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Meet a Baldwin resident who visits ICE detention every week
For the nearly 1,500 immigration detainees at North Lake Processing Center, the large ICE detention facility in Baldwin in northern Michigan, visitation hours are limited.
Each detainee gets two hours a week. And many are being held hundreds of miles from friends and family.
Over the past few months, Julie Cordier has been visiting them.
She keeps a binder filled with notes on the people she’s visited and when. She estimates she’s met between 15 and 20 detainees, none of whom she knew before, who were brought to her corner of Michigan after being detained all across the U.S.
She says the cabin she shares with her husband at the end of along, winding dirt road is “kind of our happy place, out in the middle of the woods on a two track, nobody around.”
Except, it happens to be less than 10 miles from the private prison facility, owned by GEO Group, that’s been operating as a immigration detention center since last summer.
The first time she visited was with her pastor at the Covenant Community United Methodist Church in Baldwin.
They got the idea from a retired pastor in Grand Rapids, who has been driving people out to North Lake to visit detainees ever since a member of his church was detained.
“We knew that there were all these strict rules,” she said. “Your shirt isn’t supposed to have any pockets. You can’t wear an underwire bra because of the metal. They are literally for people who come a long way to see their family members, and if you’re wearing an underwire bra, you’re not going in.
“They’ll give you a pair of scissors. They send you out to the little waiting area, and women wiggle out of their bra and cut out the underwire.”
To get in, she just needs someone’s name and what’s called their “Alien Number” — which is how they’re identified by the government. She calls it an “A” number. She doesn’t like the word “alien.”
The detainee she first met puts her in touch with others.
“He’ll say, this person, here’s a name, a number, he really needs a visit. He’s really struggling. He’s losing hope and could really use a visit.”
Now, Cordier goes most weeks that she can, sometimes multiple times a week. She has been to North Lake so many times that she catches up with the staff at the facility about their weekends, their families, and how they’re doing.
The other day, when she called to ask about visitation hours, the person on the other end of the line at North Lake recognized her voice.
“The gal who answered the phone,” she said, “was like, is this, Julie? I’m like, it is.”
She has helped family members of detainees get their cars back after they were impounded, given advice to people who’ve lost their apartments, and deposited money into commissary accounts on behalf of detainee’s family members who couldn’t do it in person.
If people in detention don’t have family or friends who can come, the only connection they have to the outside world is through visitors like herself.
“You actually feel like, oh my gosh, this is probably one of the very most important things I’ve ever done in my life,” Cordier said.
Baldwin is a very conservative part of Michigan. 65% of Lake County voted for President Donald Trump.
When the facility re-opened back in June, lots of people here were excited about the jobs and traffic coming to this area, where there are very few opportunities for well-paying work.
Cordier is part of a network of people across West and northwest Michigan paying visits to North Lake. It’s called Hope for Neighbors.
But not all of her neighbors want to come with her to support detainees.
“Honestly, not everybody in our church is wanting to get involved with it,” Cordier said. “I think a lot of people have preconceived ideas about the migrant population… and if you don’t take the time to actually get to know the immigrant population, I guess you just believe what you’re told, right?”
She pointed to data from ICE, about 1,200 out of the nearly 1,500 people detained at North Lake have no criminal record.
When people at her church ask her why she continues to go, Julie says it’s simple to explain.
“It’s very easy to just hearken back to the things that Jesus said and say, ‘Hey, I’m welcoming the refugee. I’m loving my neighbor.'”
This story was originally published by Interlochen Public Radio.
The post Meet a Baldwin resident who visits ICE detention every week appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.
