10 A.M, after a long day of school, work and dance rehearsal, it’s time to unwind. Turning off the lights and getting into bed. I’m lying on my stomach with a pillow under my chin, tapping on the TikTok icon on my phone. First, TikTok: a new dance trend; second, TikTok: the news; third, TikTok news on ICE brutality against immigrants; fourth, fifth, and sixth are all about illegal immigration, falling down a rabbit hole. It’s now the middle of the night, thinking about how horrible and dire a situation involving real people is. Eventually, I fall asleep, and when I wake up, I have forgotten what I saw last night; I am no longer conscious, only in my subconscious.
The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others leads you to refrain from stepping in to solve a problem; the more people around, the less likely you are to intervene to stop bullying and crime. This is likely due to a fear of being judged or the belief that someone else will step in because there are so many other people around, leading you and others to do nothing and walk away.
Nothing will change because no one is intervening, so at what point are you willing to step in? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when wrong is happening around you and on the national news. But in your own state, dreadful actions are happening all the time with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their role in detention centers.
In the Midwest, the largest ICE detention center, called the North Lake Processing Center, is in Baldwin, Michigan. It is one of the poorest counties in the state. According to Statistica, it is the ninth most populated detention center in the US, holding roughly 1,391 people per day with a total capacity of 1,800 people, according to Statista. Michigan currently has five detention centers, with two more going under construction.
These detention centers are not correctional facilities, meaning that Baldwin is supposed to be a short-term holding facility for illegal immigrants. But is this actually the case?
In Michigan, the public press has had difficulty gaining access and coverage of what is happening inside these facilities and the people in these centers, leading to unreliable narration of what is going on inside the detention facilities. Even members of Congress have been denied entrance in the past months. The knowledge the public has access to is very limited, and no one truly knows what is happening in the detention center or if it is humane.
Although they state that this detention center is helping the community by creating jobs and doing good in the community, GEO Group INC, the contractor for this center, has made over $70 million in revenue off this detention center alone in 2025. What is the likelihood that GEO Group Inc. claims to be helping truly when they are making so much profit?
GEO Group Inc.’s mission statement is “Global Leader in Evidence-Based Rehabilitation.”The North Lake Processing Center should have created around 500 jobs for the community of Baldwin, but the past indicates this might not be the case. When the center first opened as a jail in 2019, around 300 job openings were created, and only 69 of those positions were filled by Baldwin residents. The detention center’s history suggests the center may not have hired many Baldwin residents when it reopened as an ICE detention center in 2025.
When GEO Group Inc., claims evidence rehabilitation, what does that mean? Rehabilitation is when an institution wants to fix someone’s undesirable behavior, and has participated in that behavior over and over again. When we detain immigrants, we are qualifying their behavior of coming to our country to stay alive as criminals. What rehabilitation or help can we provide to someone who just wants to stay alive and is unable to do so in their home country?
People have a will to live, and so they will keep coming back to America from their home country if they can not stay alive in their home country. Even if the Baldwin detention center is providing evidence-based rehabilitation to immigrants coming to our country to live, their motive now comes into question when you are making 70 million from one detention center and 600 million from ICE in just one year. Money can sway opinions and make people do immoral things, even incorrect things. Even if they would not act that way normally or without the incentive of money, that could be happening here as decisions are made with the incentive of money.
Right now, Michigan’s neighboring state of Illinois has a unique state law in place, banning-for-profit prisons. This law has been in place since 1980, and more recently, in 2019, they added on to their law, particularly to prohibit the construction of for-profit immigration detention centers in the state. This raises the question of why Michigan does not have a similar law and why Michigan still tolerates for-profit prisons being operated and constructed in its communities.
With Michigan allowing for-profit prisons, it has become a hot spot and a place of choice for them to be located. With five in total in Michigan and two more in the works, Michigan will have a total of 7 by the end of the year.
So, how is it affecting your community? You might be asking yourself or even thinking it isn’t affecting our community. But the truth is, having these detention centers is using the community’s resources as well as taking a large portion of land. This is all while making a community less welcoming and more undesirable, while also decreasing property values. The property values are decreasing because who wants to live near a group of criminals, even if they are incorrectly accused? The word “criminals” still carries weight, or even, I dare to say, stigma.
This can also impact the health care system serving the community. An impact on healthcare is the risks of healthcare being inaccessible for some community members or a risky choice. The ethical standards doctors are held to include providing care to anyone who comes through the door, and that can even mean giving care to a detainee with a homeland security agent accompanying them every step of the way.
The presence of a homeland security agent at the hospital can add additional stress to the already strained healthcare system. Also, the presence of a homeland security officer at the hospital, or even the perception that one could be there, can and will deter residents from attending their appointments, making it harder for the hospital to serve its community. Through that, the presence of DHS detainees at hospitals can impact the community negatively and the services they can access.
Even now, some feel the effects of decisions made many years ago, even up to 80 years ago: in 1945, Japanese internment camps closed. The effects lasted for many years after wiping out the economic gains of Japanese immigrants in the United States. This also stripped their culture and dignity, as well as starting them back at square one financially.
Many fear this could be history repeating itself in a slightly different form with the ICE detention centers. Currently, in our country, a minority is being incarcerated in the setting of fear without due process. Even if we hope this is not what is happening, the lack of information makes it hard to know.
The lack of information about what is happening means we truly won’t know for another 80 years what the impacts are or what happened, but imagine your grandchildren learning you did not fight for your neighbors and coworkers.
The conversation of immigration, deportation and immigration detention is a topic all over the news across the country. Now the question is: will Michigan, as a state, be in the news for bystanding or helping ICE? Or will Michigan be in the news for pushing back against ICE? If Michiganders decide to push back ice by putting it in its place, they would be protecting their longtime neighbors and co-workers. We will have to see, as the decision is left to us, to figure out and make it through our actions.
Some actions you can take to push back against ICE include attending protests, emailing your representatives, informing others and speaking out. If you are not able to go out in person, you can also donate to people who will and to organizations that can help, such as the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and the Freedom for Immigration organization.
Thinking that you agree that ICE and the detention centers are negative is not enough because you are not doing anything about it; it makes you a bystander. Being a bystander is not enough because it is horrible for people to do horrible things to other people, which is no different than agreeing with them.
