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By October Krausch
This article was originally published by Truthout
Migrants at the GEO Group-run facility demand their right to due process, edible food, and an end to sleep deprivation.
Hundreds of immigrant men at North Lake Processing Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, began a hunger strike on April 20 in an attempt to assert their rights to due process, edible food, and an end to sleep deprivation. Outside the prison, advocates from all over Michigan converged to offer solidarity to those inside and share the strikers’ demands with the wider public.
“There are people who want to speak and want their voices to be heard … but [ICE] is covering everything up,” says a man who was released from the prison on April 24 after winning a habeas corpus petition. The man, identified by the pseudonym Juan in a Spanish-language interview released to the press, says that “almost everyone” inside the prison is participating in the hunger strike.
The Prison Up North
Most visitors to Baldwin, Michigan, are there for outdoor recreation. Located a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Detroit, Baldwin has a small downtown with an ice cream shop, a pizza joint, and a boat store catering to summer tourists, just like most other small towns in the area. Tall pine trees sprout from both sides of the highway leading into the town and signs for campgrounds and boat launches abound. But a few blocks away is one of the largest immigrant prisons in the country, North Lake Processing Center, where around 1,400 immigrants are currently jailed.
The prison is almost hidden; it’s easy to drive past the unassuming street where it’s located. Unlike most state prisons, there are no road signs indicating its location and it cannot be seen from the highway. Instead, it’s tucked into the pine trees located a few blocks through a neighborhood off Route 10 where the paved road turns to dirt.
At close range, though, the razor wire and the guard tower come into view.
North Lake Processing Center is a privately run ICE prison operated by the GEO Group. Originally opened in 1999, and closed by the Biden administration in 2022, it recently resumed jailing immigrants as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Since its reopening in June 2025, it has quickly filled with people from Detroit, Chicago, and throughout Michigan and Ohio as part of the Trump administration’s ramped-up attacks on immigrants.
Conditions in the prison, by all reports, are abysmal. Attorney Diana Marin, who represents clients at North Lake in filing habeas corpus petitions, told Truthout the descriptions she hears are consistently the same. There is the sleep deprivation — the lights are only off from 12:00 am to 5:00 am, and even then, guards shine flashlights inside cells and keep their radios on full volume, making it impossible to find any rest. Then there is the food: Rations are inconsistent and of poor quality. “I have not had an individual that I represented or have talked to who has told me, no, there’s enough food here,” Marin says.
The medical care, or lack of it, is another major concern. In February, advocates organized a phone zap for someone who had an abscess in his mouth that began to limit his ability to speak after medical staff gave him ibuprofen and no antibiotics. According to Marin, this remedy is fairly typical at North Lake, regardless of symptoms.
Deaths in ICE facilities are at record highs and many seem to stem from inadequate medical care. At North Lake, Nenko Stanev Gantchev, a Bulgarian man who had lived in Chicago for 30 years, died in December. The cause of his death is unclear, although his family says he did not receive necessary medical attention while in the facility.
The uncertainty gives new weight to the poor conditions. People imprisoned at North Lake have been waiting for months, some as long as a year, and many say they have no idea what’s happening with their cases.
Isidro is a volunteer hotline operator with Asamblea Popular, a rapid response and ICE watch group in Detroit that receives dozens of calls each week from people imprisoned at North Lake. She says that immigrants held in the prison are given so little information that sometimes they call the hotline just to see if operators can Google information about their cases. (Isidro is using a pseudonym to protect her mutual aid work from state repression.)
Marin, who has represented and consulted with dozens of individuals at the facility, highlights that imprisonment itself is traumatic, especially for people who were picked up by ICE as they went about their daily errands, or as they fulfilled their legal obligations at immigration check-in appointments. Now, she says, “It’s incredulous to them that … their entire every single day is dictated by whatever it is the GEO Group decides is going to happen to them.”
Hunger Strike Builds Hope Out of Despair
For over a week, the hunger strike has rolled across North Lake, with some units dropping out while other men joined in. Reports indicate that the men were also withholding labor.
JR Martin, a member of No Detention Centers in Michigan, a group that has been fighting the North Lake prison since the first Trump administration, told Truthout that hunger strikes are “a common occurrence in ICE detention, but also part of the history of this particular facility. No Detention Centers in Michigan was supporting people who were incarcerated at North Lake between 2019 and 2022, who were organizing hunger strikes in response to conditions that are strikingly similar.”
The same week the strike began at North Lake, men at an immigrant detention facility in Pennsylvania also began a hunger strike. That prison, Moshannon Valley, is also run by GEO Group.
