Up North Progressive

On February 12, 2020 the Lake County Board of Commissioners approved with unanimous vote to accept a contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The contract will allow ICE to move prisoners from North Lake Correctional Facility, owned by GEO Group, to the shuttered Lake County jail annex located in Baldwin.

The annex up until October of 2019 was leased by the Michigan Department of Corrections as part of their Residential Reentry Program. The facility housed parolees, men and women prisoners, and eventually expanded into residential reentry. The facility, which has a capacity of 300 only had 20 residents at the time of its closure. The building is owned by Lake County and the dwindling population provided by MDOC couldn’t justify the cost of keeping the jail open.

The promise of rehiring personnel laid off with the closure of the jail annex persuaded the Lake County Board of Commissioners to unanimously vote in favor of the offer made by ICE. This new ICE facility will work with the Lake County Sheriff Department which currently handles transporting prisoners from NLCF. Undersheriff Wesley Bierling says rehiring corrections staff will take pressure off the County Sheriff for transportation.

Over the last six months, they have had around 200 releases. Every day we would be driving somewhere, picking someone up and dropping them off somewhere else. That would require two corrections officers from our jail.

Not only will the Lake County Sheriff provide transportation for prisoners released from NLCF, they will also work with ICE to transport anywhere within the ICE field office based in Grand Rapids, which services 13 counties in West Michigan.

When the Lake County jail annex closed last year, the County Board of Commissioners was faced with the problem of finding someone who could legally use the facility. Publicly owned facilities cannot be leased to private companies. The fact that an ICE facility will be located on a major Michigan highway, M 37, should also be cause for concern.

ICE is coming to northern Michigan. The Democratic Party winning the election in November becomes more critical every day.