CoreCivic is reopening a dead Minnesota prison to lock up strangers for seventy-five million dollars a year.
Under a five-year federal contract finalized with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, this former state lockup — bought by the company in 1997 and shuttered in 2010 — will hold up to 1,600 immigrant detainees. CoreCivic expects arrivals to begin by the end of 2026, with the facility reaching its full capacity by the second quarter of 2027.
The building sat silent for sixteen years. It was once the largest employer in Appleton. Then the lock died, and the only hand that reached for it arrived holding taxpayer money and keys. The company did not reopen it as a school. It did not reopen it as a hospital, a workshop, or a place where people could get well. It reopened it as a cage, and the town was told this is what a resurrection looks like.
Look plainly at what this contract proposes. CoreCivic estimates that the facility will generate $75 million a year while holding as many as 1,600 detainees. Divided across full capacity, that is a rough capacity-based estimate of about $46,875 per bed per year. It is not a demonstrated per-detainee price, and the source does not establish that payment rises or falls with occupancy. But the moral fact remains: a private prison company has secured public revenue by reopening a facility whose purpose is to confine human beings.
You can call this correctional capacity. You can call it detention infrastructure. I call it a business model built around the captivity of human beings. The company does not need the people inside those walls to flourish. Its contract exists because the government has chosen detention as a way to manage migrants.
The stranger has a case number, a food budget per head, a per diem. The stranger becomes a unit of capacity. Every bed is also a worker, a mother, a son, somebody who crossed a line and then crossed into a line item in a federal detention system. This is what happens when public policy turns a person into an accounting category.
The law of my tradition is not complicated. “You shall not oppress the resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” “You shall love the stranger as yourself.” “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.” The Lord says it once, says it twice, says it a third time, because the people keep forgetting which side of the door they were on. Jesus did not say, blessed are those who profit from the stranger’s fear. He said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me not.” He made the stranger himself. He did not make the stranger a capacity target.
I will not pretend Appleton made this up, and I will not pretend Appleton authored it. A small city has every right to want jobs, wages, and a future. The people who need work are not the authors of this contract. They are neighbors caught inside an economy that offers communities a choice between economic abandonment and participation in someone else’s captivity. The machine is older than any administration. Both parties have fed it — Republicans by expansion, Democrats by maintenance, neither by abolition. The climate that makes a town grateful for a cage is a climate we all breathed. I have benefited from an economy that makes such choices appear ordinary. We have all learned to look at a prison as payroll before we look at the people behind its doors. That is our complicity.
Appleton, I am not calling you the Pharisee. I am calling you the chosen and the captured both. You will watch the trucks. You will watch the detainees, the strangers, arrive whether or not the fence goes back up, because the federal government will keep sending people into a system built to confine them. Somewhere inside that fence there will be a person the Lord loves, and the town’s bread will be tied to that person’s confinement. You know it now, before the first key turns.
The question is not whether Appleton residents deserve work. They do. The question is why public power keeps offering communities employment only when another human being has first been made vulnerable enough to detain. A humane immigration policy would not begin with empty beds and ask whom to put in them. It would begin with due process, legal representation, family unity, community-based alternatives, and the presumption that a person’s liberty is not raw material for corporate growth. It would help Appleton through public investment and dignified work that does not require the detention of strangers.
Stop. That is the sentence the gospel has for it. Archbishop Óscar Romero stood in a pulpit and said to the men with power, in the name of God and in the name of the suffering people: stop the repression. He said it in his own voice, and he offered his own hand, and he was killed for both. The door stays open in the same sentence. CoreCivic can walk away from the contract and take its keys and go. The hand is out.
The stranger will come anyway. That is the one thing the country has never been able to stop, because the stranger is Christ, and Christ does not stop coming. The question was never whether the stranger would come. The question was whether this town would be the one that charged for the door.