LEAVENWORTH, Kansas — Nestled into the crook of a wooded two-lane highway on the edge of northeast Kansas, a complex of concrete and barbed wire sits mostly vacant — for now.
For over a decade, the Leavenworth Detention Center held federal inmates awaiting trial. But that chapter closed in 2021, when then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order that caused many federal contracts with private prisons to expire.
Now CoreCivic, one of the country’s largest private corrections companies, wants to reopen the more than 1,000 bed complex in Leavenworth as an immigrant detention center.
THE DORMANT facility would adopt a new name, the Midwest Regional Reception Center, and a new mission: to boost regional capacity for President Donald Trump’s push to deport millions of people in the country without legal status.
But a lawsuit stands in the way of CoreCivic’s proposal. Under local ordinance, the city of Leavenworth argues CoreCivic needs to follow a formal process to receive permission before it can reactivate. The company insists those rules don’t apply to them because, in their view, the facility never closed.
On the surface, it’s a mundane matter of statutory interpretation. But for the groups who oppose CoreCivic’s plan to reopen the detention center, it’s a fight to protect their immigrant neighbors and keep traumatic memories of the troubled prison firmly buried in the past.
FORMER corrections officer William Rogers remembers where he was when an inmate slashed his head open with a blow from a metal lunch tray.
Squinting into the sunlight, he pointed at a slate-gray building scored with tall, narrow windows. Behind that same unbreakable glass in 2018, he said, an inmate started to threaten a case counselor.
“‘Man, I’ll hit a woman. Don’t think I won’t,’” Rogers recalls the inmate saying.
He reported those threats and started to transfer the inmate to a different unit. That’s when the man decided to take his anger out on Rogers instead.
“When he hit me in the back of the head — I mean, it hurt. But I didn’t know it was split open,” he said. “Because at that point you’re just going to fight.”
Rogers finished his shift that day with 14 staples in his head.
THAT WAS ONE of three instances in Rogers’ four years at the facility when an inmate assault sent him to the emergency room. Despite the violence he and his colleagues endured, Rogers doesn’t place all the blame on inmates who lashed out.
He said understaffing created unbearable conditions for detainees. Coveted recreation hours dwindled without enough officers to run them. The same problem arose for staff that helped set up phone calls, manage commissary money and provide basic needs like clothing.
“They’re just in that pot all day brewing,” Rogers said. “How do you think they’re going to act?”
A 2017 audit of the facility by the U.S. Department of Justice found that chronic understaffing by CoreCivic, coupled with poor oversight by the U.S. Marshals Service, created dangerous conditions for inmates and staff.