Details about the strike are difficult to confirm due to the monitoring of communications from imprisoned people and the fears of retaliation. One unit of men at North Lake reported to outside supporters that they stopped striking after guards came by and seemed to be taking down names of those refusing to eat, but other units continued on. Those imprisoned at the facility fear having their support networks broken up by being transferred within the prison, or worse, to one of the infamous immigration jails in the South as retaliation for fighting back.
The strikers have shared a list of demands orally with outside supporters. The top three are that ICE officials speak with them to explain why they are being held, that they be released on bond as happened in the past, and that decisions about their status need to come more quickly, since many have been waiting for more than 120 days for resolution to their cases. They also argue they should not be at the mercy of immigration judges, who are employed directly by the Trump administration. They call for more food, of increased quality, and improvements in the laundry since the clothes issued and laundered by GEO Group make them itchy. Finally, they ask for an end to arbitrary rules, such as a 6:00 am headcount, and for conditions that allow for regular sleep.
Testimony from those in North Lake regularly echoes a call for human dignity and an end to the treatment that undermines it. Marin says that when she has spoken with strikers, although they were hungry and dizzy, “they haven’t lost perspective that there’s value in doing something even if it’s just to keep the hope alive.”
“I think the longer folks are in there, the more they’re going to figure out ways to build community and to come together to give each other hope that either there’s going to be outside knowledge about what’s happening or … their demands will be met,” Marin says.
ICE issued a statement to news outlets denying the strike, concluding with the claim that “being in detention is a choice” and that those detained could self-deport. One of the strikers, Ahmad Alnajdawi, says that he has requested a final removal order and even offered to pay for his own flight, but is still imprisoned in the facility. “I don’t know why I’m sitting here,” he told a public radio reporter. “I’m not fighting my case, I’m not applying for bond, I’m waiving my right for asylum, appeal, for everything,” Alnajdawi said, making a plea to those outside the prison’s walls to recognize that everyone in North Lake is a person with loved ones.
Women’s Collective Civil Action
While the hunger strike is in the men’s units, Isidro and Marin both highlighted the plight of the women at North Lake. “Women are probably bearing the brunt of this in ways that are unaccounted for and not spoken about enough,” Marin told Truthout.
“It’s not surprising that the inequities that exist on the outside are also being replicated on the inside. I think women find it harder to have supportive family or spouses on the outside that are really going to fight for them,” Marin said.
Some of the women, however, are fighting for themselves. Thirteen women at North Lake have filed a joint petition for habeas corpus, calling themselves the Women’s Collective Civil Action, or WCCA. The petition highlights the terror the women experienced as they were abducted by men in plainclothes, and their concerns for the children from whom they’ve been separated. Some women in the facility are victims of domestic violence, who might have been eligible for visas through the Violence Against Women Act in the past.
Isidro spoke to a woman who called the hotline for support because she believed she might be a few months pregnant. “She has no real way of knowing. I don’t know what medical attention they’re getting in there for things like that,” Isidro said.
Solidarity on the Outside
On April 21, the second day of the strike, supporters of the people held at North Lake protested outside of the prison. Despite less than 24 hours’ notice, approximately 40 people from across Michigan made the trek to protest outside the fence that Tuesday afternoon, including people from Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Ypsilanti. Later that week, on April 26, about 75 supporters gathered to show their continuing support.
Those inside “have been made to feel that they are alone or that they should be hopeless. And I think everyone wants to do as much as we can to let them know that we’re with them and that no one should be treated this way. No one should be held by ICE or confined for profit by the GEO group,” Martin, whose group coordinated the protest, told Truthout.
The presence reflects the large network of people around the state who are working overtime to support those imprisoned in North Lake, not just through demonstrations outside the gates but through hotlines, commissary funds, rent funds, bond funds, and more. These groups, like No Detention Centers in Michigan, build on earlier immigrant solidarity networks, but most of them have expanded dramatically and taken on new forms in the last year.
No Detention Centers in Michigan learned about the strike quickly and has been able to support it because, as Martin said, organizers “already had something in place that was intended to support people in detention and to resist the expansion of this system and also to recognize the connections between the immigration detention system and the carceral system more broadly.”
For her part, Isidro says that the work is personal. “It is my community,” she told Truthout. Marin, meanwhile, refers to her work at North Lake as her “pro bono docket,” which she does in addition to her full-time job in employment law.
A week into the strike, a group of clergy in Michigan announced a fast in solidarity with the hunger strikers, calling for anyone to join them. “I think people have come from all over the state because they know that this is the largest detention facility in the Midwest, and they’re horrified that this facility exists, that it has ever existed, and that it’s now serving the purpose that it does, which is to hold … people who’ve been kidnapped from the broader region and beyond,” Martin says.
At time of publication, the hunger strike and actions in support of it are ongoing.
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