When state Rep. Brad Tabke (D-Shakopee) first learned of ICE’s plans to open a massive detention facility in Appleton, Minnesota, on the opposite side of the state from his district, it was like déjà vu.
Earlier this year, a similar facility was proposed for the heart of Tabke’s district, the city that he was previously the mayor of from 2012 until 2015. But the proposal, which arrived the same month as the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, essentially became a non-starter after the community made its opposition known. Now, Tabke, who was first elected to the Minnesota House in 2019 and has been serving in the legislature since 2023, is hoping that history repeats.
“Although our tools are extremely limited,” he shared, there are plenty of things Minnesotans can do to fight back—“as we saw in Shakopee.”
The Appleton proposal
ICE wants to open the Appleton detention center in the shuttered Prairie Correction Facility, which closed in 2010. The detention center would house “1,600 males and females of all security levels,” which would make it one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country. ICE cites the need to “increase bed capacity to meet the administration’s interior enforcement and border decompression goals” as the reason for the proposal.
The facility is owned by Core Civic, the largest private prison and detention contractor in the US. The same company also runs the Dilley Processing Center in Texas, where five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family were sent during Operation Metro Surge.
Dilley is known for multiple cases of “mismanagement, forced labor, inhumane living conditions, excessive use of force, sexual abuse,” and much more. “We really need to find ways to stop this or slow it down…because it is going to hurt people,” Tabke told Courier Minnesota.
During Operation Metro Surge, many ICE detainees were held at the Whipple Federal Building in St. Paul, but ultimately, this building was not meant to hold hundreds of people. So, ICE started sending people to facilities in New Mexico, Texas, as well as certain county jails in Minnesota that ICE has established contracts with, like those in Itasca, Cass, Crow Wing, Mille Lacs, Sherburne, and Kandiyohi counties. Tabke believes that if the Appleton contract is approved, it would allow the federal government to “absolutely ramp back up in the Upper Midwest, and give them the logistical pull for detaining more people, pulling more people off the street, and treating people unfairly without due process.”
The proposed facility is also attracting criticism as it dwarfs the size of the community where it is based. The population of Appleton is roughly 1,400 people, while the prison’s capacity is 1,600 people. In the 148-page proposal, ICE states the initial intake of detainees will be 150 people before scaling up to the max capacity of 1,600. It’s likely the center would hold detainees from Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, on top of Minnesotans, as the St. Paul ICE Field Office serves multiple states.
As stated in the contract proposal, the facility must provide scheduled phone calls, access to send and receive mail, a law library area and resources, and legal visitation spaces. But, when it comes to legal visitation access, ICE has “near-total control over who can see inside the facility, including members of Congress and their staff.” Tabke says we know “from history and other states” that ICE facilities are unaccountable for what happens to detainees inside.
The contract proposal also comes in spite of the 2023 law that bans private prisons in Minnesota. Tabke says the bill has “very clear language that stopped this specific location from being used as a prison for local and state prisoners.” But, Tabke acknowledges that the state government can’t stop the federal government from “basically doing whatever they want.” In ICE’s proposal it even states, “If any conflicts between federal, state, or local laws or rules arise, the federal rules shall be followed.”
The battle in Shakopee
When the ICE facility was first proposed in Shakopee in January, Tabke immediately released a statement condemning it, and started working with the city to turn things around.
The proposal came from a company called Opus Group, which the city had worked closely with for a long time and which Tabke said had “done lots of great work for the community.” The new facility would have been located in the Opus Group’s River Valley Business Park, “right next door to a mobile home park, where we have a significant number of vulnerable people who live there,” he added. He immediately reached out to the company looking for answers.
“We started asking them when we started hearing rumors about this happening, and they just clamped up. They ghosted us,” he said. “We gave the company a deadline of that Thursday night, saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t talk to us about what’s going on and make sure that we know this isn’t happening, we are going to leverage public opinion to get this going.’”
When no response came, the next morning at 7 a.m., Tabke and the city “released some videos telling the public what was going to happen, that they wanted to put thousands of people in a detention facility…that they were blowing through all of our local rules.”
The response was almost immediate. Tabke said opposition to the proposed Shakopee facility came from across the metro, the state, and the country. And on the same day the videos were released, Tabke issued another statement offering good news to the center’s opponents: The proposal was off the table.
“We shut down their phone lines of every business office they had across the country. They took their Facebook pages down for a little while,” Tabke said, adding that he got a call from Opus CEO saying there was no contract with the federal government, even though “we heard through rumors and back channels around the fact that there absolutely was a signed contract moving forward.”
Continuing the fight
Appleton and Shakopee are very different communities, as are their facilities. Appleton is a privately-owned facility anticipating a federal government contract, while the Shakopee proposal was run by “a well-known company [Opus] that was selling a property to the federal government,” Tabke noted.
But Tabke credited public pushback with stopping the Shakopee contract in its tracks. He said the same pressure is needed to prevent the Appleton plan from becoming reality despite the fact that a 2023 state law bans private prisons in Minnesota. In the eyes of the federal government, and as explicitly described in ICE’s proposal for the site, “if any conflicts between federal, state, or local laws or rules arise, the federal rules shall be followed.” That’s where the people power has to come in.
“Public opinion is really, really important and people talking about these things, and where we go with them,” he said. “It’s only because the people of Shakopee and Minnesota and the country stood up and said, ‘No, this can’t happen here,’ that we were able to stop that, and the company made a different decision.”
Minnesotans are rallying to stop the Appleton facility, with the organization Clean Up the River Environment (CURE) leading the initiative by hosting a petition opposed to the plan. Statewide faith leaders have prayed with Appleton residents in protest of the proposal, and many state officials, like Tabke, have spoken out directly against the contract.
The timeline of when the Appleton facility could become operational remains unclear. The proposal has not been accepted yet, despite the agency initially claiming the facility should be fully operational by the end of November. Job postings for the center were already live, but were recently taken down. As of now, the only place to find updates on the status of the proposal is on the US System of Award Management (SAM) website. The most recent update was June 19, when the document became publicly available.
Meanwhile, the facility’s opponents are pressing on, with Tabke urging Minnesotans to vote for candidates in the upcoming midterm elections who won’t stand by while the federal government attempts to bring facilities like the ones proposed in Shakopee and Appleton to the state. “If we have the majority this year…we will absolutely be able to use our power as a state to restrict the federal government’s activities on our properties and different places like that,” he said. “We all do better when we all do better, and we need to make sure that we’re still focusing on that as a people, and that we are electing people to do that work.”
