Leavenworth is a city of prisons.
The area is home to five separate facilities, including a federal penitentiary, a state prison, and the U.S. military’s only maximum security prison. The imposing federal pen once housed Machine Gun Kelly and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” who did most of his research on birds in Kansas, not on the California prison island.
In popular culture the city’s name has become synonymous with incarceration, a legacy of pulp magazines and old gangster movies. Prisons are among the city’s major employers, and construction is underway for a new $532 million federal prison to replace the existing 128-year-old facility by May 2026.
But there’s one detention facility that Leavenworth city officials don’t want.
It’s the newly (and Orwellian) named Midwest Regional Reception Center, a for-profit prison that would hold ICE detainees gathered in massive raids now undertaken by the Trump administration. The center would be located in the former Leavenworth Detention Facility, in operation from 1992 to 2021, which a federal judge once called “an absolute hell hole.”
Owned and managed by CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest private prison firm, the Leavenworth Detention Facility was a nightmare of humanitarian and civil rights abuses where both guards and inmates feared for their lives, according to court documents. Operated under a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, in 2017 the Office of Inspector General issued a 129-page audit that found chronic understaffing and mismanagement.
Abuses continued even after the audit.
The American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders sent a letter to the White House documenting their concerns. Beatings and stabbings were rampant, suicides were prevalent, sexual assault reports were discouraged, and the company failed to report the death of an inmate for six days. Employees who were victims of crime were forbidden from being interviewed by police during work time, and CoreCivic staff refused to cooperate with city police on sexual assault allegations.
In 2019, a federal judge found that telephone conversations between detainees and their attorneys — conversations that should be confidential by law — were routinely recorded.
In 2021, a 39-year-old detainee, Scott W. Wilson, was beaten to death by another inmate who attacked him with a plastic food tray. The entire facility went on lockdown for weeks, with detainees kept in their cells except for showers every few days.
“The only way I could describe it, frankly, what’s going on at CoreCivic right now is it’s an absolute hell hole,” said U.S. District Judge Julie A. Robinson during a resentencing hearing four years ago. “The court is aware of it. The defense bar is aware of it. The prosecutors are aware of it. The United States Marshals are aware of it.”
The environment inside the facility was causing trauma to all involved.
“Guards have been almost killed,” she said. “Detainees are being traumatized with assaults and batteries, and not long ago a detainee was killed. So I’m well aware of the situation at CoreCivic and very troubled by it as well.”
After an executive order by former President Joe Biden prohibited the Justice Department from contracting with private prisons, the Leavenworth Detention Facility officially closed on Jan. 1, 2022.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Anticipating an opportunity to profit from the mass deportations, on Feb. 21 of this year CoreCivic applied for a special use permit from the city of Leavenworth to open a detention center for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The permit was necessary under city code because the facility had been closed for more than 24 months.
The application for “reactivation” of the detention center, which would operate as the “Midwest Regional Reception Center,” would allow approximately 1,000 detained noncitizens to be held on the 20-acre site.
“On average, detainees will be held for approximately 51 days as they are processed through the immigration system, including through removal hearings held at the facility,” CoreCivic said in document supporting the application. “All detainees who are processed through the facility will be transported to the nearest major transportation hub (i.e., the Kansas City International Airport) or the ICE office in Kansas City.”
CoreCivic, headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, would operate the detention facility through an interagency agreement with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. The city had scheduled an initial public hearing before the planning commission hearing on the permit for April 7.
But on March 13, CoreCivic withdrew the application for the special use permit. It said it didn’t need one. On March 25, the prison corporation asserted that the recently awarded contract with ICE “necessitates a swift contract activation of the Midwest Regional Reception Center to accommodate their pressing need for capacity in the region,” according to court documents. There was no time to go through a lengthy permitting process. It began advertising for correction officers and other staff needed to reopen the facility.
On March 31, the city of Leavenworth filed suit in U.S. District Court to prevent CoreCivic from reopening the facility without a permit. The complaint asks for a temporary restraining order.
“The city is likely to suffer irreparable, irreversible, direct, and intangible harms to the health, safety, comfort, economic development, and property values of Leavenworth citizen and businesses” if CoreCivic is allowed to proceed, the city argued.
Supporting the suit was a declaration by Patrick Kitchens, Leavenworth chief of police, asserting that “significant problems” were encountered by the department when investigating violent felonies at the facility.
