Tensions and conflicts in movement work: How we move forward in the goal of shutting down the North Lake Detention Center

(Editor’s note: Before writing this post I sought out lots of input from those involved in shutting down the North Lake Processing Center, especially people who have been involved with No Detention Centers in Michigan since 2019.)

“Solidarity is not a humanitarian gesture, it is a political intervention rooted in a material understanding of power. In the context of ICE raids, deportations, and carceral violence, to show up is not to perform rescue, but to participate in collective resistance. This is why we say we are not protesting ICE, rather we are resisting ICE.”  Movimiento Cosecha organizer Carlos Castaneda

Engaging in movement work is never easy and it often results in tensions and conflicts with people and organizations. However, I am of the belief that tensions and conflicts aren’t inherently negative. They give us the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and clarify what our movement is all about.

There has recently been increasing tension between various groups and individuals, some of which is directed at No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM). Before I get to the tension and conflict, I want to provide some history of the movement work that NDMC has been engaged in, along with providing St. Paul Principles to give my critique a principled framework for what is happening.

NDCM origins

No Detention Centers in Michigan started in 2019 as a statewide effort to address the issue of ICE detention centers in Michigan. At that time there were no formal ICE detention centers in Michigan, except for a few county jails which had contracts with ICE to either hold immigrants for a few days until they could be moved or longer stints, since ICE compensated county jails to act as de facto detention centers.

Members of the statewide coalition that became NDCM discovered that there were some proposed ICE detention centers, like the proposal to convert one of the former Ionia State Prison facilities into a detention center.

I wrote about the original proposal back in October of 2018, followed by a post about the company that was behind the proposed Ionia location, when they presented their proposal before the Ionia City Council in January of 2019.

As a response to the Ionia ICE detention proposals NDCM hosted their first public meeting in February of 2019. It is important to note that from the very beginning, NDCM was working directly with the national coalition Detention Watch Network, which was coordinating all efforts nationally to resist and shut down ICE detention centers.

Just months after pandemic hit the world, the same company that was attempting to convert one of the Ionia state prison facilities into an ICE detention center. Immigration Centers of America (ICA) was proposing to construct a new building near the Ionia State Prison. NDCM organized to oppose that ICE proposal, which I wrote about after listening to an Ionia City Council meeting. The NDCM effort paid off and that proposal from Immigration Centers of America (ICA) was defeated.

Because jails, prisons, and detention centers were essentially incubators for the COVID-19 virus to spread, there were growing concerns over people who were incarcerated. Additionally, there was a growing demand around the country to release all prisoners, since it was understood that the disregard for prison conditions was another form of state carceral violence to subject people who were incarcerated to the COVID virus.

In solidarity with prisoners, No Detention Centers in Michigan released a statement written by prisoners at the North Lake Correctional Facility. Here is part of that statement:

On Sunday, April 5th, approximately ten people incarcerated at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan launched a hunger strike in response to unsafe conditions and the mistreatment they have experienced inside the Special Housing Unit, or SHU. Their concerns include inadequate food and lack of access to medical attention. North Lake is a private immigrant-only prison operated by the GEO Group through a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

From 2020 through 2024, No Detention Centers in Michigan was engaged in significant prisoner solidarity work, building relationships with those incarcerated and learning valuable lessons about how to show up for people being detained.

I share this history because it is important to understand that NDCM has been doing meaningful solidarity work against the Prison Industrial Complex since 2019, and the coalition’s member organizations and individuals have been showing up for the impacted communities for even longer. It is in this context that some of the aforementioned tensions and conflicts began in 2025.

With the second Trump Administration taking power in 2025 and calling for mass deportation, there was naturally deep concern for how to organize and resist ICE arrests, detention, and deportation. By the time the GEO Group began steps to reopen their vacant building in Baldwin as a detention center in 2025, people were ready to protest. Naturally, NDCM began to host meetings, build solidarity, and plan a coordinated campaign with coalition members. However, several people did not want to wait for consensus before protesting, disregarding the years of organizing that NDCM had engaged in around fighting detention centers and NDCM’s years of collaboration with Detention Watch Network.

