Greensboro Responds to Potential ICE Detention Plans

A Kelly green fence lines Greensboro’s Jefferson Road, dividing the sidewalk from snow-covered fields, empty bleachers, and a complex of buildings. The property that once housed the old American Hebrew Academy, near the city’s quiet Jefferson Wood neighborhood, has largely been empty since the school closed in 2019. 

But in recent weeks, alarm spread as the American Civil Liberties Union released documents that suggest the federal government could locate an immigration detention center at the site.

The ACLU received the documents as part of a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and they include responses to a June 2025 request for proposals from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Included among them, on page 71, is a heavily redacted proposal from a government contractor to use a 100-acres site in Greensboro and a photo that appears to be the former academy site. The documents also cite the Rivers Correctional Institution in northeastern North Carolina, and describe other targeted properties, their potential uses, and their proximity to major infrastructure such as hospitals, fire stations, and highways.

On February 3, the City of Greensboro released a statement saying the federal government has not contacted it regarding the use of the old academy. Representatives for the American Hebrew Academy, which still owns the property, declined to answer questions on record to The Assembly, but said in a statement that they also have not been contacted about a proposal.

There are no new detention centers to announce now, an ICE spokesman said in a statement this week, but it “should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”

“I don’t think Greensboro needs to be the center of a detention center,” Greensboro Mayor Marikay Abuzuaiter told The Assembly. “We are concerned about anything that comes up like this and are trying to address it the best we can.”

City staff, as well as elected officials, said any such center would need to overcome significant hurdles in a city with a long history of welcoming immigrants and fighting for civil rights. But immigration advocates say diligence and transparency are necessary to ensure that it doesn’t happen.

“We need to be on high alert,” said Julie Peeples, the former pastor of the Congregational United Church of Christ Greensboro. “We can’t put anything past this administration. They do not honor the law or local regulations.”

What’s Really Happening in Greensboro?

While city officials say they’ve heard nothing about any detention center plans, they said converting the old school would not be a quick or simple task. 

Andrea Harrell, an assistant city manager for Greensboro, said the facility is currently zoned for educational use. Rezoning it to be used as a detention center would take at least three months. “And that would be the fastest rezoning in history,” she said.

The applicant would have to submit plans to the city’s planning and zoning commission, which would review them and make a recommendation to the Greensboro City Council. The council would be required to hold a public hearing and vote on the change. The property would also likely have to be brought up to specific building and fire codes for the proposed use.

City council members Tammi Thurm and Adam Marshall both said they would not support rezoning.

“This is not a land use that is needed in this community,” said Marshall, whose District 4 includes the site, in a statement to The Assembly. 

November’s elections ushered in a largely new city council, including Marshall. The nine-member council is now entirely Democrats, and is majority-Black for the first time in history. Several members, including April Parker, Irving Allen, Crystal Black, and Cecile Crawford, made a name for themselves as activists and community organizers. During their campaigns, all the current council members said they would oppose federal overreach from the Trump administration.

Nancy Vaughan, the former mayor, said there would not be community support for a detention center at the site. “In my perspective, it’s really a jail,” said Vaughan. “This just does not seem like a good fit.”

Since the academy closed in 2019, the property has been outfitted for at least two different uses. In 2022, the buildings and grounds were leased to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to house migrant children, though none were ever held at the site. In October 2024, the Federal Emergency Management Agency used it as a training and processing center after Hurricane Helene. FEMA ceased its operations there in February 2025. According to the academy, the agency terminated its lease last April.

When the federal government first approached the city with a plan to use the facility to house migrant children, Harrell said, it gave a year of notice; provided hundreds of pages of security protocols, contracts, and plans; and worked with the fire department to make upgrades. None of that has happened in relation to a potential detention center, Harrell said.

The ACLU’s release of the documents comes in the wake of a December report in the Washington Post revealing the Trump administration’s plans to renovate industrial warehouses across the country to hold more than 80,000 immigrants.

“It’s part of a national trend,” said Andrew Willis Garcés, an organizer with the immigrant advocacy organization Siembra NC. “They are trying to rent hundreds of thousands of warehouses in addition to other facilities across the country.”

