An empty 1,600-bed private prison has sat idly on land that was once a soybean field in rural Appleton, Minnesota since the prison failed and, as a result, tanked the town’s economy in 2010.
Now, ICE is seeking to reinhabit the bones of Prairie Correctional Facility (PCF) and use it as a new detention facility, according to a federal contract released on June 4.
ICE is coordinating the effort with CoreCivic, the same private prison company that oversaw the operation and failure of PCF.
Appleton City Administrator John Olinger told the Daily Yonder in June that the detention center is “allowed to open with no further action from the city.” Job openings to staff the facility were posted on CoreCivic’s website and renovations have reportedly been underway.
Though plans appear to be moving forward, it may not be a done deal.
“A perception of inevitability is exactly what ICE and the Trump administration are trying to create,” said Andy Pearson, a community organizer with the rurally based advocacy group CURE.
If the project seems inevitable, Pearson explained, efforts to disrupt it would seem futile.
While the contract boasts the optics of finality, Pearson thinks the handiwork seems rushed. Parts of it seem all but copy-pasted from other projects: one section states that people released from the facility could be sent to the nearest subway station, although there is no subway system near Appleton in southwestern Minnesota.
“It’s an attempt to move faster than the speed of public resistance can slow you down, even when that public resistance is a super majority,” Pearson said.
Indeed, a January 2026 Marist poll found that 65% of Americans – up from 54% in June 2025 – thought ICE’s actions had gone too far.
The poll was conducted in the midst of ICE’s heightened operations in the Twin Cities and small towns across Minnesota, when ICE arrested over 3,500 people, murdered two U.S. citizens, and terrorized entire communities in the span of a few months.
Minnesotans are still reeling from the emotional and economic impact of the surge.
“With what we lived through in Minnesota over the last several months, it’s reasonable to imagine a diversion from what you might otherwise generalize about political attitudes when it comes to having a detention center in your backyard,” said Pearson, referring to the fact that 66.3% of Swift County, in which Appleton resides, voted to elect Trump in 2024.
What About Appletonians?
ICE and the Trump administration want to push a narrative that everyone in Appleton is for the facility, another CURE staffer, Misty Butler, told the Daily Yonder.
“We don’t have any evidence to support that,” Butler said.
“Local folks have not been brought into the loop,” Pearson said. In an attempt to remedy the lack of public input, CURE is exploring the idea of conducting a poll, with the help of Immigrant Defense Network, to better understand Appleton residents’ opinions about the detention facility.
While more information is needed to make any sort of generalization about what Appletonians think, Butler said some have shared concerns about re-opening the facility, but fear backlash from neighbors if they speak out.
One resident of an unincorporated area just outside Appleton, Therese Quinn, told the Daily Yonder about her concerns.
“I don’t think anybody really does know what it’s going to look like,” Quinn said, expressing fear that it could become another high-profile immigrant detention facility like so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, which has come under fire for rampant human rights abuses.
“They were showing off how brutally they were treating people,” Quinn said. “To me that’s not okay.”
Quinn is also concerned about the facility abetting the federal government’s ongoing policy of mass deportation.
“Everybody [in America], except for [Indigenous people], came here from somewhere else,” Quinn said. “When we all came in here, we probably looked a little different, sounded different, acted different, had different religions.”
Quinn worries about the deportations tearing people away from small towns like Appleton, which she feels are already suffering from dwindling populations of young working people.
“The people who suffer are the workers,” Quinn said.
Quinn said she doesn’t know what many of her neighbors think about the re-opening of the facility because she is often afraid to get political. But she suspects she is not alone.
Along with other Appleton residents, Quinn attended a vigil in town last fall opposing the potential ICE facility.
The vigil was organized in part by Melissa Gonzalez, a concerned pastor of a majority-immigrant congregation in Minnesota..
Gonzalez said many of her parishioners had been deported by ICE in recent months. Some had lived in the U.S. for decades, spouses and children left behind.
