An idled 1,800-bed private prison in Baldwin will reopen as a detention facility for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a move applauded by locals.

Florida-based GEO Group announced Thursday the company has inked a deal with ICE for the “immediate activation” of its North Lake Correctional Facility, the largest source of tax revenue in Lake County.

The state’s only private, for-profit prison closed in 2022, when former President Joe Biden issued an executive order ending the federal government’s use of private prisons, WOOD reports.

“We expect that our company-owned North Lake Facility in Michigan will play an important role in helping meet the need for increased federal immigration processing center bedspace,” GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoley said in a statement.

Zoley told investors during a call last month that GEO Group “faces an unprecedented opportunity at this time to play a role in supporting President Trump’s new administration policies,” MLive reports.

Trump border czar Tom Homan told CNN in December ICE was looking for up to 100,000 more detention beds to carry out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.

“This will be an expense — this will be an expensive operation. But in the long run, it should be a — it would be a huge tax savings on the American people,” Homan said.

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An ICE spokesman declined to discuss the Lake County prison.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enhanced enforcement operations and routine daily operations have resulted in a significant number of arrests of criminal aliens that require greater detention capacity,” the spokesman wrote in an email to WOOD. “While we cannot confirm individual pre-decisional conversations, we can confirm that ICE is exploring all options to meet its current and future detention requirements.”

GEO Group expects to finalize the multi-year deal “within a few months,” with exclusive services for ICE forecasted to generate about $70 million over the first year.

“We are proud of our 40-year public-private partnership with ICE, and we stand ready to continue to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities,” Zoley said.

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Lake County Administrator Tobi Lake told WOOD the reopening will bring good things to the community.

“They’re a private prison, for the most part, selling beds to the feds,” Lake said. “And the feds have gone Republicans, Democrats, Republicans, Democrats. It seems like every four to eight years, we’re kind of stuck in the middle.”

“At the end of the day, besides what your philosophical view is or your morality, at the end of the day, they are the biggest taxpayer, and when they’re open, the biggest employer in our county,” he said, adding the prison pays hundreds of thousands in property taxes. “And that has a huge spinoff effect. These are dollars that flow into our community, go to the bank, go to the barber, go to the restaurant.”

GEO Group was pursing a reduction in the prison’s taxable value from the Michigan Tax Tribunal that would have shaved $600,000 off its tax contributions, arguing the facility is less valuable when empty.

That would have had “a huge impact on Lake County,” local Chamber of Commerce President Larry Reed told WOOD.

“Lake County is one of the poorest counties in the state, so by cutting their tax revenue, that impacted everything from our veterans to our 911 dispatchers to our senior millage to our schools,” he said. “I think the sentiment in the community is we don’t really care what capacity that it’s opened, … we would just like to see the facility opened.”

The prison at one time employed 300. It has operated for 26 years and most recently opened in 2019 to hold low-security federal inmates with pending deportation orders, but was shuttered three years later, the Big Rapids Pioneer reports.

John Arndt, who lives in a camper in the woods near the prison, agreed that reopening the facility near abandoned homes in a county with a poverty rate at 21% would be a positive.

“I’m not opposed to it at all,” he said. “It’s a facility that would employ people here.”

News of the reopening, however, is not sitting well with the ACLU, which points to allegations of abuse and poor conditions at other ICE facilities, which hold 90% of illegal immigrants, according to MLive.

“They’re there to make money,” Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told the news site. “And so they are uniquely motivated to cut costs, like medical care, food and adequate staffing.”

Cho also alleged that reopening the North Lake Correctional Facility could result in ICE targeting local immigrants.

“Any time an immigration detention facility opens in a community, it certainly increases the risk that people in the local community could be more vulnerable to immigration enforcement and detention as a result,” she told WOOD. “I think it’s important for communities to say, ‘This is not what we want in our town.’”

Instead, residents in Baldwin are saying something else.

“We’ve got some houses for sale – let’s sell them,” Reed told WOOD. “Let’s get people making decent incomes. It’s all going to help drive revenue for Lake County.”

The ICE contract for the North Lake Correctional Facility is one of three announced by GEO groups over the last month, with other contracts for a 1,000-bed facility in New Jersey and a 1,328-bed facility in Texas.