St. Paul Principles

The St. Paul Principles were developed by those who participated in the effort to shut down the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2008.  The principles are:

1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.     
2. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.    
3. Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.    
4. We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

These principles were developed primarily because there were groups that did not support the more direct action approach of preventing the convention from happening. I was a participant in those actions, and I remember how people who decided to get permits to protest and people that wanted to engage only in performative actions condemned people who fought in the streets with a wide range of tactics to stop the GOP convention from happening.

Current tensions and conflicts regarding the GEO Group owned ICE detention facility in Baldwin, Mi

NDCM held a protest at North Lake in July of 2025, but it was not without controversy. The main issue was that some people objected to protesters blocking cars from entering or exiting the main gate. Despite such tactics being used in movement work for centuries, some thought it was too aggressive, and even erroneously labeled it as “violent.” Violence is something that is done to living creatures, such as the violence that GEO Group guards and other staff at the North Lake Processing Center are inflicting upon our neighbors.

The other issue that day was that there was someone who was designated as crowd safety (not the police liaison) who spoke with the cops. When this person was confronted about this behavior, they said they knew these cops and had known them for years, so it was no big deal. This person was an older white woman who violated a fundamental tenet of movement work: only police liaisons talk to cops, but only to potentially get information and never to give information.

Shortly after the July 4 protest, NDCM and Detention Watch Network sent out a joint Press Release to underscore the urgency of shutting down ICE detention centers across the country. Part of the Press Release stated:

Communities Not Cages is amplifying local community organizing to end ICE detention while illuminating the dangers of the Trump administration’s multi-layered detention expansion plan. Campaign organizers underscore that the gravity of this moment cannot be understated, particularly after the passage of the MAGA megabill that will supercharge Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda, making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Shockingly, ICE’s budget now exceeds many militaries around the world. 

Subsequent NDCM protests have been held at the North Lake Concentration Camp, alongside other protests from a variety of groups. However, some of the other groups decided to distance themselves from what NDCM was doing, since they believed that the tactics being used to both demonstrate solidarity with people in detention and disrupt business as usual at the ICE detention center were too “aggressive.” What was even worse was that some of these groups were saying that, when protests are aggressive, the GEO Group would not allow visitation during that time or cancel visits for an entire day. These groups were blaming NDCM for the repressive tactics being used by the GEO Group. To the degree that systems of oppression use these types of counter measures means that they see the growing resistance as a threat, but the GEO Group imposed these repressive tactics against people in detention because that is what systems of repression do. It is also important to understand that this GEO Group tactic of cancelling visitation is not legal by international standards—it constitutes collective punishment, a violation of the Geneva Convention.

The tension and conflicts with the North Lake Concentration Camp have increased in recent months, specifically with work being done by Bonnie Demos and Cliff Demos. The group of people they are working with have been fundraising to put money into the commissaries of people in detention and organizing visits to people in detention. This is all well and good. A question that many of us have asked is, do these participants attend any sort of anti-oppression and anti-racism training before doing visits to make sure that they are not engaging in white saviorism? How people show up in these situations is critical, so good intentions are not enough. We must listen to affected people/communities and do what they want us to do, not what we think is best. The language barrier can exacerbate this dynamic, as many or most of the visitors in this group reportedly have little Spanish, or fluency in other first languages of people in detention.

Additionally, doing visits and putting funds into the commissaries without working towards the abolition of ICE detention centers makes such actions charity rather than Mutual Aid. Mutual Aid work that is done within movements is always part of the larger goal of ending state carceral violence and abolishing detention centers. (See Dean Spade’s important book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).

NDCM, as well as many other groups and individuals in Michigan (for example, Movimiento Cosecha, Detroit People’s Assembly/Asamblea Popular, and Raíces Migrantes), also coordinate commissary deposits, visit people in prison at North Lake, and assist people upon release. Bonnie and Cliff Demos’ group is not the first or only group to engage in this critically important material and moral support for people in detention. The question is, does a group engage in these activities from a position of solidarity and mutual aid with a solid political critique of oppression, or do they do so out of white saviorism and charity?

