ICE just added Leavenworth to its chain of detention islands. Blame a failure of moral leadership.
Protesters gather March 10, 2026, outside Leavenworth City Hall to encourage city commissioners to vote against a permit that allows private prison company CoreCivic to reopen in the community. (Photo by Grace Hills for Kansas Reflector)
By the time you read this, those swept up in ICE raids may already be filling some of the 1,000 beds at a troubled for-profit prison in Leavenworth now turned federal detention facility.
The last hurdle for owner CoreCivic to reopen its site was a special use permit from the city of Leavenworth and, after a year of lawsuits and community turmoil, the city finally gave in. The city commission took a final vote March 10 to grant the permit, which passed 4-1.
Commissioners in the majority attempted to excuse their votes by claiming the issue wasn’t about immigration policy but about risk and fiscal responsibility. But that’s like saying traffic laws aren’t about public safety and that you voted against putting a stoplight at a dangerous intersection because the device was too expensive and the city might be sued if it failed.
CoreCivic needed a stoplight, and the city ultimately failed to provide one.
The city commission could have denied the permit, citing concerns about widespread community opposition and a lack of confidence that CoreCivic would operate the new facility differently than the old one. It could have said trust had been broken because CoreCivic had attempted to bypass the permitting process by taking the city to court. Or it could have cited alarm that ICE detainees were being denied due process and that immigration enforcement operations were reckless, causing unjustified loss of life.
Instead, the city threw in the towel.
It was a failure of moral leadership from a city that had been in the spotlight over immigration policy. Seldom are city officials from a town of just 37,000 called upon to decide an issue of national import, but this is where Leavenworth leaders found themselves over the past year, and in the end it crushed them.
The commission vote was not just about what would happen in Leavenworth, but whether the town should contribute to the chain of detention centers — and let’s face it, concentration camps — being built across America. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called the prisoners in the Soviet gulags of the middle 20th Century “zeks,” captives of the totalitarian state. It’s Russian slang for inmate or detainee. Our American detainees are ensnared in the growing machinery of the immigration incarceration complex. But unlike the Soviet system, the profit here isn’t in the forced labor of the zeks — the detainees themselves are dehumanized as a product for export.
ICE is set to spend $38 billion on facilities for warehousing detainees.
Leavenworth, a prison town whose name is synonymous with incarceration because of the federal penitentiary and the military maximum security barracks there, had fought CoreCivic’s attempt to reopen its prison because the company failed to apply for a special use permit and because of the facility’s history of violence and mismanagement.
There was a list of concerns about CoreCivic’s plan to reopen the facility, which in 2017 was the subject of a brutal 129-page audit by the Office of the Inspector General that found chronic understaffing and mismanagement. In 2019, CoreCivic reached a $1.45 million settlement with 539 detainees over illegal audio recordings of calls protected under attorney-client privilege. In 2021, a federal district judge described the Leavenworth prison as “an absolute hell hole” of violence and death for both inmates and guards. The facility, which opened in 1991 and was contracted by the U.S. Marshals Service, closed in January 2022 after President Joe Biden prohibited the Justice Department from contracting with private prisons.
It has remained empty but maintained by CoreCivic since then.
Protesters gather March 10, 2026, outside Leavenworth City Hall to encourage city commissioners to vote against a permit that allows private prison company CoreCivic to reopen in the community. (Photo by Grace Hills for Kansas Reflector)
CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America, is based in Nashville and is the nation’s second largest for-profit prison company. Last year, the company announced $300 million in new ICE contracts, including one for the Leavenworth facility, now renamed the Midwest Regional Reception Center.
The Leavenworth City Commission vote came after an hour-long public comment session, in which 42 spoke against the reopening of the prison, only three spoke in favor, two individuals were arrested, and others were ejected for shouting profanities. Those arrested were Jalen Brown, 19, and Adam Meysing, 33, who were booked into the county jail on “unspecified charges” and released when fellow protestors showed up and paid their $250 bail, according to the Kansas City Star.
Two of the commissioners who voted to grant the permit did so for practical legal and business reasons, according to a report by Kansas Reflector’s Morgan Chilson.
“Everybody wants to make this morality over fiduciary responsibility,” said Commissioner Joe Wilson, “but I think there is a real risk to the future of the city … that could have long-term ramifications for our children, for our tax base, for our law enforcement and out firefighters and the services we can provide.”
Commissioner Holly Pittman said the vote wasn’t about immigration policy or politics. Pittman, a Realtor who was formerly mayor, was the target of social media attack ads by a dark money PAC, Defend US, that accused her of a progressive agenda to waste taxpayer money and lose jobs.
“It is a land use decision governed by law and by the constraints of our political authority,” Pittman said. “After reviewing all the legal framework, the zoning standards and the court rulings, I believe denying this permit would expose our taxpayers to a significant financial risk, and I will not gamble the financial stability of this city.”
Pittman said leadership doesn’t offer easy choices.
No doubt Pittman and the other council members haven’t had an easy year.
Nobody has.
