GOSHEN, INDIANA: The sermon had been preached, the last prayers offered. Now, Mike Yoder decided, the time had come to share unsettling news.
As congregants at Silverwood Mennonite Church chatted around a Sunday potluck spread, Yoder, a county commissioner for 13 years and a dairy farmer for much longer, huddled with Pastor Jeremy Shue at the edge of the hall. There was a very good chance, Yoder confided, that the nation’s newest immigration detention center would soon rise from a soybean field north of town.
“One of the only positives is that it would be less of a drive to protest,” Shue said.
Yoder needed no reminder of the potential for conflict. The Republican had paid close attention when nearly two-thirds of Elkhart County’s voters backed Donald Trump for president after a campaign in which he lambasted immigrants. He knew just as well that the politically mixed county seat and the largest local employers had made a place for thousands of immigrants from Mexico – a significant, but uncertain, number of them in the U.S. illegally.
It was a balancing act in this part of northern Indiana, founded on sometimes conflicting views about business and faith, community and law. And the proposal for a 1,200-bed detention center put decision-makers on the tightrope.
“It was like a microcosm of all the different issues of immigration,” Yoder said, “right here in this county.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has long sought to consolidate immigrants held in scattered Midwest jails. Since 2011, contractors have proposed detention centers in seven communities near Chicago, from the exurb of Crete, Illinois, to the steel center of Gary, Indiana.
“This is a game of whack-a-mole,” said Fred Tsao of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who has worked with activists to push a number of those proposals to defeat.
Local governments in Texas and California recently canceled agreements to hold detainees for ICE even as other communities seek the jobs and dollars that doing so can generate.
But demand for those facilities is rising. Though Trump talks up building a border wall, his administration has focused a large part of its policy on arrests away from the border and is seeking new detention sites.
ICE does not own most of these facilities. Instead, it hires companies whose for-profit lockups hold two-thirds of the immigrants detained for being in the country illegally, with others in local jails under contract. The agency spends about $134 a day to hold each detainee, government figures show.
Last fall, ICE put out a request for new detention sites near Chicago, Detroit, Salt Lake City, and St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as in South Texas, as it sought to expand capacity from 40,000 migrants to 51,000.
A proposal by CoreCivic Inc., one of the nation’s largest private prison companies, put Elkhart County on that list.
The county, two hours east of Chicago, is the hub of the booming recreational vehicle industry with around 2 percent unemployment. A large Amish population has long provided many factory workers, but with 9,000 openings, “we have a lot of jobs that nobody wants,” said Yoder, whose father once led RV manufacturer Jayco Inc.
Immigrants have filled much of the gap in the workforce, yet residents remain divided on issues including immigration. More than 7,000 packed an Elkhart school gym in May to cheer Trump. But the county seat of Goshen _ dotted with multilingual yard signs proclaiming “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” – is a counterweight, home to a Mennonite college and large Latino population.
The proposal for a detention center would jab at those complexities. Yoder jumped in first, trying for a dialogue instead of a dispute.
“Commissioners had a mess to deal with, and that’s the reason I reached out early,” Yoder said. “It didn’t go as planned. Maybe that was because I was naive.”
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