A former maximum-security<\/span> prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, is now a critical hub in the Trump administration\u2019s immigration detention machine, transforming in just a few months from a facility shuttered for its inhospitable conditions to a privately run jail holding hundreds of immigrants.<\/p>\n This is the story of how \u2014 and why \u2014 it happened.<\/p>\n The deal had been in motion for more than a year before the Leavenworth City Commission conceded to the controversial project, one that would allow the private-prison operator CoreCivic to reopen its notorious prison and fill it with immigrants. They did so after a protracted battle with the company, one that made them cogs in a vast deportation machine.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want them to be in jail,\u201d Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder said of the more than 500 immigrants<\/a> \u201cThey just bought their permit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But as the Trump administration and CoreCivic carried out an aggressive campaign to expand the federal detention network, city officials said they concluded they couldn\u2019t afford to fight it. They tried to sue to stop the project, but instead spent more than a quarter-million dollars fighting it in court, draining city funds, before CoreCivic offered a $1.5 million impact payment to reimburse the city\u2019s legal costs and pledged $400,000 a year to the local government.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey just bought their permit,\u201d said Michael Sharma-Crawford, chair of the Missouri\/Kansas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association<\/a>, or AILA.<\/p>\n The Leavenworth facility, for years marred by an ugly history of overcrowding and understaffing<\/a>, is now the Midwest hub for the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. Under this hub-and-spoke model<\/a>, which has gone little noticed by the public even now, ICE moves detainees and staff between smaller facilities \u2014 the \u201cspokes,\u201d which include facilities such as regional jails \u2014 and a larger facility as a center of operations \u2014 the so-called \u201chub.\u201d Using this model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked<\/a> deportation flights<\/a> out of the country<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cLeavenworth\u2019s capacity is going to be that hub in the Midwest, to draw down from Minnesota, Chicago, Indiana, to house all that detention,\u201d Sharma-Crawford said. Two other immigration attorneys who represent clients in the region corroborated the operational pattern through their own clients\u2019 transfers and named additional \u201cspoke\u201d facilities feeding the pipeline.<\/p>\n Using a hub-and-spoke model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The Midwest Regional Reception Center, as it\u2019s now known, in Leavenworth is a critical site for the Trump administration, whose promises of 100,000 beds<\/a> for immigrant detention stalled out at around 66,000 in July and had run into multiple obstacles across the Midwest. In Illinois, a 2021 state law<\/a> ended immigration detention statewide. Minnesota remained a possible location for a hub, but the process moved slowly; CoreCivic\u2019s shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility<\/a> in Appleton had long sat idle before its recent sale, and ICE needed to get a Midwest hub up and running immediately. Proposed sites were contested one after another: A potential warehouse for up to 10,000 detainees<\/a> in south Kansas City was killed by community opposition, and facilities were either blocked or contested in Shakopee, Minnesota<\/a>; Romulus, Michigan<\/a>; Hudson, Colorado<\/a>; and McCook, Nebraska<\/a>. The Midwest\u2019s largest operational ICE detention center, GEO Group\u2019s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, is geographically isolated, hours from any major airport, and has been mired in controversy over a hunger strike<\/a>, a death in custody<\/a>, and hundreds of unlawful detention rulings<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Leavenworth, a town with a corrections history stretching back over a century, seemed to offer the path of least resistance.<\/p>\n The City of Leavenworth fought the facility in court for months. CoreCivic countersued, and the Department of Justice intervened on CoreCivic\u2019s side, accusing Leavenworth of \u201caggressive and unlawful<\/a>\u201d interference.<\/p>\n In the meantime, the fight threatened to bankrupt the city. Records obtained through the Kansas Open Records Act show the city paid roughly $820,000 in legal fees to Spencer Fane LLP over 12 months, about 6 percent of its general fund<\/a>. The bill was a drain, but not a death blow. The city\u2019s foremost concern was the takings clause<\/a>, which allows the government to seize private property for public use, City Manager Scott Peterson said. A state judge had directed CoreCivic<\/a> to follow the permit process, and if Leavenworth denied the permit, CoreCivic could argue bad faith, claim the city had effectively seized its property, and sue for damages, Peterson said, leaving Leavenworth to choose between greenlighting a facility it opposed or gambling on a lawsuit it might not survive. The alternative, Bauder, the mayor, said, was the federal government acquiring the building, which would eliminate local oversight entirely.<\/p>\n Both the city and county rejected the facility early on, local officials said. Residents protested its reopening and offered impassioned testimony against it at public hearings.