By MORGAN CHILSON
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — A Leavenworth District Court judge reaffirmed his decision to bar CoreCivic from housing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisoners at its closed facility, rejecting the private prison company’s appeal to reconsider.
Judge John Bryant on Friday issued the injunction that will be in place while the two parties fight out their disagreement in court. Bryant cited potential damages to Leavenworth if CoreCivic is allowed to skip the city’s development process.
“The Court also believes that the balance of harms in this case favors the City,” Bryant wrote. “While CoreCivic now has the ability to increase revenue that it has lacked since 2021, it also has had other remedies available to it in order to move this process further along toward a resolution.”
Those “other remedies” refer to going through the city’s development process to get a special use permit, which is what started the disagreement between the two parties. When CoreCivic announced it would reopen the facility, which closed in 2021, as the Midwest Regional Reception Center, the city in March demanded the company apply for the permit.
In court documents, attorneys for Leavenworth said the company needed a special use permit and indicated the city wanted to address problems with the prison management. One judge had called the former prison a “hell hole,” and the city cited numerous instances of CoreCivic prison officials refusing to cooperate with local law enforcement.
CoreCivic pushed back against the need for a special use permit in a new petition filed July 7, saying the city didn’t follow its own development process and maintaining its argument that a special use permit is unnecessary because the company previously operated the site as a prison.
The petition said CoreCivic anticipates about $50 million in annual revenue from its ICE contract to house “1,000 nondetained noncitizens” and laid out the benefits to the community from an annual payroll of $30 million, plus $10 million for local spending by the plant.
“Regarding last week’s hearing and any other court documents that have been filed, we do not have any updates to share beyond the fact that we are pursuing all avenues to find a successful conclusion to this matter,” said CoreCivic spokesman Brian Todd in an email. “We maintain the position that our facility, which we’ve operated for almost 30 years, does not require a Special Use Permit to care for detainees in partnership with ICE.”
A hearing has not been scheduled for CoreCivic’s latest petition.