In January 2010, the private prison operator now known as CoreCivic announced the closure of a 752-bed facility in Walsenburg, Colorado. At the time, the Huerfano County Correctional Center was the second-largest employer in the county. Its shutdown caused a “major hit” to the economy, said John Galusha, then the county’s administrator. The town estimated a loss of $300,000 in revenue as almost 190 jobs disappeared, helping spike the county unemployment rate to 10.2 percent, above the state average. Without the contract that paid 25 cents a day per inmate into local coffers, Galusha said, “we had a hard time keeping up with the demand from social services.”
For the last 15 years, the facility has lain dormant. But that may soon change. Vested with a $45 billion immigration detention budget courtesy of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to open or expand at least 125 facilities, with the goal of scaling up to more than 107,000 beds by the end of 2025, according to the Washington Post. Under ICE’S ambitious blueprint, the 200,000-square-foot Walsenburg prison would not only be reactivated, but used to hold double the number of people it previously detained.
Trump’s ballooning of what already is the world’s largest immigration detention system has unleashed a gold rush among federal contractors eager to cash in. And nowhere are the economic incentives to take advantage greater than in struggling communities with empty prison beds.
“It’s a very hungry machine,” said Nancy Hiemstra, co-author with Deirdre Conlon of Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants. “These webs of dependency, they want to keep being fed.” For an old coal mining town like Walsenburg—with an aging population and a median household income about half that of the state—the money detention offers can seem like a matter of survival. “It’s easy pickings,” Hiemstra said. “All of a sudden, immigration detention seems to be this beacon on a hill.”
But the prospect of a privately run ICE facility has divided Walsenburg. Some locals and public officials have welcomed the potential influx of money and jobs. “It’s a godsend,” Mayor Gary Vezzani told a TV reporter in early July. “If they use it for ICE or use it for a prison or use it for whatever they use it for, we really don’t care…It’s a pretty big paying customer for us. We’re not big enough, nor [is] anybody here big enough to stop it. So, we may as well take advantage.”
The mayor’s comments sparked fierce backlash. At a July 15 county commissioners meeting, one resident succinctly shot back: “We don’t want to be known as a town with a concentration camp.” At a city council meeting the same day, a speaker argued that “what’s happening in Walsenburg isn’t just corrupt. It’s fascist. It’s a blueprint for authoritarianism wrapped in barbed wire and dressed up as local revival.”
Since February, a local group, Speak Up Southern Colorado, has been gathering weekly outside Walsenburg’s historic downtown courthouse to protest Trump’s policies. Lately, members have focused on fending off the potential deal between ICE and CoreCivic. “The day we become silent about things that matter is the day we begin to die,” organizer Dee Maes-Sandoval told me, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr. “And I am not at that day.”
During the first Trump administration, the now-66-year-old retired mortgage operations manager drove to the Southern border to volunteer at migrant camps that had formed in Mexico as a result of US policies. Now, she’s taken up the fight in her own hometown. “It’s a money-making thing,” Maes-Sandoval explained. “That’s what it’s all about: money and power.”
She’s right that big bucks are on the line. During a May earnings call, CoreCivic executives reveled in the likely profit. “This is such a significant moment,” said outgoing CEO Damon Hininger. “Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services.”
In the second quarter of 2025, about half of the company’s revenue came from federal contracts, primarily from work with ICE and the US Marshals Service. Over that period, CoreCivic brought in $176.9 million from ICE, a 17.2 percent increase over the year before. If the agency’s expansion plans are fully realized, it is estimated that CoreCivic could rake in an additional $500 million in annual revenue.
Company executives have prioritized reopening idle prisons and have identified nine with a combined capacity of more than 13,400 beds. On the investors’ call, CoreCivic boasted that ICE officials had already visited several facilities and highlighted the Huerfano County Correctional Center as “attractive” to the agency, even “top of the list.”
While CoreCivic may be enthusiastic when speaking to investors, it’s been tight-lipped around Walsenburg, leaving even local officials in the dark. Carl Young, Huerfano County’s current administrator, says he knows little other than that ICE toured the prison earlier this year. “We’re along for the ride,” he said, explaining that the county has no say in what happens with the privately owned facility. “The thing is already built,” Young said. “There’s really not much we can do one way or the other.”
CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs, Ryan Gustin, wrote that the company’s staff are “trained and held to the highest ethical standards” and referred questions about new contracts to ICE. As of late August, an agency spokesperson said no decision had been made about the Walsenburg facility, but noted that ICE “is exploring all options to meet the nation’s current and future detention requirements.”
Jason Valdez, another organizer with Speak Up Southern Colorado, said the group first caught wind something might happen in June, after CoreCivic asked officials about utility infrastructure near the facility. “People around here started putting two and two together,” he said, “because we knew that ICE was looking for new places.”
Suspicion grew when the group found a CoreCivic job listing for detention officers at $31.50 an hour in Walsenburg, contingent on the company winning an unspecified contract. Official confirmation came in July, when the ACLU of Colorado won a public records lawsuit seeking information submitted by potential contractors to ICE’s Denver field office about “possible detention facilities.” The 115 pages of heavily redacted documents that were released revealed several companies, including CoreCivic and GEO Group, offering six locations. CoreCivic’s proposal said ICE could have the Huerfano County Correctional Center’s “total capacity” and suggested it could begin “a staged ramp 120 days after contract commencement.”
“They’re not providing information to the public,” said Tim Macdonald, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado. “People have no idea what the actual plans are.” He’s especially concerned about increasing private immigration detention in the state, given complaints of dehumanizing treatment at GEO Group’s existing Aurora location. (The company said its services meet ICE’s “strict requirements.”) “It’s the wrong thing to be doing—to expand in secret and add to these deplorable conditions and spending billions of dollars to do so,” Macdonald said.
The lack of transparency is just one issue infuriating locals. On August 15, Maes-Sandoval and Valdez were among an estimated 300 protesters who turned up outside the facility and along a nearby interstate overpass. They waved signs that read “Keep ICE Out of Our Burg” and “No Concentration Camp,” as supportive honks and cheers from passing cars lifted their spirits.
Valdez has a different vision to remake the scenic town’s economy, by creating incentives for new businesses to flourish in empty storefronts, luring tourists and hikers making their way to the nearby Spanish Peaks wilderness. “Our focus should be improving the town,” he said, “not putting all of our hopes and dreams into making money off of kidnapping people who are just out there trying to earn a living for their families.”
As mayor when the Huerfano County Correctional Center shut down in 2010, Bruce Quintana tried to keep the prison open. Now, he thinks turning it over to ICE will only polarize the community without a positive long-term impact.
“I say, go somewhere else,” he told me. “Let somebody else have that kind of left and right battle. It’s not going to bring us permanent jobs. It’s a very temporary thing. Why would we want to go up, just to come back down again?”
Quintana also worries about the conditions to which detainees would be subjected. “I think that there’s a temptation there to house them in less than pristine ways,” he said. “It’s all about the almighty dollar…And if they don’t do it right, somebody’s going to either get hurt or die.”
It still remains unclear when, or if, the prison will be reactivated. Galusha, who is now Walsenburg’s interim administrator, said that as of late August, he had heard ICE was still considering the site. If it does reopen, Galusha anticipates a “natural uptick in economic activity,” estimating an annual infusion of $1 million into the city from salaries and related consumer spending.
When asked whether there was any other revenue source the town could turn to, Galusha cut to the chase: “No, nothing short term…This is really the only thing.”
