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    Not just Alcatraz: the notorious US prisons Trump is already reopening

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    Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz, the infamous prison shuttered more than 60 years ago, sparked global headlines over the weekend. But it isn’t the only notorious closed-down jail or prison the administration has sought to repurpose for mass detentions.The US government has in recent months pushed to reopen at least five other shuttered detention facilities and prisons, some closed amid concerns over safety and mistreatment of detainees. While California lawmakers swiftly dismissed the Alcatraz announcement as “not serious” and a distraction, the Trump administration’s efforts to reopen other scandal-plagued facilities are well under way or already complete, in partnership with for-profit prison corporations.The shuttered prisons are being revived for immigration detainees, unlike the US president’s purported plan for Alcatraz, which he claimed on social media would imprison “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders”.US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has sought to reopen the California city correctional facility, a state prison in the southern California desert region that closed last year, according to government contract records. The facility is owned by CoreCivic, a longtime Ice detention partner, and previously housed more than 2,000 people.California Democrats have also warned that Ice was interested in reopening Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a US prison shuttered last year amid scandals surrounding systemic sexual abuse by staff, and concerns about mold and asbestos. The correctional officers’ union has reported that staff were recently forced to do maintenance work at Dublin in hazardous conditions, seemingly to prepare for a reopening, but Ice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), which runs Dublin, have not commented on plans.Communities in California, the country’s most populous state and home to nearly a quarter of immigrants in the US, have long opposed Ice detention centers, and there are currently no Ice jails in the state north of Bakersfield in the Central Valley, said Susan Beaty, senior attorney for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.View image in fullscreen“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.“They are following the pattern of the president … who believes that he can just do what he wants to do and obscure the laws,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Monday.Christopher Ferreira, a Geo Group spokesperson, said in an email that the firm had a “valid certificate of occupancy” and complied with health and safety requirements. The mayor’s opposition was “another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government”, he added.In a December 2024 earnings call, Geo Group said it was in “active discussions” with Ice and the US Marshals Service about their interest in six of its facilities that were idle.In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic is working to reopen an immigration detention center closed in 2021 under Joe Biden. The proposal for the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC) has sparked backlash from the city of Leavenworth, which sued CoreCivic in March, alleging the company has not followed the proper permitting protocols.View image in fullscreenIn 2021, the ACLU alleged that the Leavenworth facility was beset by problems, including frequent stabbings, suicides and contraband, and that “basic human needs [were] not being met”, with food restricted, contact with counsel and family denied or curtailed, limited medical care and infrequent showers. A federal judge called the facility a “hellhole”.Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the company’s decades of operations in Leavenworth in an email on Monday, saying understaffing amid the pandemic “was the main contributor to the challenges” and “the issues were concentrated in about an 18-month period”: “We’re grateful for a more stable labor market post-pandemic, and we’ve had a positive response with nearly 1,400 [applicants] expressing interest in one of the 300 positions the facility will create.“At any of our facilities, including MRRC, we don’t cut corners on care, staff or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards,” he said. He also pointed to a recent op-ed by the warden, who argued the facility “is and always has been properly zoned”.CoreCivic also reopened a family detention center in Texas last month.The use of shuttered prisons is just one way Ice is expanding detention for Trump’s mass deportations. He has also moved immigration detainees into BoP facilities currently housing criminal defendants, causing concerns about poor conditions, rights violations and a lack of basic resources as staff manage multiple populations under one roof. Trump has also pushed to expand local jail contracts and use military bases for Ice.Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which has obtained public records on Ice’s expanding detention, said Ice was ignoring safety concerns in previously shuttered facilities.“This is a continuing pattern of the Trump administration’s willingness to knowingly place immigrants in detention facilities already well-known for having dangerous conditions,” she said. “They’re putting people in facilities where the conditions are so dire … that people simply give up their valid claims of relief to stay in the United States.”There is growing local backlash to these facilities, Cho added: “When people realize what is happening in these facilities, it’s not something they want to see up close. People are becoming very aware that billions of dollars are being spent to enrich private prison companies to hold people in abysmal conditions … including their neighbors, co-workers and friends.”Ice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, did not answer questions about the reported reopening of Dublin for Ice. William K Marshall III, BoP director, said in a statement that the bureau would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the president’s agenda” and had ordered an “immediate assessment” to determine “our needs and the next steps” for Alcatraz: “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice.”Corene Kendrick, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director, dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz statement as a “stunt”, noting that the prison’s cellblock has no running water or sewage and limited electricity.“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” she said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.” More

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      Trump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristone

