Hundreds of Incarcerated Migrants Go on Hunger Strike in Remote Michigan Prison |
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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.
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.
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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........