28 an hour.
“I’d like to see all the revenue that would come into our community, all the jobs,” Mr. Fagan said, adding that Leavenworth, which has 37,000 residents, is “not like a community that’s completely, totally afraid of the fact that you have prisons.”
But even in a place that has been in the corrections business for more than 150 years, plans for an immigration detention center have proved divisive, fusing national tensions into municipal debates.
City leaders filed two lawsuits against the detention center’s private operator, CoreCivic, after conversations about a local permit fell apart. A judge temporarily blocked the company from housing detainees. Lawyers and activists raised alarms about understaffing and violence when the facility last housed inmates.
All the while, supporters of the project have grown frustrated with what they see as an attempt to undermine President Trump and, in the process, deny Leavenworth hundreds of jobs.
As the Trump administration increases deportations and builds a network of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention sites, from “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida to an airport in Louisiana, Leavenworth residents have found themselves engulfed by the country’s immigration debate and questioning what the rift means for their city’s signature industry.
“What’s happening across our nation — the abuse, the neglect, the stories coming out of Florida — do we want that in our community?” asked Shannon Lehman, a stay-at-home mother in Leavenworth who is part of a group protesting the ICE plans.
‘So Many Red Flags’
CoreCivic’s beige cellblocks are tucked away at the bottom of a hill, beside the uniform white headstones of a military cemetery and within walking distance of a car dealership. The cells behind its razor-wired fence were empty, as they have been for more than three years, after the Biden administration ordered the Justice Department to no longer enter into contracts with private prison operators.
For about three decades, CoreCivic housed inmates, often federal detainees awaiting trial. But in the final years that the lockup was operating, records and interviews show, jobs went unfilled and violence grew common.
“It was just breathtaking the risks they were willing to take with our clients’ lives and with the staff’s lives,” said Melody Brannon, the chief federal public defender in Kansas, who said she averaged one or two trips to CoreCivic each week over more than 20 years.
A 2017 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found patterns of understaffing and lax oversight. During the Covid-19 pandemic, conditions worsened. One inmate died after another attacked him with a food tray and then punched and kicked him, court records show. In its lawsuits against CoreCivic, the city of Leavenworth quoted a federal judge who described the place as a “hell hole.”
In an email, Ryan Gustin, a company spokesman, said CoreCivic was “proud of the operational track record we’ve built” but acknowledged “challenges as that contract neared expiration” at the end of 2021. The company declined to make officials available for interviews.
“As with any difficult situation, we sought to learn from it,” said Mr. Gustin, whose company operated more than 40 correctional and detention centers across the country as of late last year. “Staffing was the main contributor to the challenges, and the Covid-19 pandemic compounded the labor issues. We’re grateful for a more stable labor market now.”
This year, Mr. Gustin said more than 2,000 people had applied for jobs and that about 115 had been hired as of early July. A person working 40 hours a week at the starting wage for a CoreCivic detention officer would earn around $59,000 a year. The average household income in Leavenworth is about $71,000, and about 29 percent of workers are government employees, roughly twice the national rate.
Some of the most passionate arguments against CoreCivic’s plan have come from people who used to work there.
One of those critics, Diana Polanco, was a corrections officer at CoreCivic in 2021 when an inmate stabbed her and a colleague. Ms. Polanco, 29, said the lockup was chronically understaffed and unsafe when she worked there, and that “shanks” and other contraband were common. Ms. Polanco said she suffered broken ribs, nerve damage in her face and injuries to her mouth in the attack that led the inmate to be sentenced to 25 years for attempted murder and assault.
The other injured officer, Marcia Levering, said that she was permanently disabled from the attack, has facial paralysis and has struggled to provide for her children.
If CoreCivic could not operate safely before, Ms. Polanco asked, why should it now handle ICE detainees?
“There’s so many red flags,” she said.
‘Right in Our Bailiwick’
Holly Pittman, the mayor of Leavenworth, said that the city was not trying to make a point about President Trump or to shape federal immigration policy. The debate, she asserts, is simply a matter of local zoning rules and the city’s belief that CoreCivic needs a particular permit.
“Just like any restaurant or day care, when they want to open, they have to file these special-use permits,” said Ms. Pittman, a Democrat whose role is officially nonpartisan. “It’s not about immigration to me.”
But Leavenworth is a politically mixed place — Mr. Trump carried the city last year with about 52 percent of the vote — and many residents see the CoreCivic question through a national lens. Mr. Trump carried Leavenworth County and Kansas by larger margins.
“I think the city’s just playing politics,” said Jason Claire, a Leavenworth resident who owns a military surplus store that counts prison guards among its customers.
State Senator Jeff Klemp, a Republican who unseated Mayor Pittman’s husband by 31 votes in last year’s election and who supports CoreCivic’s plans, said he was “not sure if it’s really a permit, or is this the current administration’s stance on border policy that might be influencing that decision.”
Opponents of the detention center, many of whom oppose an array of Mr. Trump’s policies, also invoke national politics. Several dozen residents gathered recently to protest the detention center plan, holding signs with messages like “No Human Being Is Illegal” as they marched through downtown, pausing next to a shrunken-down Statue of Liberty and a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln on the lawn of City Hall.
Skie Pearson, a Leavenworth resident who helped plan the protest, said she worried that “we’re sliding into fascism” as Mr. Trump rolls out his agenda and increases funding for ICE.
“Is it happening here in our very small town? Yes,” Ms. Pearson said of the detention center debate. “But I hope this gives other small towns the idea that they can fight back.”
CoreCivic opened its Leavenworth center in the 1990s before the city began requiring the special-use permits. Even after the rules changed, CoreCivic was grandfathered in. The court battle centers on whether that grandfather clause expired after CoreCivic stopped housing inmates. CoreCivic argues that it never fully abandoned the site and needs no permit.
The last time CoreCivic operated in the city, officials said, police officers sometimes had trouble getting inside to take reports. Inmates also flushed objects down their toilets, taking a toll on municipal plumbing.
CoreCivic said it had offered the city a one-time fee of $1 million, and an additional $400,000 in “impact fees” every year spread between the city’s government and police department. Federal records show that ICE entered into contract with CoreCivic for the Leavenworth site this year. CoreCivic said in court filings that it “anticipates approximately $50 million in annual revenue” from its agreement with ICE.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions. Those opposing the project include residents of Leavenworth and other cities, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth.
As the debate over the detention center stretches on, it is raising questions about what role an industry that shaped Leavenworth should play in its future.
“This is right in our bailiwick,” said State Representative Pat Proctor, a Republican from Leavenworth. “It’s both national security — deporting dangerous illegal criminals — and it’s corrections, it’s detention, which is something that our town does very, very well.”
But others are uneasy about their connection to prisons, or at least unwilling to be defined by them. They point out that Leavenworth was the first city to be incorporated in Kansas, that downtown is seeing signs of investment and that Fort Leavenworth is home to the Army’s Command and General Staff College.
After the earlier staffing problems at CoreCivic, there is also the question of whether enough people in Leavenworth even want a corrections job. A billboard on the highway into town advertises openings at the state prison, and a digital sign near the federal prison urges drivers to visit a jobs website.
At the recent protest, one person held a poster that said Leavenworth was “not just a prison town.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
The post This City of Prisons Is Suing Over a Planned ICE Detention Center appeared first on New York Times.