‘Looking in Places That it Never Has Looked Before’

The ACLU documents identify multiple proposed locations for federal detention centers.

“What is happening right now is that the Trump administration is engaging in an expansion of immigration detention that has never been seen before,” said Eunice Cho, senior counsel of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “The amount of funding that the Trump administration has received from Congress—$45 billion—means it is looking in places that it never has looked before to build immigration detention sites.”

Part of the reason ICE needs these centers, Garcés said, is to hold people while they either wait for their immigration court hearing, or give up and agree to leave the country.

“Immigration courts are so backlogged that it will take you years to get a trial,” Garcés said. “And they’re trying to keep people in cages as long as possible.”

Places like Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, or “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida, have faced numerous allegations of abuse and inhumane conditions. When people are kept in places like that, Cho said, they sometimes sign away their right to a trial in what is known as “voluntary departure.”

“There are detainees who lack access to counsel, and ICE officials tour the facilities and encourage people to sign voluntary deportation agreements, sometimes without understanding what they are,” Cho said. “It is ICE’s very clear strategy to deny people counsel and place them in abusive conditions to help compel people to accept these deportation orders.”

Currently, most immigrants arrested in North Carolina are transferred to Georgia, Cho said, because there isn’t a large facility in the state.

“There is an adage that says, ‘If they build it, they will fill it,’” Cho said.

Garcés agreed. “The number one thing keeping ICE from deporting people as much as they want is lack of bed space,” he said. “If they can expand into every city, it’s more likely that they can get people to waive their right to a trial and just leave.”

The documents the ACLU released indicate that the proposal to use the American Hebrew Academy site comes from Baptiste Group, LLC, a federal contractor. Public records and news reports show that the organization has a history of problems with at least one other detention site. 

In 2021, the company made headlines after a staff member at La Casa de Sidney, a federal migrant children center it ran in Tennessee, sexually assaulted a boy in its custody. Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigated the organization. All of the children were moved out of the facility in 2022 after the state suspended Baptiste Group’s business license and brought criminal charges against former staff members. Baptiste dissolved its organization in Tennessee but still operates in Georgia, according to state business records.

“These facilities have a history of concerning treatment of people in their care,” said Michele Delgado, a staff attorney at the ACLU of NC. “I don’t think in any world I would be happy if they opened one nearby.”

Reports indicate ICE is also looking at reusing former correctional facilities and private prisons as detention centers. Among them are several owned by the GEO Group, Inc., including Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, N.C. 

Rivers “offers a secure, fully functional, and strategically located detention setting within commuting distance of Richmond, VA,” the recently released documents state.

GEO’s Plans in Winton

Originally built in 2001, the Rivers Correctional Institution is situated on about 257 acres in Hertford County. The facility closed in 2021.

The ACLU documents include a proposal from the GEO Group dated June 2025 to reopen Rivers to house more than 1,000 immigrants. 

The Assembly, in collaboration with Down from DC, first reported on the potential reopening last September in a story that was based on statements GEO officials made in a call with investors. The ACLU documents do not indicate the status of any negotiations between GEO and ICE, but do provide some previously undisclosed details.

The GEO proposal states that the prison has been well-maintained since it closed and could be reopened within 90 days. It also notes local emergency and medical services that could support a detention center, and its proximity to transportation.

In its most recent call with investors last November, GEO officials said negotiations with federal officials were delayed due to the government shutdown, but that they still expect to lease idle prisons to ICE. Company leaders didn’t name Rivers explicitly in that call, but spoke generally about detention center plans that could add up to $300 million in new business for the company.

“While the exact timing of government actions, including our new contract awards, is difficult to estimate, we believe that our remaining idle facilities are likely to play an important role in supporting the objective of increasing overall detention capacity,” George Zoley, executive chairman of the board, told investors. 

GEO officials reminded investors that Congress provided $45 billion to ICE last year to dramatically expand its network of detention facilities. “We have approximately 6,000 idle beds at six company-owned facilities, which remain available,” Zoley said.

