After being arrested by immigration agents, Fernando Ramírez remained incarcerated since late September at the ICE facility in North Lake Processing Center, located in the rural northwest side of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Poor organization, inadequate food, and deficient medical care defined his experience inside the facility.
Alerted by his daughters from outside, Ramírez sought out a young man who didn’t speak English and had just arrived at North Lake. He helped him request medication; he walked him to his cell and, concerned, asked a guard to keep an eye on him. The guard never showed up. When Ramírez went to check himself, he found the young man convulsing on the floor. He asked nearby guards to call medical staff, but only lieutenants arrived. They stabilized him and made him walk downstairs.
“I told them, ‘What are you doing here? The ones who need to come are the medical staff, not you.’ They pushed me and moved me aside,” Ramírez recalls. “That wasn’t right, because I told them, ‘I’m doing your job. You’re the ones who are supposed to be paying attention to what’s happening, not me.’”
Ramírez is a man in his late 50s, hefty, and brown-skinned. Though he carries a feisty character, he is quick to make friends wherever he goes. His daughter, Samantha Ramírez, describes him as a man who shares. He came to the United States in the 1980s from Taxco, a small city whose name is in Nahuatl, a native language in Mesoamerica, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico.
How and why did he decide to cross the border in his early 20s? With a nervous laugh, he says he walked across “out of craziness” to improve his quality of life.
“I walked over the hills from Tijuana to San Ysidro. I was young and crazy because I came without any family. Absolutely nothing,” he remembers. “I came with some friends, but we split up, and each went our own way.”
On Sept. 29, 2025, ICE agents arrested him at the Illinois-Michigan border while he was weighing the truck he was driving. Although he had a valid work permit and no criminal record, he was detained and sent to the Broadway detention center in Chicago, which he described as extremely dirty and overcrowded with immigrants waiting to be processed. The next day, he was transferred to North Lake, where he would spend about 103 days.
Surrounded by metal-wire fences in a wooded, rural area of Lake County, the ICE facility has the capacity to hold 1,800 detainees and is managed by The GEO Group, a private company that operates prisons and detention centers across the country. The company contributed $1 million to former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, ABC News reported. And according to MLive, after securing federal contracts to manage ICE detention facilities, it reported profits of $254 million in 2025, compared to $32 million in 2024.
Since opening early last summer, the ICE processing center has received hundreds of immigrants of different nationalities. The population grew from 28 detainees in August 2025 to 1,413 in January 2026, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), and ICE data shows that as of January 22, 2026, 1,266 inmates have no criminal record. Family members and elected officials have also raised concerns about what they describe as poor oversight, inadequate medical care, and suicide attempts inside the facility.
Nenko Gantchev, a 56-year-old Bulgarian immigrant and small business owner in Chicago, died Dec. 15 at North Lake. Gantchev had Type 2 diabetes. While ICE stated he died of natural causes, his family says his health deteriorated during his 82 days in detention, and they seek a second independent autopsy. Politicians in Illinois and Michigan have called for an independent investigation.
Inside North Lake, Ramírez says detainees are dressed in blue uniforms and given light jackets that do little to keep out the cold, along with blankets that he says caused him allergic reactions. Strict routines governed daily life. As a diabetic, he says proper hygiene and adequate medication were hard to obtain: exposed showers, Tylenol for nearly any pain or symptom, and food as bland and cold as the building itself.
“It was almost always processed chicken with some kind of pasta. Also, rice and beans. No salt. Undercooked. Hard. And the chicken had no flavor either. Everything had no flavor,” he recalls.
For diabetics, the daily routine was especially risky and different. Instead of waking at 5:30am for breakfast like the others, they were awakened at 4:30am for blood draws and glucose checks. Medication was inconsistent, he says. The showers were too unsanitary for someone with diabetes, where even a small cut or infection could lead to serious complications.
Regarding these issues of cleanliness, food, and medical care, EL CENTRAL requested comments from GEO Group and ICE; however, no response had been received by the time of publication. Previously, GEO Group told NPR that they respect access to medicine, food, recreation, and religious freedom, and that this care is provided under federal detention standards. After Gantchev’s death, ICE said in a public statement that “comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay.”
In more than 35 years of living in the United States, Ramírez had not returned to Mexico. He worked, built a community, and created a family, moving to western Michigan in 1997. Still, self-deportation became a desperate option to escape detention. A month in, his daughters placed his name on a voluntary departure list, but neither deportation nor release occurred.
“That was our goal — to go back to Mexico. Even though I want to stay here because all my children were born here. We have our house here. Everything is here. But if I have to go back, why not? I’m not afraid of going back to my country because it’s my country,” he says.
Outside, his daughters Samantha and Naomi were not only fighting for his release, they also organized a support network called Raíces Migrantes, providing financial assistance for food and phone calls, transportation upon release, and translation help for those who did not speak English. Inside, Ramírez sought out fellow detainees, helping them with phone calls, translation, and encouragement.
Though being separated from his family made him wish time would move faster, he built another kind of family inside, spending his days outside the cells with men with whom he shared, as he puts it, “good things and bad things.” A habeas corpus petition eventually secured his release from North Lake. He says that on Jan. 10, when a guard told him he would be freed that day, he was overwhelmed with mixed emotions.
“It’s like a cancer that stays in my soul, not in my body, because it changed my whole life,” Ramírez says.
He also remembers that, ironically, they were frequently asked to work inside the facility, cleaning or in the kitchen, for $1 a day. “If they have me there, as they say, ‘illegal,’ why would I go to work? We would refuse. I told them, ‘Give me papers, and I’ll go to work.’”
Erick Diaz Veliz is a Peruvian reporter based in Lansing, Michigan. He has documents and reports on cultural, social, and political issues in Peru and Michigan as a freelancer. Erick was born in Lima, Peru, and has been living in Lansing since 2018.
This article was made possible thanks to a generous grant to EL CENTRAL Hispanic News by Press Forward, the national movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news. Learn more at www.pressforward.news.