We can have some sympathy for the commissioners while also recognizing that being made uncomfortable is a risk that comes with public service. They were put on the hot seat, especially when Trump’s justice department accused the city in court documents of “an aggressive and unlawful effort” to block the reopening. Sadly, Pittman and the three other council members missed turning discomfort into an historic opportunity to stand for what is right.
Would the continued fight have been expensive?
Almost certainly.
But not as expensive as the price of the civic soul.
Oh, there were modifications of the permit in an attempt to hold CoreCivic accountable. The permit would be for three years instead of five, for example, and a community oversight board was created. CoreCivic has pledged transparency and accountability. The company claims its work serves a “limited but important role” in immigration enforcement, according to its website, and that CoreCivic does not advocate for or against laws resulting in individual detentions. This does not stop the company from lobbying politicians at the federal, state, and local levels. In 2023, according to its most recent report, the company spent $2 million in political activity and lobbying.
The only commissioner to vote against the Leavenworth permit was Rebecca Hollister, who said it was difficult to trust CoreCovic given its past abuses. She said she would have preferred to send the matter back to the planning commission and shorten the permit period from three years to two.
CoreCivic officials at the meeting declined comment. Along with city officials, they were escorted out of the meeting by police through a side door to avoid an angry crowd outside shouting, “Shame!”
The company released a statement from Brian Todd, the company’s manager of public affairs:
“CoreCivic thanks the Leavenworth City Commission for their approval of the special use permit for the Midwest Regional Reception Center,” the statement read in part. “As we have from the start, CoreCivic remains committed to operating a safe, transparent and accountable facility. We look forward to our continued partnership with the city and to the benefits the MRRC will bring to Leavenworth and the surrounding communities.”
Time will tell if CoreCivic lives up to its promises, but the odds are against it. This is the same “hell hole” operator that didn’t report the death of an inmate to city police for six days and was accused of refusing to turn over to local authorities evidence, including photographs and weapons, that had been used in assaults on guards and inmates. In April of last year, I asked a CoreCivic representative about abuses at the facility. The spokesman, Ryan Gustin, talked about the importance of 300 jobs to the community but didn’t address the allegations of abuse contained in the city’s lawsuit against the company.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. About 1% of the adult population — some 2 million people — are behind bars. Wanting to punish people is as American as baseball or apple pie, and the for-profit prison industry is willing to meet that desire without pesky, soul-searching questions about fairness or equality. While prisons are unfortunately needed for a few violent offenders, it should be government and not business that provides the cells (and not warehouses) needed. There should be no private financial incentive for incarcerating any individual, lest justice be traded for profit.
Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author and dissident I mentioned earlier, was probably the greatest authority on the subject of prison. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police for corresponding with a friend, convicted of anti-government propaganda, and spent years in the gulags. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.
“The Universe has as many different centers as there are in it living beings,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in his most famous work. “Each of us is a center of creation, and the universe is shattered when they hiss at you: You are under arrest.”
Arrest, he said, is the rude knock at the door in the middle of the night, the “insolent” entrance of unwiped jackboots, the frightened civilian witnesses with hands behind their backs.
We are not at Soviet-era levels of political arrests in this country, not yet. But there have been enough examples to give alarm. There are the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents for daring to witness, the immigration sweeps that have detained scores of American citizens, the terror felt in Minnesota and elsewhere by school children of color. Federal immigration agents have become, in effect, a masked secret police. Then there is the apparatus of mass incarceration being assembled to hold 100,000 detainees.
Some communities have fought back.
Plans to turn a massive warehouse in Kansas City into a detention center were nixed after intense public opposition and legal action by the city council. A similar project was halted in Oklahoma City. But plans proceed elsewhere, including a “mega center” for 8,500 at Social Circle, Georgia.
We live in an age remarkable for a lack of moral leadership. We are now two weeks into an unprovoked war in which U.S. forces assassinated a foreign head of state and mistakenly killed 175 at an Iranian girls’ school. The rest of the list includes, but is not limited to, a lack of adequate health care for all Americans along with state-sponsored transphobia and calculated attacks on voting rights.
What does moral leadership look like?
It is John McCain’s 2017 “thumbs down” vote in the U.S. Senate that blocked repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It is the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe ditching an ICE contract worth $30 million because “Indian reservations were the government’s first attempts at detention centers.” It is the Helena City Commission in deep red Montana voting 4-1 on a resolution supporting immigrant communities — and stipulating that city police can ask federal agents to unmask and identify themselves.
Perhaps the vote of a city commission in a relatively small city in Kansas on a special permit may not seem to be of much significance given the challenges facing us.
Really, it is the core of the challenge.
Our democracy is made up of many interlocking centers, of city and county commissions and school boards and state legislatures and all the rest. The quality of our democracy reflects the character not just of our national leaders, but all of those local officials who make decisions on our behalf every day.
Sometimes they fail us.
Perhaps it’s because they are too scared or too weak or that they simply didn’t understand the consequences of their actions. I think that’s what happened with the Leavenworth City Commission, that they didn’t know their vote to allow a for-profit ICE detention facility was also a vote that brought us one step closer to the midnight knock on the door that might make an American zek of any of us.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.