Rivers also had a record of health and safety violations, which contributed to former President Joe Biden’s decision to let federal contracts with GEO and other private prison companies expire in 2021. Rivers previously operated under contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which used the facility mostly to hold migrants who had been convicted of crimes and were completing sentences before deportation. 

In a written response, U.S. Rep. Don Davis, whose district includes Hertford County, said that he hasn’t spoken with anyone from the GEO Group since December 2024, when representatives came to see him about the potential reopening of Rivers.

“I strongly urge the GEO Group to be transparent with the public if they intend to reopen the Rivers Correctional Institution, especially given the current national climate,” Davis wrote. “Transparency and community engagement are key to building and maintaining trust. Any facility reopening must meet operational standards that guarantee humane treatment.”

Davis was one of 21 House Democrats who voted to reopen the government last week with a Friday deadline for negotiating restrictions on immigration enforcement as a condition for Congress to approve ICE’s regular budget.

“It is deeply troubling and unacceptable to see families grieving after tragic incidents involving federal agents in Minnesota, including multiple fatal shootings that have shocked communities and eroded public trust,” Davis wrote. “As negotiations continue in Washington, D.C., over Department of Homeland Security appropriations, our focus must remain on holding those responsible accountable and taking swift, decisive action to address violence and disorder.”

Concerns about conditions at the facilities have led communities across the country to oppose new detention centers.

In Hanover County, Virginia, residents filled a local meeting last month to protest a proposed ICE detention center. Community members in Salt Lake City, Utah, have also protested a proposal to convert a warehouse to a detention facility.

Legal experts and activists alike say local pushback is essential to stopping new detention facilities. 

“We will start preparing what we can do as an organization to help fight back on these facilities,” said Delgado of ACLU NC. “But it will also require more of a community pushback.”

The Work of Resistance

Nina Sal, who lives across from the old American Hebrew Academy, said she opposes opening a detention center at the site. She pointed to the plight of long-time residents who are being swept up in immigration raids across the country.

“So many people have lived here for so long,” she said. “I don’t support this method.”

Other neighbors said they fear the potential for controversy and increased law enforcement and protest activity. They said they want to keep the area peaceful.

Former mayor Vaughan pointed to the Trump administration’s initial claim that deportations would only target violent criminals, the “worst of the worst.”

“Certainly we don’t want the ‘worst of the worst’ in the neighborhood of a growing city,” Vaughan said. “But we’re also seeing that it’s more than the ‘worst of the worst.’ Many people are getting caught up in a situation that, to me, seems unfair.”

While Greensboro was not part of the wave of ICE activity in North Carolina last fall, the city has seen its share of detentions since Trump took office.

In June, young father-to-be Marlon Ivan Mendez was arrested. In July, ICE detained Mohamed Naser, a refugee from Libya who was here legally. They held him in Georgia as state lawmakers and advocates condemned the action, and released him in August only after the Board of Immigration Appeals denied ICE’s motion to keep him in custody.

“At the heart, this is about white nationalism, white supremacy,” said Peeples, the pastor. 

Peeples, who retired in 2024, helped establish her church as a sanctuary for undocumented migrants, worked to resettle refugees, and advocated for immigrant rights. She has traveled to Stewart Detention Center to talk to detainees from North Carolina.

Seeing the conditions there firsthand was harrowing, she said.

“It’s this massive violation of human rights wrapped in barbed wire,” she said. “It’s unthinkable that we would allow that here. I think we need to be dismantling them, not building more.”

No matter what happens, Peeples said, it will be important for the community to stay engaged and support local groups.

“Continue to make calls to local, state and federal officials,” she said. “Use whatever gifts you’ve got to fight this.”

Siembra is encouraging people to continue to hold local leaders to their promises, Garcés said. “There’s clearly a lot that city council can do in terms of zoning and making sure the American Hebrew Academy is up to code,” he said. 

“Minneapolis is showing us such incredible creativity and energy for the work of resistance,” said Peeples. “Let’s be in touch with communities that have figured some things out so that if and when something happens here like this–whether it’s a detention center or another invasion of ICE–we’ll be ready to act.”

Phoebe Zerwick and Jane Cohen from Down From DC contributed to this story.