Private prison company CoreCivic has offered the city of Appleton more than $1 million and Swift County more than $500,000 per year to cover tax revenue they would lose following the sale of the shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility.
The draft agreements come as CoreCivic moves ahead with plans to reopen the facility to house detainees under a five-year contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
CoreCivic sold the 1,600-bed prison to the Department of Homeland Security in August, removing it from the local tax rolls. The company will run day-to-day operations at the new detention facility under its contract with DHS.
City officials said the draft memorandum of agreement, which is not binding, could help recoup some of the $800,000 in property taxes CoreCivic paid last year — money that went to the city, Swift County and the Lac qui Parle Valley School district.
The city’s draft agreement with CoreCivic would pay the city $1.5 million in 2026 and $1.26 million in subsequent years. Swift County’s draft agreement would pay the county $200,000 in 2026 and $540,000 in subsequent years.
“When I first looked at it, I thought it’s going to save us because otherwise we were in huge trouble,” Appleton Council Member Allan Oyen said of the city’s draft agreement.
CoreCivic has already begun hiring staff for the facility, which is expected to provide 525 jobs. The first detainees could arrive by November, Appleton Police Chief Sedrick Borsgard said.
At a standing-room-only roundtable at the Appleton VFW on Aug. 20, residents raised questions about lost property tax revenue, the cost of providing local services, and the tradeoff between an influx of jobs and potential backlash to opening an ICE facility.
“I worry what’s going to happen to families being ripped apart, and then hearts that are already hard are going to continue to be hardened,” said Megan Stein, one of the attendees. “I think there’s a soul to communities, and I think over time it’s going to deteriorate the soul even further.”
Sen. Torrey Westrom, R-Alexandria, co-hosted the roundtable. In a recent social media post, he touted the “hundreds of new jobs” the ICE facility would bring and the “optimism” that is creating for the community.
The new ICE facility is three hours west of the Twin Cities. Once fully operational, it will more than double Appleton’s current population.
An economic boost, or drag?
CoreCivic sent Appleton city officials a draft memorandum of understanding Aug. 24, said Olinger, the city administrator. It details how the company will pay $1.5 million between August to September this year, and will continue to pay a monthly payment of $105,000 starting January 2027 with no end date.
The city and county MOUs state that CoreCivic has authority to terminate or suspend the payments “for any reason” and provide a 30-day written notice. City officials say they’re seeking an amendment to extend the 30-day notice to six months. If CoreCivic denies the amendment, the City Council will discuss the MOU again on Sept. 9.
“Certainly there are some things we would like to see a different timetable for,” Oyen said, referring to the 30-day notice. “But we have to be a little [accepting] of what they’re offering because they also don’t need to give us anything.”
When CoreCivic owned the shuttered prison, Oyen said CoreCivic paid more than a third of the city’s property tax revenue.
“All we can do is hope that they continue assisting us because when you lose 30 plus percent of your yearly budget, what can you do? If that money is gone, what do you do?” he said. “We can’t tack that amount onto our local residents. There’s no way that they could handle that increase, everybody would leave town.”
Olinger said the city plans to use the money from CoreCivic to ramp up its services to accommodate the detention facility, but they also want to make sure it helps residents in the future.
“This money is intended to deliver services, but it’s also intended to provide long-term investment in the city,” he told Sahan Journal. The city is looking into possible options, such as investing in housing development that may replace a loss in market value or buying capital equipment.
Swift County commissioners will need to discuss the CoreCivic draft agreement and then take action at a board meeting, county Administrator Tesa Tomaschett said in an email.
The agreements with CoreCivic include public works, policing and fire services, but do not include the Lac qui Parle Valley School district.
CoreCivic paid more than $100,000 this year to the local school district, according to property tax records. A fifth of all students in the school district identified as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and about 8% identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2026, according to the Minnesota State Report Card, a state-run database.
Corinna Erickson, superintendent of the Lac qui Parle Valley Schools, which includes Appleton, declined multiple requests for comment.
“They [school district] don’t deliver any direct services to CoreCivic whereas the city and the county would deliver direct services to CoreCivic,” Olinger told Sahan Journal. “So the school district, yes, will lose out on tax dollars.”
Stein said she sensed that most of the Appleton residents at the Aug. 20 roundtable meeting have mixed feelings about the detention center, but leaned more towards supporting it.
“For the most part, they just want economic opportunities,” she told Sahan Journal. “Instead of providing that, [ICE officials] are dangling a five-year contract in front of these folks saying, ‘This is going to bring you economic opportunity, but at the expense of all of your neighbors.’”
Before reviewing the county’s draft agreement, Swift County Commissioner Gary Hendrickx told Sahan Journal on Aug. 26 that he’s already seen several local residents hired to work at the detention center.
Posted jobs range from detention officers to case processing specialists, registered nurse and administrative positions. Detention officers can get a $3,000 signing bonus, according to the company’s job posting and have a starting salary of $32.50 per hour, or $67,600 a year.
Between 2020 to 2024, the median household income was $43,958 in the city of Appleton, according to Minnesota Compass, a demographic project led by Wilder Research.
“Overall, I’m hearing things — people who are looking at selling a house have reconsidered what they’re going to be asking, and I understand that if I had a house to sell, at this point in time, I would also feel it has a little more value than it did three months ago,” Hendrickx said.
Questions of oversight
ICE has held detainees on a short-term basis at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling and at several Minnesota county jails.
But the large-scale detention facility in Appleton would be the first of its kind in Minnesota. Following the announcement of CoreCivic’s sale of the facility to ICE, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota raised questions about oversight of the facility.
John Boehler, policy counsel at the Minnesota ACLU, said federal control can remove local oversight, a strategy the company has used in other states.
The company sold two California facilities, the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the California City Detention Facility in California, to DHS in early July. The company will continue to manage both facilities under a contract with ICE.
“As soon as the state [California] indicated a desire to go in and conduct those inspections, the federal government simply repurchased the facility to cut off that access, and then allow[ed] CoreCivic to continue running them,” Boehler said.
At least 26 people have died nationally in ICE custody as of Sept. 1 this year, according to the National Immigration Project. Congressional members have been given only limited access to the Whipple Building in several attempted visits this year.
Federal oversight has also been curtailed since the beginning of the second Trump administration, said Eric O’Denius, a former deportation officer.
“There was a division called the Office of Detention Oversight and another part of the Department of Justice called the [Office] Civil Rights Civil Liberties division — and both of them have been gutted by the new administration,” he told Sahan Journal.
The Appleton detention center will be monitored on a daily basis by ICE officials, CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin said in an email. Gustin declined multiple requests for an interview.
Who will be held at the facility?
The facility will house only adult men and women, Gustin said in an emailed statement. When the detention center is fully operational, CoreCivic plans to have 1,600 beds to hold detainees.
Since ICE’s main office and immigration court is housed at the Whipple Building, O’Denius said detainees will still be transported and held there for processing or to appear in front of an immigration judge.
ICE has the authority to decide which detainees to house at the Appleton immigration detention center, but immigration experts say they’ll most likely bring detainees arrested in Minnesota or nearby states.
“Bringing this facility online, adding another 1,600 beds is really taking Minnesota’s current detention capacity and multiplying it by a factor of seven or eight,” Boehler said.
