Anonymous submission to Unsalted Counter Info.
On Saturday, September 6, 2025, about 200 Michiganders gathered outside of the North Lake Correctional Center for a noise demo. Formerly a youth prison, since June 2025, North Lake has become an ICE detention center operated by GEO Group, holding over 600 people captive from various ICE raids across the Midwest.
The demonstration was called by the No Detention Centers in Michigan coalition. First, there were a few speakers. Members of the coalition, a lawyer who represents some prisoners at North Lake, as well as the voices of some of the people trapped inside. Some imprisoned people and their loved ones sent statements or audio recordings to be read or played back at the demo, while one person happened to call during the demo and was able to have their voice amplified and to hear their supporters. While the speakers addressed the crowd, ICE goons drove past the gathering in white pickup trucks, recording the crowd with camcorders and spying on everyone with binoculars (the cowards wouldn’t come out and confront anyone).
After about an hour of standing around the front entrance to the prison, a small group of people peeled off and found the service entrance, where four cars were spotted exiting the grounds, their drivers speeding away from the handful of people yelling “shame!” and “fuck you fascists!” One ICE transport van with Florida license plates arrived, with captive people inside. The drivers were of course masked. A few folks tried to block the vehicle from entering the prison grounds, but were unsuccessful. After the transport van went inside the grounds, a barricade across the entrance way began to grow, made of fallen trees, branches, mushroom-covered logs, mossy cinderblocks, and anything else found around the rural gravel roads. The ICE goons in their trucks were stumped by this, but none tried to remove the barricade or even tell people to stop it. People chanted “freedom will blossom in the ashes of the prison!” and “fuck you GEO Group!”
Back at the front gate, a similar barricade made of branches and trees also began to appear. Responding to the prison administration who had decided to bar both family and legal visitation for prisoners that day, protestors decided to make it harder for the ICE “employees” to leave. The GEO Group sign later appeared to have been tagged with phrases like “ICE GTFO” and “more like peepee poopoo group…”
Michiganders will be back, and will return until North Lake has been emptied and razed to the ground. Abolish ICE! Abolish the USA! Free all prisoners!