<\/p>\n CoreCivic structured the $1.5 million impact payment in part to reimburse the city\u2019s legal costs from the company\u2019s lawsuit. When asked about the arrangement, CoreCivic instead reiterated its promised $1 million one-time impact fee, $250,000 a year to the city, and $150,000 a year to the police department.<\/p>\n Mayor Pro Tem Rebecca Hollister, who cast the sole dissenting vote on the 4-to-1 decision, explained her objection was procedural and understood it had no bearing on the outcome: \u201cIt was an inevitability.\u201d<\/p>\n On January 14, two months before the vote, CoreCivic detention officer Brittany Williams reached out to city leadership to voice her support of the facility, an unusual move for a rank-and-file corrections officer with no role in the municipal permitting fight. In the email to Assistant City Manager Penny Holler, Williams said the company transferred her to Oklahoma to help open Diamondback, a sister CoreCivic facility. She wrote that she was currently assigned to TransCor America, a private transportation company that contracts with ICE to move detainees around the country, in her case from ICE\u2019s Kansas City, Missouri, field office \u201cto where they are needed to go.\u201d The email, which was entered into the public record before the February 2 hearing on the special use permit, or SUP, to allow the facility to house immigrants, inadvertently revealed ICE\u2019s hub-and-spoke detention model was already in motion in the region, shuffling detainees and staff between facilities and states.<\/p>\n The Leavenworth facility was in a strategically advantageous position to become a new hub for ICE, and Sharma-Crawford, the immigration attorney, said ICE had been eyeing the location since it closed as a federal prison. It sits just 10 miles from Kansas City International Airport, where ICE\u2019s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office is a six-minute drive away. It also allows ICE to hold detainees at Leavenworth then move them through KCI to staging areas for deportation flights in Louisiana or Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey want it short, quick,\u201d Sharma-Crawford said. It allows ICE to claim \u201c\u2018I gave them due process,\u2019\u201d he said, \u201cand they\u2019re out the door.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re doing this in smaller areas because no one\u2019s paying attention.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n On March 25, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a bond decision<\/a> holding that anyone who entered the United States without authorization is ineligible for bond, a ruling that covers Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, and Minnesota, the states Sharma-Crawford said he expects to feed into Leavenworth. Mandatory detention across those seven states meant the government needed greater capacity from the region\u2019s jails. Genevra Alberti, former chair of the local AILA chapter, whose attorneys represent clients throughout the area, named additional \u201cspokes\u201d in the system: Chase County<\/a> in Kansas, and Greene<\/a>, Ste. Genevieve<\/a>, Phelps<\/a>, and Ozark<\/a> counties in Missouri. Enough local jails plus a CoreCivic facility, she said, can hold and process as many people as a mega-detention center.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt makes sense that they\u2019re doing this in smaller areas, because no one\u2019s paying attention,\u201d Alberti said. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely a method to this. They know if they do this in the massive cities, there\u2019s going to be more light shed on what they\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n In Leavenworth County, the CoreCivic-run ICE detention center<\/a> is one of five major correctional facilities, which provide a total of roughly 6,000 beds. Up the road, FCI Leavenworth<\/a>, a federal Bureau of Prisons facility, held ICE detainees in what Alberti called a \u201cblack hole\u201d for a full year before the SUP was approved. Last May, the ACLU wrote to the warden<\/a> documenting limited time outside and no exercise for detainees. Peterson, the city manager, confirmed the federal prison doesn\u2019t answer to the city, and there have been no community relations meetings for more than a year.<\/p>\n The county\u2019s other major prisons are the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks<\/a> and the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility<\/a> at Fort Leavenworth and Lansing Correctional Facility<\/a>. Rounding out the cluster is the Grossman Center<\/a>, a federal halfway house run by the private prison giant GEO Group<\/a> adjacent to CoreCivic\u2019s site. <\/p>\n The SUP the city approved authorizes \u201cjail or prison\u201d use at the Leavenworth site without restricting it to ICE detention. The concentration of prisons meant the workforce, the infrastructure, and the institutional muscle were already there. Reopening one more facility for ICE required little more than a single municipal approval.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once their clients are fed into one of the deportation regime\u2019s hubs, immigration attorneys say it\u2019s become an increasingly byzantine process to find them, plan their defenses, and get them out of detention.<\/p>\n Working with clients imprisoned at Leavenworth is chaotic and difficult from the moment they arrive, the attorneys said. To schedule a televideo call the lawyers must email their state bar cards and licenses, and they are subject to automatic, one-hour cutoffs. CoreCivic has repeatedly demanded attorneys file formal representation paperwork before they\u2019ve even met the detainee or agreed to take on the case, Alberti said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Valerie Sprout, a Kansas City immigration attorney with 15 years of experience, said she wasn\u2019t even able to locate the facility in ICE\u2019s call-scheduling portal.