“We’re supposed to love the widow, the poor, the immigrant, and the orphan,” Gonzalez said. “[But instead] we are making widows, we are making people poor, we are making children orphans.”
Gonzalez said that it was incredibly difficult to locate where her parishioners were incarcerated within the highly decentralized and complex migrant detention network.
When she could reach them, she said parishioners described the treatment they endured in ICE facilities as “inhumane and cruel.” Last year was the deadliest year for people in ICE detention in two decades.
Gonzalez acknowledged the economic pressures that may push some Appleton residents to want the facility to open: the very real need for employment, housing, and healthcare that exists in both rural and urban communities.
“When you have this promise of some good paying jobs, that’s really enticing,” Gonzalez said.
But there are other options, Gonzalez said: pathways toward “moral and ethical jobs that don’t steal our humanity and harm our spirit,” as she put it.
Another Bill of False Goods
In addition to moral and ethical concerns, the longevity of any economic prosperity an ICE detention facility would bring to the community is an open question.
Minnesota Department of Corrections commissioner Paul Schnell pushed back on plans to re-open the facility in a June Minnesota Star Tribune commentary piece, writing “Appleton has seen this story before… [the private prison model is to] arrive with promises, extract value and move on.”
When PCF opened in 1992, Appleton residents were promised that it would bring economic growth and opportunity.
And for the couple decades it operated, it did. Property taxes and utilities made up for almost 60% of the city’s budget. Increased traffic through town buoyed local businesses and increased demand for city infrastructure, according to a 2018 city plan. The prison became a pillar of the local economy.
But when it buckled, the economy largely collapsed with it. Local businesses closed, unemployment rose, and some people moved away.
The decision to close PCF was an economic one: CoreCivic decided there were not enough incarcerated people to make a prison of its size profitable. Years later, in 2023, Minnesota effectively banned private prisons altogether, joining a handful of states in doing so.
Brianna Nofil, a historian specializing in American migrant detention, said the Appleton site is representative of what she calls “the rise and fall of private prisons in the last 30 years.”
“The great loophole [now] is immigrant detention,” Nofil said.
In Appleton and across the country, immigration detention projects are reinhabiting the skeletons of the boom-and-bust private industry, a phenomenon Shannon Heffernan of the Marshall Project dubbed “zombie prisons.”
While re-opening the facility as an ICE detention center may bring some economic benefit to Appleton in the short-run – as PCF did temporarily – Nofil said it would not be a sustainable model for long-term economic growth.
“People were already sold a bill of false goods once,” Nofil said. “It failed once. Why would it succeed this time?”
Nofil’s skepticism is compounded by the particular volatility of migrant detention, subject to the ever-changing winds of federal policy, global migration flows, and public opinion.
“Where ICE needs space is not consistent,” Nofil explained. While ICE may need space in the Midwest right now, in a couple years it could need space somewhere entirely different.
“It’s not something any community can reliably bank on,” Nofil said.
And when a detention facility becomes a hotspot for controversy – as they often do due to widespread human rights violations – Nofil said the response is to cast off the problems as hyperlocalized to the particular site.
Immigration officials will say, “we agree, that site is out of control, that site is a problem, we’ll close that site,” Nofil explained, effectively pacifying the public at the height of the controversy without treating systemic issues.
When this happens, the communities that have become economically reliant on the sites become collateral damage.
The extreme volatility of migrant detention makes it “a particularly treacherous industry to link a community’s financial future to,” Nofil said.
Opening a “zombie” immigrant detention facility in Appleton may very well lead it down the same path PCF did, pulling the rug out from under the community without reliable systems in place for long-term economic health.
It would also bring an industry of highly questionable morality to people’s backyards.
Gonzalez said she thinks about the people who would be held in the facility: “It’s moms and dads and sons and daughters and cousins and grandparents and church people… who would be criminalized and warehoused there.”