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      Donald Trump’s administration on Monday pushed forward in defending US rules easing access to the abortion drug mifepristone from a legal challenge that began during Democratic former president Joe Biden’s administration.The US Department of Justice in a brief filed in Texas federal court urged a judge to dismiss the lawsuit by three Republican-led states on procedural grounds.While the filing does not discuss the merits of the states’ case, it suggests the Trump administration is in no rush to drop the government’s defense of mifepristone, used in more than 60% of US abortions.Missouri, Kansas and Idaho claim the US Food and Drug Administration acted improperly when it eased restrictions on mifepristone, including by allowing it to be prescribed by telemedicine and dispensed by mail.The justice department and the office of Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump said while campaigning last year that he did not plan to ban or restrict access to mifepristone. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, told Fox News in February that Trump has asked for a study on the safety of abortion pills and has not made a decision on whether to tighten restrictions on them.Last year, the US supreme court rejected a bid by anti-abortion groups and doctors to restrict access to the drug, finding that they lacked legal standing to challenge the FDA regulations.Those plaintiffs dropped their case after the high court ruling, but US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, allowed the states to intervene and continue to pursue the lawsuit.The US justice department moved to dismiss their claims days before Trump took office in January.In Monday’s filing, government lawyers repeated their arguments that Texas is not the proper venue for the lawsuit and that the states lack standing to sue because they are not being harmed by the challenged regulations.“Regardless of the merits of the States’ claims, the States cannot proceed in this Court,” they wrote.The three states are challenging FDA actions that loosened restrictions on the drug in 2016 and 2021, including allowing for medication abortions at up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven, and for mail delivery of the drug without first seeing a clinician in person. The original plaintiffs initially had sought to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, but that aspect was rebuffed by a lower court.The Republican-led states have argued they have standing to sue because their Medicaid health insurance programs will likely have to pay to treat patients who have suffered complications from using mifepristone.They have also said they should be allowed to remain in Texas even without the original plaintiffs because it would be inefficient to send the case to another court after two years of litigation. More

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      Kansas Voters Will Decide Whether to Hold Open Elections for State Supreme Court

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      A question on the ballot next year will ask voters to amend the Constitution to set open elections. Republicans said it would empower Kansans, while Democrats argued it would politicize the judiciary.The Kansas Supreme Court, made up mostly of jurists appointed by Democrats, has long served as a check on the Republican-dominated Legislature.The justices have established a statewide right to abortion. They have told Republican leaders that they were not spending enough on schools. And they have weathered repeated attempts to tip the court’s balance of power toward conservatives.But the high court, which is officially nonpartisan, could soon face major changes. Lawmakers decided on Wednesday to place a question on the primary ballot in August 2026 that would ask voters to amend the Kansas Constitution to set open elections for the court. If voters approve the change, justices would become free to campaign and hold leadership positions in political parties.The move, which follows efforts in other states to elect justices, would give Kansas Republicans a clearer path toward a conservative majority on the court and the possibility of revisiting issues like abortion. Conservative lawmakers said making the change would return power to voters.“It comes down to one thing: Do you trust the people of Kansas to select the seven people who run the third branch of our government and who have an enormous say over our government and how it’s run?” asked State Representative Bob Lewis, a Republican from western Kansas who supported placing the amendment on the ballot.Democrats criticized the effort to hold open elections, saying it would empower wealthy campaign donors and politicize the judiciary. They pointed to polarizing elections in places like North Carolina, where the results of a 2024 State Supreme Court election are still being disputed, and Wisconsin, where tens of millions of dollars have been spent ahead of a State Supreme Court election next month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Scenes From Eight States Battered by Weekend Storms

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      A cross-country storm system tore through the South and the Midwest over the weekend, accompanied by tornadoes, dust storms and wildfires. Severe damage was reported in at least eight states.Number of reported deaths from storms and firesOfficials reported at least 40 deaths across seven states that have been attributed to severe weather in the South and Midwest. More

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      Tribes and Students Sue Trump Administration Over Firings at Native Schools

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      A group of Native American tribes and students is suing the Trump administration to reverse its recent firing of federal workers at Native schools that they said has severely lowered their quality of education.The firings, part of the series of layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency that have cut thousands of federal jobs since January, included nearly one quarter of the staff members at the only two federally run colleges for Native people in the country: Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque.Instructors, a basketball coach, and security and maintenance workers were among those who were fired or forced to resign in February. Although the total number of layoffs was not clear on Sunday, the reductions also included employees at the central and regional offices of the Bureau of Indian Education, a federal agency. Some staff members, but not all, have been rehired, according to a statement from the Native American Rights Fund, which filed the suit on Friday in federal court in Washington. About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states.As a result of the cuts, dozens of courses at the two colleges lost instructors, according to the lawsuit. And because of the loss of support staff and maintenance workers, school dorms were quickly overrun with garbage, students reported undrinkable brown water, dining halls failed to adequately feed students, and widespread power outages hampered students’ ability to study.“Unfortunately, these firings were done without preparation and without regard to the health and safety of the students, and that is a continuation of a history of neglect and disrespect,” Jacqueline De León, a lawyer for the tribes and students, said. “We are here to fight to make sure that it doesn’t continue.”Lawyers with the Native American Rights Fund filed the suit against the heads of the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Education Programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chiefs owner backs Harrison Butker’s political push for ‘traditional values’