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t know how to contact that client,\u201d Sprout said. \u201cWe were on our listserv, frantically sharing information, because you have people there that you have no access to.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, rejected these characterizations, saying video visitation calls run in 30- and 60-minute sessions, calls are not automatically cut off, and staff accommodate requests for more time. He said the forms identifying a detainee\u2019s lawyer are standard and a pre-representational visit can occur without one, adding that legal representatives may visit their clients seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.<\/p>\n Some of the details of the internal dysfunction detainees face only come to light after they\u2019re released. According to Alberti, a former client took over running the laundry for roughly a week because no one was washing detainees\u2019 clothes. She was promised token pay, either a dollar an hour or a dollar a day, but was never paid.<\/p>\n The obstacles extend into the courtroom. Detainees are increasingly given remote, on-camera hearings, never physically appearing before a judge. The Kansas City Immigration Court, part of the Justice Department\u2019s Executive Office for Immigration Review<\/a>, holds jurisdiction over Leavenworth\u2019s detainee docket. Just six judges, working across three courtrooms and a small pro bono room, carry more than 1,000 cases.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo far, I haven\u2019t seen any of them in person,\u201d Alberti said of the judges, which she said makes it more difficult to tell how they\u2019re weighing cases.<\/p>\n Sprout, who is also a board member of Asylum Clinic Kansas City, has witnessed the shift to teleconferenced hearings firsthand.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAll detained cases are over video. No detained cases are in-person, which I feel is just an incredible violation of due process, especially in asylum cases, because the threshold issue in every asylum case is to determine whether the respondent is credible,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Former prosecutors and military lawyers preside over the hearings. Allan F. John-Baptiste<\/a>, a former Bureau of Prisons lawyer, was appointed during the first Trump administration. Jared Grimmer<\/a>, a former Air Force judge advocate general, accepted a temporary appointment in October 2025. Katherine Estes<\/a> ran military personnel law at the Pentagon. Scott Ison is a local-level Missouri prosecutor. After the Trump administration fired or pushed out<\/a> more than 100 judges last year, none of the newly appointed Kansas City judges have a background in immigration law, according to the official bios provided in a DOJ press release<\/a> announcing their appointments.<\/p>\n Created in the wake of 9\/11 and historically invoked only sparingly, the EOIR-43 automatic stay<\/a> allows the government to override an immigration judge\u2019s bond order without review or appeal. Records obtained by Documented<\/a> through a records request show the Department of Homeland Security used it 877 times over a three-month period in mid-2025. Faced with these stays, Alberti has filed two federal habeas corpus<\/a> petitions for clients at CoreCivic Leavenworth. The first was for a young woman with a pending petition for legal status as a victim of crime and no criminal history who entered the country as a baby; she was released after roughly two weeks. As of this spring, the second remained in detention.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another recent petition put the conditions themselves before a federal judge. Katsiaryna Bartko, a Belarusian asylum-seeker detained at Leavenworth, filed a pro se petition in August over her medical care. In an order appointing her counsel, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree found she brought \u201ca viable deprivation-of-medical-care\u201d claim and noted it was undisputed that her recent test results showed worsening thyroid levels. Bartko, who depends on hormone medication after surgery for thyroid cancer, had not seen a specialist since her transfer<\/a>, according to court filings. CoreCivic and ICE dispute she was denied appropriate medical care. After a fourth hospitalization and 106 days in ICE in custody, she was released on recognizance<\/a> on September 16.<\/p>\n One of Alberti\u2019s clients, who was detained at Leavenworth but has now been released, told her that guards and ICE officers sometimes asked her to act as an interpreter for other detainees without pay. No one on staff spoke Spanish, the client told Alberti, and when officers needed to communicate, they relied on a translation app rather than a live interpreter.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept that \u201cany claim that a detainee is required to translate for staff communication is false\u201d and that the facility uses a contracted translation service with a live translator reached through devices, computers, and phones.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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\u201cAggressive and Unlawful\u201d<\/h2>\n
The Hub\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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The Immigration Courts\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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