EXCLUSIVE — Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell has come out in strong support of the Trump administration’s decision to open a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in the blue state.
ICE awarded CoreCivic a major contract to repurpose its shuttered facility in Appleton, Minnesota, known as the Prairie Correctional Facility, and reopen it by the end of the year.
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The detention expansion gives ICE a major hub in the Midwest to detain up to 1,600 illegal immigrants as they are arrested and held pending deportation proceedings in court.
“One hundred percent it’s a good thing,” Lindell said in a phone call with the Washington Examiner Wednesday. “We have 1,400 illegals in our prisons that have committed the most atrocious crimes ever, and we house them for, it costs us $110 million a year to Minnesota taxpayers.”
“Cooperating with ICE is what has to be done in Minnesota … but there’s a way to do it with … the detention center, but get these criminals that are in our prisons.”
CoreCivic will take over the property on Aug. 11 and received a five-year contract to run the facility, which has been dormant since 2010. The company first bought this site in 1997 as a state prison, but shut down the site in 2010.
The company told stakeholders it expects to generate $75 million per year once the facility is up and running.
“We expect to begin receiving detainees in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the full ramp estimated to be complete in the second quarter of 2027,” CoreCivic said in a press release.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) did not respond to a request for comment, but posted a statement online from the state’s Department of Corrections commissioner, Paul Schnell.
“Minnesota outlawed the use of private prisons for people serving state prison sentences because public safety is a core government responsibility,” Schnell wrote in an op-ed. “CoreCivic, the owner of the Appleton prison, is not a public safety agency like the DOC or your local sheriff’s office. CoreCivic is a publicly traded corporation whose profits depend on keeping beds filled.”
Minnesota has been a challenging environment for federal immigration authorities to conduct immigration enforcement. ICE and other federal police moved in to Minneapolis-St. Paul last December for a two-month operation going after the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants residing in the state.
Activists sought to defend their communities from ICE and frequently engaged in stand-offs with law enforcement. Two U.S. citizen activists were fatally shot by federal police in separate incidents that occurred in Minneapolis in January.
White House border czar Tom Homan was sent to Minneapolis at the end of January to meet with elected Democratic leaders in the state to restore order. Homan said county sheriffs agreed to turn over illegal immigrants in county jails and state prisons to ICE rather than release them onto the street, making it easier for ICE to get custody of wanted individuals without having to go into communities as often.
Schnell denied Lindell and the Trump administration’s allegations that the state was harboring nearly 1,400 “dangerous illegal aliens,” and said it had transferred incarcerated illegal immigrants directly to ICE, rather than releasing them onto the street.
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Illegal immigrants arrested by ICE either on the street or in a jail setting are transferred to one of dozens of detention centers or county jails that cooperate with ICE, where they are held until they can appear before an immigration judge, who will decide if the individual will be deported or released.
Homan stated during an interview with the Washington Examiner in May that deportations were just getting started and said they would continue to rise as more ICE officers were hired, and detention space and air travel accommodations were expanded.
