- Immigrant and civil rights advocates allege northern Michigan ICE facility isn’t providing adequate medical care or visitation rights
- ACLU of Michigan, Michigan Immigrant Rights Center described several cases in letter to ICE, say they hope to resolve out of court
- The federal immigration enforcement agency has previously denied reports of subpar medical conditions in its facilities
A federal immigration detention center in northern Michigan is denying adequate medical care to detainees and limiting their access to attorneys, immigrant advocacy and civil rights organizations alleged Thursday.
In a letter to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, the ACLU of Michigan and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center detailed what they called delays or denials of medical care for detainees, limits on attorney-client communications and missed immigration proceedings at the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin.
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The privately owned, 1,800-bed facility has been used as an ICE detention center since June 2025 and as of April 2 housed an average of 1,410 detainees daily.
As of Thursday afternoon, a spokesperson for ICE has not responded to a request for comment on the letter.
Among other things, the ACLU and Michigan Immigrant Rights Center are seeking an independent medical audit of the facility, systematic health screenings for detainees, mandatory protocols for emergency medical response, free access to medication and adequate translation services.
The groups cited reports they’ve received from detainees inside the facility, family members and attorneys who have attempted to visit. The letter included references to medical records for detainees, whose names were not included.
For now, the groups are hoping the issues raised can be resolved out of court, but they aren’t ruling out the possibility of a lawsuit.
“The health and safety of our clients and community members is important and critical,” Ruby Robinson, senior managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said Thursday. “We’ll pursue all avenues that we need to ensure that … the people who are detained receive the care and the access that is due to them.”
ICE has previously denied claims of “subprime conditions” at the facility, including medical care, saying last month that it has “higher detention standards than most US prisons that hold actual US citizens.”
Since the North Lake facility opened as a detention center, one man, Nenko Gantchev, has died while in custody. ICE officials reported Gantchev died of natural causes, though his family has claimed he was not treated or given dietary modifications for his diabetes.
In another instance, advocates say a man who’d previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia saw a sharp decline in his mental health while at North Lake and is no longer speaking or responding to his surroundings.
Other cases described by the ACLU and MIRC include a woman who experienced heart palpitations after she did not get her required blood pressure medication and a man who did not get follow-up treatment after a six-day hospitalization following a seizure.
“No one should have to beg for hours to get urgent or even routine medical care, or fear that asking for help will result in retaliation,” Ewurama Appiagyei-Dankah, West Michigan legal fellow at the ACLU of Michigan, said. “But this is the horrifying reality.”
Ricardo Granado, a Detroit pastor who has made several trips to North Lake to meet with detainees, said he’s had difficulties arranging visits in recent weeks.
He said it’s crucial for people inside the facility to be listened to and have their needs addressed, noting that many of them don’t have the resources to make phone calls, stay in contact with their families or pay an attorney.
“Things that are so basic, like enforcing their right to have representation, are just some of the barriers that these families and detained individuals are confronting,” he said during a Thursday press conference.
It’s not the first time complaints have arisen about conditions inside the facility since it reopened as an ICE processing center last year.
In April, the advocacy group No Detention Centers in Michigan announced detainees had participated in a hunger strike and work stoppage over unsafe conditions and lack of medical care. At the time, the agency denied a hunger strike was taking place.
This article first appeared on Bridge Michigan and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.