Take action to end ICE Detention at Miami Correctional Facility
On Sunday, August 30, Indivisible Evansville co-sponsored one of 63 events across Indiana for the Weekend of Public Witness to ask the State of Indiana to end ICE detention for-profit at the state-run Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana. The statewide events were coordinated by the Indiana Organizing Project and the local event was hosted by River City Rising, which meets each Sunday on MLK near Main Street.
At the event, we sold our “We Stand with Immigrant Families” yard signs and collected postcards to mail to Governor Mike Braun, asking him to end ICE detention at the facility.
Indiana has a two-year contract with ICE at Miami. It started in October 2025 and goes through September 2027 to house up to 1,000 male detainees. The state is profiting off of their confinement. ICE pays the state of Indiana $291.24 per detainee each day - nearly four times higher than the $75 daily cost of housing a regular state inmate.
Men housed at Miami have reported lack of access to life-saving medications and healthcare, tampering with their food - which is lower quality than food served to the regular prison population - and dangerous conditions in which prisoners are able to access weapons. Two detainees have died at Miami this year.
The prison does meet the definition of a concentration camp in terms of how it is housing people abducted by ICE: The government is confining people without trial, based on their identity or legal status, rather than individual criminal convictions. That is important to emphasize - in many cases, these are people who have committed no crimes, and who were on a legal path to citizenship.
We are a nation built by colonizers, immigrants, and enslaved peoples. Unless your ancestors are indigenous people who survived colonization, or were brought here abducted and enslaved, your story is rooted in the history of colonizers who seized the land or immigrants who arrived later.
The very name of this prison - Miami - is for the Miami Nation of Indiana, a state-recognized tribe whose stolen lands are occupied by the prison. Their current headquarters is in Peru, Indiana - eight miles north of the prison. In many ways what we are seeing today is the ongoing story of white supremacy which is American history - especially in Indiana with its history with the KKK.
But we have hope because even in Indiana, one of the states most complicit in the Trump administration’s inhumane immigration crackdown, 27 actions took place on Sunday, and over the weekend there were more than five dozen, from Evansville to South Bend and everywhere in between.
Even in Indiana, there are so many of us who want to be a better country.
And with that hope in mind, here are some concrete actions you can take to end ICE detention at Miami and support immigrant families:
Email Lloyd Arnold, the Commissioner of the Indiana Department of Correction and the architect of ICE detention at Miami. He secured $16 million in state funding - our tax dollars - to reopen a closed wing at the prison for immigration detention. You can email him at larnold@idoc.in.gov and tell him that you want him to end ICE detention at Miami Correctional Facility.
Volunteer with Indiana AID, a support group for people detained by ICE. They also have a newsletter you can subscribe to and stay informed about what is happening at Miami Correctional Facility and the Clay County Jail, which also houses people detained by ICE long-term.
You can support local immigration organizations like the Immigrant Welcome and Resource Center, the Haitian Center, and EDUCA.
You can buy one of our yard signs, or you can download and hang a free sign in your business, church or public space - or ask a businesses to hang the sign.
Collective action is powerful. It is what defines our democracy, and it works. We can make change, we can force our country to be who we claim to be - who we want to be - the idealized America we grew up believing in - and we can shut Miami down.
Let’s do it together.