President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reopening an immigration detention center in Baldwin, Michigan, that President Joe Biden had shut down. The detention center will help ICE hold nearly 2,000 illegal aliens in custody.
This week, GEO Group announced a contract with ICE to reopen the immigration detention center in Baldwin, which will have the capacity to hold about 1,800 illegal aliens so they are not released into American communities.
“We expect that our company-owned North Lake Facility in Michigan will play an important role in helping meet the need for increased federal immigration processing center bed space,” GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoley said in a statement.
A source close to the matter told Breitbart News that the detention center was closed by the Biden administration as part of their plan to end all private contracts with the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) — an order that eliminated available bed space for thousands of criminals.
Before its closure, the detention center held criminal illegal aliens convicted of federal crimes and was a big economic driver in the small community of fewer than 1,000 residents.
The source told Breitbart News that the Trump administration is working on reopening more of these idled detention centers that Biden closed.
RJ Hauman, president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE), said Trump is doing all he can to reopen and repurpose shuttered detention centers to ensure ICE has as much bed space as possible to hold criminal illegal aliens.
Congress must beef up ICE funding so the agency can properly carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Hauman told Breitbart News.
“The clock is ticking on funding,” Hauman said. “ICE isn’t just struggling to deliver for the safety, security, and will of the American people by launching and sustaining a mass deportation effort — current accounts are running dry.”
“Trump’s electoral mandate couldn’t have been clearer; it is time for congressional Republicans to accelerate to Trump time or they’ll soon own the next preventable tragedy at the hands of a criminal illegal alien,” Hauman continued.
Reopening immigration detention centers is a critical tool for the Trump administration as nearly 8 million illegal aliens remain on ICE’s “non-detained docket” — that is, they are living freely in the United States while awaiting deportation.
Among those millions of illegal aliens on the non-detained docket are 1.4 million who have final deportation orders.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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