Some years back, Chris Cleave's Little Bee hit the bestseller list. Little Bee is 16, a Nigerian girl who has spent two years in a cinder block detention center in Essex, England. Her life is ordered by the regime of the center, and her entire future is on pause. She has no idea what the future holds, except that she wants to find a British woman whom she met on a beach one fateful day years earlier. She and the woman share the memory of surviving the brutality of a local militia. The militia destroyed Little Bee's village, murdered her sister, and took one of the woman's fingers in exchange for her life.
The story echoes that of another bestseller, one inspired by a true story set in Australia. In Stateless (Netflix), a German woman, Cornelia Rau, is detained by Australia's border control and disappears into a desert detention camp, lost in the immigration detention system indefinitely, never charged with a crime and unable to fight for her own release.
Last fall, the LWVMC wrote about Irish father Noel Ball, twice detained in the U.S., once on the eve of his wedding and again ten years later. In his first detention, ICE moved him to seven different centers while his fiancée, Diana, sought to locate and free him. He'd committed no crime and had followed the procedures for his visa paperwork. Twelve years later, ICE detained Noel again, this time for almost two years before deporting him to London. The future is uncertain for his family.
American citizens are divided about immigration in the country. A climb in immigration in recent years has spiked concerns. The Migration Policy Institute reports that: "In 2023, the State Department issued 10.4 million temporary visas for tourists, international students, and others, up from 8.7 million in FY 2019. Inside the United States, the 969,000 immigrants who became citizens in 2022, after spending years as lawful permanent residents (green-card holders like Noel Ball), represented the largest naturalization total since FY 2008."
While some Americans support removing immigrants with a legal conviction and setting stricter visa issuance, others want immigration to be zero. Some want to provide legal pathways for immigrants studying, working and contributing to the economy here. Our system is complex, and there are many statuses for immigrants: people naturalized through marriage, adoption, or years of legal residency; student or H1-B working immigrants; asylum seekers; refugees; and those on temporary protective status.
The confusion opens a door to differences that we could be working out in civil discussion[SG1] . Some citizens perceive a heightened threat from immigrants. Either "they're taking our jobs or housing," or they're leeching our social safety net and school dollars, or they're criminals. Others have immigrants in their families, adopted kids, married in-laws or spouses, or they have church members, neighbors, and friends. That personal connection drives them to take action to care for those they know and love.
With emotions at a pitch, the distance between groups feels intractable, especially as more and more people—73.6% of whom have no criminal record, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse—[SG2] are being locked up in a growing system of detention centers fueled by federal dollars.
In January, Indiana AID's Robin Valenzuela and Whitney Guthrie presented on the current situation to Montgomery County residents, sharing about the rapid, costly expansion of detention across the region and state.
Not long ago, there was effectively one long-term ICE detention site in the state: Clay County Jail in Brazil, which typically held 50–60 people for ICE at a time. Since a major DHS-funded expansion that increased ICE bed space by roughly 170 percent, Clay now regularly holds well over 200 detainees and has, at times, exceeded 300, making it the largest ICE detention site in the Midwest. On top of Clay, Marion County Jail in Indianapolis revived its federal contract and began holding ICE detainees in 2025, initially "a few dozen" people but with dedicated housing units for up to 128 beds. Then came the game-changer: a DHS agreement to hold up to 1,000 people in ICE custody at Miami Correctional Facility north of Indianapolis, with a per-detainee payment nearly four times higher than what Clay County receives.
What was once a single county jail contracting with ICE has become a regional detention infrastructure stretching across Indiana and feeding the wider Great Lakes enforcement corridor. Clay, Marion, Miami, and additional county jails such as Clinton and Clark now move people back and forth in a dizzying circuit that is invisible to most Hoosiers but all too real for the families trying to figure out which state their loved one is in this week.
Indiana AID's volunteers report on dire conditions. At Clay County Jail, detainees sleep in overcrowded units; when the contracted beds fill, "boat beds"—thin plastic shells on the floor—are pulled out to pack more bodies into the space. Food is inadequate, both in quality and quantity, forcing people to buy basics from the jail commissary run by the same private contractor that provides the meals, removing any incentive to improve them. The federal government pays the for-profit company that runs Clay County $85/day per person, along with $27/hour for each guard and transportation fees. Detainees are frequently transferred without warning.
Detainees must purchase more food to meet their daily caloric needs and towels, undergarments, shampoo, soap, and toiletries from the commissary. Commissary prices are heavily marked up—some items more than five times local retail. For instance, a 3-ounce packet of chicken breast costs $5.34. The same brand at Walmart costs $2.60 for 7 ounces.
There is no outdoor recreation, limited access to health care and medication, no mental health counseling, and widespread use of solitary confinement and collective punishment (for example, taking away tablets or television for the entire unit when a few people complain). Books and mail have been withheld.
At Marion County Jail, Indiana AID volunteers note that ICE detainees are housed in separate units, often woken for breakfast at 3:30 a.m., and excluded from the programming available to county inmates, despite the county receiving a daily fee of $75/person.
Miami Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison now being used for civil immigration detention, is even less transparent. Advocates estimate that roughly 800 people are currently held there, many transferred from Clay, Marion or further away, at a rate of around $291 per detainee per day.
Through all of this, the basic legal fact remains: immigration status is a civil matter, not a crime. Yet people with no criminal convictions are locked up for months or years in county jails and state prisons across our region.
Many detainees were originally present legally in the United States—they entered with visas, held Temporary Protected Status, or had pending asylum claims—and later found themselves detained after a loss or challenge to that status, sometimes because protections like TPS were narrowed or because they overstayed a visa in a system that offers few realistic paths to adjust their status. They're being detained when they report to maintain their legal status, as they are required to do, or they get caught up in sweeps through businesses and neighborhoods.
Local citizens who see the need are volunteering to document when a person is taken, to try to obtain names of those being picked up by ICE or to prevent residents who are constitutionally protected by due process from having their rights violated.
These actions have a constitutional and moral basis. Now, what we need is a larger civic discussion about resolving the system's problems and our philosophy on immigration: how many can we welcome, how are they contributing, and what is the tipping point for straining our systems? Next week we'll answer five questions people ask about immigration.