In a recent talk given by Cliff and Bonnie Demos to a group of white people with Indivisible Central Michigan (linked below), they criticize people who are aggressive or rude towards the GEO Group guards. Cliff Demos says the guards are just trying to feed their families. While people employed at the North Lake Concentration Camp are making money to support themselves, they are also working in a brutal system that is designed to punish immigrants and disregard their basic human rights, all so the GEO Group can expand their profits. The same argument was made about Germans working at Nazi Concentration Camps – that they were just doing their job. Make no mistake about it, the guards working at North Lake are not only complicit in the oppression of people in detention, but they also directly participate in it based upon the conditions and treatment that people in detention have reported receiving at the hands of the guards.

Another false claim made by Cliff Demos in this video is that there never was a hunger strike that took place in the North Lake Concentration Camp. This harmful claim is in fact the same thing that the GEO Group and DHS/ICE have said. NDCM has been communicating directly with numerous people in detention in North Lake over the past year and has built a relationship based in solidarity. Many people in detention have shared about the conditions in detention and began a hunger strike in April, even before the Delaney Hall hunger strike in New Jersey. NDCM supported by quickly organizing another solidarity demonstration. In fact, the group Michigan Multi-Faith Clergy Rapid Response supported the hunger strike and were inviting people to fast as a way of being in solidarity with people in detention and their demands during the hunger strike. For anyone to claim that the hunger strike did not occur is to do harm to the people in detention who organized it and all people in detention who are being subjected to these inhumane conditions.

In that same video, Cliff Demos demonizes people from Grand Rapids who were protesting at the North Lake Concentration Camp because they “were covering their faces just like ICE does.” ICE covers their faces because they don’t want to be held accountable and they don’t want to reveal their identity so they can continue to brutalize immigrants without any consequences, legal or otherwise. Grassroots autonomous groups cover their faces to make it harder for the state to ID them, because the state will come after them, with the full force of state carceral violence, for resisting ICE.

Do Cliff and Bonnie Demos not know what happened to the Prairieland defendants for organizing against ICE, where people are receiving decades long sentences for a noise demonstration, or for distributing or transporting zines? People can’t afford to be this naive and reckless in their comments about tactics simply because they don’t agree with those tactics. It does real harm and has consequences when people say that protesters “act like ICE” or are too “aggressive.” Indeed, this kind of harm is akin to cooperation with the state. When people with a whole lot of privilege dedicate themselves to tearing existing solidarity groups down without taking the time to unlearn their own biases, they end up inadvertently siding with the systems of oppression. It’s also important to mention that these same privileged people usually don’t know the history of movements fighting for collective liberation. If they took the time to listen and to learn, they’d discover that militant tactics were always used in collective liberation movements.

Bonnie and Cliff Demos also have falsely claimed that a comrade who was at a recent protest against the North Lake Concentration Camp and was hit by a car driven by one of the guards was being violent. Again, these kinds of claims are harmful, and they do damage to individuals as well as to the movement as a whole.

Moving Forward

I believe it is beneficial to include as many people as possible when doing movement work. There are a growing number of people who oppose what ICE does, many of whom support the abolition of ICE.

There are also more and more people who want to shut down ICE detention centers, especially with increased awareness of the conditions and the increased number of people that have died while in detention.

Movement work can involve all kinds of people who want to shut down the North Lake Concentration Camp. We don’t all have to do the same thing. We need people to write letters with people in detention, put money in their commissaries, and visit them if they request visits from non-family members. We need people to do more popular education work around the GEO Group and the North Lake Concentration Camp, especially with workshops, presentations and lots of online resources that are necessary to mobilize people.

However, we also need people who are willing to do the resistance work and to engage in direct action that can disrupt the GEO Group’s ability to profit from human suffering. We need to maintain a diversity of tactics so we can get closer to the goal of shutting down the ICE detention center in Baldwin, Michigan.

What we don’t need is people who criticize and demonize those who don’t make nice with systems of power and oppression, in this case the GEO Group. Even if you don’t agree with the tactics, you never publicly condemn them unless they are doing active harm to the movement and disregarding input from the affected communities as Bonnie and Cliff Demos are.

What we do need is for people with privilege, which includes me, to follow the lead of affected communities and do what they are asking of us. Those of us with privilege do not know what is best for those who are people in detention, unless we engage with them and their loved ones and communities directly. We need to cultivate a deep sense of solidarity if we want to shut down the North Lake Concentration Camp and we need to show up in ways that centers those most affected.