“Whether officers would be permitted to enter depended entirely on who was in charge,” Kitchens said. “Officers often were not allowed access at all and had to conduct interviews outside of the facility’s gate.”
CoreCivic prohibited its employees from giving interviews to police on company time, he said.
“Instead, these crime victims were forced to provide a written statement through the holes of the facility’s fence and then follow up on their own time,” he said.
The company also routinely refused to turn over evidence, including photographs and weapons that had been used in assaults among inmates and against guards.
I reached out to CoreCivic for a response to the city’s lawsuit.
“We don’t believe it’s right for Leavenworth’s taxpayers to have to pay for a lawsuit protesting efforts at the facility that would result in the creation of 300 jobs,” Ryan Gustin, senior director for public affairs, wrote in an email. “We’ve been part of this community as a dedicated employer for more than 30 years, and our intention remains to meet the emerging needs of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at our Midwest Regional Reception Center.”
Gustin said CoreCivic believes the site is already properly zoned. He did not address a question about allegations of past abuses at the facility.
Leavenworth has been a prison town for more than a century, and its city leaders and residents know that’s not an easy legacy. When I visited Leavenworth a few years ago, I heard from shopkeepers along its main street and the customers in a local diner that nearly everybody either had worked at one of the prisons or had a family member who did.
When I learned recently the city had filed suit to stop the reopening of the Leavenworth Detention Facility, my first thought was it seemed out of character for a prison town. But the more I thought about it, the less out of character it seemed. Who better to judge the civic threat posed by a for-profit prison company with a horrifying record of mismanagement and abuse?
It may also be part of the crisis of conscience the country is having about mass deportations. If the flights to a notorious El Salvadoran prison, in apparent defiance of a federal judge’s verbal order, don’t give you pause, consider this: the Trump administration has admitted that not everyone it deported on those planes was a criminal. An “oversight” resulted in the deportation of a Maryland man who had been granted protected status, but the U.S. government says it’s unable to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the custody of El Salvador.
What the government of the United States did in our name was to effectively disappear a 29-year-old father. Whether he will emerge alive from his ordeal is uncertain.
Despite noncitizens having rights under the Constitution, hurried deportations are preventing detainees from accessing the courts. This obscene abuse of power is brought to bear not only on those who are suspected gang members, but is also being used to remove international students whose opinions the administration finds irksome.
There is a name for this, and it is terrorism.
Terrorism is defined in the U.S. Criminal Code is to engage in violent criminal acts that appear to be intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” What happened to Garcia and others was violent and illegal, and there is little doubt it was meant to intimidate and coerce others.
Today the deportees are those “suspected” of being gang members because of their tattoos and college students who have exercised their First Amendment rights with op-ed pieces about Gaza. Tomorrow it might be just about anybody the government finds troublesome or merely inconvenient.
Take a look at your own tattoos, your own posts on social media and your friends or family members. There is something or someone among them that authorities could use to punish you. Have a butterfly tattoo? Some sources identify them as gang symbols. Have a cousin who did time for drugs? You’re a suspect, too.
To make mass deportations more efficient, facilities such as the “Midwest Regional Reception Center” are needed. Organized repression at scale requires the ability to detain thousands while hearings — or flights to third-world oubliettes — are arranged. The manufacture of terror also requires the tacit approval of a majority of citizens. This last is perhaps easier than imagined, because as any criminal defense lawyer will tell you, there is a built-in bias among the American public that if you’re arrested for something, you must be guilty.
That bias can only be overcome with fact.
Here is a 29-year-old Maryland man who was removed by irrevocable error. There is a Columbia University student arrested only because he was a political activist. And in Kansas, a private prison firm seeks to profit by becoming part of America’s mass deportation machine.
The story of American prisons is told in the architecture of the institutions at Leavenworth, from the castle-like old federal penitentiary built in 1903 to the modular shape of the contemporary military barracks. But the building that housed the Leavenworth Detention Facility resembles nothing so much as a warehouse, a place to store the bodies and souls of noncitizens until they can be discarded.
The question of whether the former Leavenworth Detention Facility should be brought back online as part of the mass deportation pipeline goes beyond the legal issue of whether it can be done without a municipal permit. It’s a moral question of whether it should be done.
The answer will define us.
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