In response to confirmed reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started detaining people at Indiana’s Miami Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) is raising the alarm over the Trump administration’s rapid expansion of the immigrant detention system in the Midwest.
According to reports, about 15 people were in custody at the detention camp on October 2, 40 people had been detained there as of today, and ICE intends to detain at least 100 people there by the end of the week. An NIJC attorney spoke this morning with the family member of a client who was sent to the facility. The administration’s plans for the state prison were modelled after the notorious Florida Everglades detention camp, where about two-thirds of the 1,800 people detained there have seemingly disappeared. The Miami Correctional Facility will be used to imprison immigrants who are being swept up in the violent and illegal arrest operations currently rampaging Illinois communities. NIJC calls on elected officials to demand access to the Miami Correctional Facility and to hold ICE accountable to providing due process protections and a fair process for release for people being held there.
“As a legal service provider for immigrants throughout the Midwest, and the primary legal service provider for detained immigrants in the state of Indiana, NIJC is gravely concerned about the conditions in which people are now being held in the Miami County prison,” said Lisa Koop, NIJC’s director of legal services. “NIJC is working to contact people held in the facility and will conduct an attorney visit in the coming days to ensure that people have access to due process, know their rights, and have the opportunity to fight for their release and fair day in court.”
NIJC has joined local and national groups decrying ICE’s planned use of the Miami Correctional Facility and the proposed use of the Camp Atterbury military base in Franklin, Indiana. These are among the many new detention camps that have expanded ICE’s capacity to detain thousands of more people in the Midwest. The private prison company CoreCivic recently announced a new contract with ICE to hold more than 1,300 people in a shuttered prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. ICE also has been regularly detaining people for days at a processing facility in Broadview, Illinois, that previously operated as a staging facility and not an detention center used to hold people days at a time. ICE also has added hundreds of beds in recent months through new or expanded contracts with county jails throughout the Midwest.
DHS has reported that federal agents have taken more than 800 people from Chicago-area neighborhoods so far since Trump’s “Midway Blitz” operation began in early September. Members of Congress are demanding answers and transparency regarding the arrests. Even before this recent surge in September, in the first seven months of 2025, ICE arrested over 500 more people in Illinois than in all of 2024.
NIJC filed federal court notices in late September on behalf of 35 people who have been unlawfully arrested without warrants or probable cause by DHS officers and other federal agents since May 2025. The filings alerted the court that these recent illegal, and often violent, arrests violate the Castañon Nava consent decree. The filings also describe the tremendous barriers to access to counsel that people have faced after being taken into ICE custody.