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      The owner of the Kansas City Chiefs said on Wednesday that he has no issue with kicker Harrison Butker forming a political action committee designed to encourage Christians to vote for what the Pac describes as “traditional values”.Butker announced his Upright Pac last weekend in a series of posts on social media.“One of the things I talk to the players every year about at training camp is using their platform to make a difference,” Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said. “We have players on both sides of the political spectrum, both sides of whatever controversial issue you want to bring up. I’m not at all concerned when our players use their platform to make a difference.”Butker is front and center on the website of the Upright Pac along with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, who earned the kicker’s endorsement in his re-election bid against Democrat Lucas Kunce.“We’re seeing our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even from our own government. But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great,” the Pac says on its website. “We are working to mobilize Christians across this country to make sure we protect these values at the ballot box.”Butker first made what he called a “very intentional” foray into politics in May, when he delivered a polarizing commencement address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas. The three-time Super Bowl champion said, among other things, that most of the women receiving degrees were probably more excited about getting married and having children than working, and that some Catholic leaders were “pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America”.Butker also attacked Pride month and Joe Biden’s stance on abortion.The NFL distanced itself from Butker’s comments, issuing a statement afterward that said: “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”At training camp before the season, Butker said he was glad he had voiced his opinions. “I’ve just decided, ‘You know what? There’s things that I believe wholeheartedly that I think will make this world a better place,’ and I’m going to preach that,” Butker said. “If people don’t agree, they don’t agree, but I’m going to continue to say what I believe to be true and love everyone along the way.”The Hunt family has supported a group urging Missouri voters to reject a ballot measure that would overturn a near-total ban on abortion in the state through Unity Hunt, the company that oversees the assets of the Lamar Hunt family. The Chiefs have declined to comment on the $300,000 donation other than confirming to the Kansas City Star that the money was wired by Clark Hunt’s half-brother, Lamar Hunt Jr, through his account with Unity Hunt.Meanwhile, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said last month that he would not endorse Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the November election, even as the former president repeatedly referred to the player’s wife, Brittany, as a supporter of his campaign.“I don’t want my place and my platform to be used to endorse a candidate,” Mahomes said. “My place is to inform people to get registered to vote. It’s to inform people to do their own research and then make the best decision for them and their family.”Those comments came less than a day after Taylor Swift, who is dating the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce and has become friends with the Mahomes family, endorsed Harris for the presidency. That led Trump to tell Fox News: “I actually like Mrs Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth. She’s a big Trump fan. I like Brittany. I think Brittany is great.”Patrick Mahomes was asked on Wednesday about Trump’s references to his wife and said “at the end of the day, it’s about me and my family and how we treat other people.”“I think you see Brittany does a lot in the community. I do a lot in the community to help bring people up, and give people an opportunity to use their voice,” he said. “In political times, people are going to use stuff here and there, but I can’t let that affect how I go about my business every single day of my life, and trying to live it to the best of my ability.” More

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      Parts of Biden’s Student Loan Repayment Plan Blocked by Judges

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      A part of the SAVE plan that would have cut monthly bills for millions of borrowers starting on July 1 was put on hold.Two federal judges in Kansas and Missouri temporarily blocked pieces of the Biden administration’s new student loan repayment plan on Monday in rulings that will have implications for millions of federal borrowers.Borrowers enrolled in the income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE, are expected to continue to make payments. But those with undergraduate debt will no longer see their payments cut in half starting on July 1, a huge disappointment for borrowers who may have been counting on that relief.The separate preliminary injunctions on Monday are tied to lawsuits filed this year by two groups of Republican-led states seeking to upend the SAVE program, a centerpiece of President Biden’s agenda to provide relief to student borrowers. Many of the program’s challengers are the same ones that filed suit against Mr. Biden’s $400 million debt-cancellation plan, which the Supreme Court struck down last June.“All of this is an absolute mess for borrowers, and it’s pretty shocking that state public officials asked the courts to prevent the Biden administration from offering more affordable loan payments to their residents at time when so many Americans are struggling with high prices,” said Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center. “It’s a pretty cynical ploy in an election year to stop the current president from being able to lower prices for working and middle-class Americans.”Eleven states led by Kansas filed a lawsuit challenging the SAVE program in late March in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The next month, Missouri and six other states sued in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Both suits argued that the administration had again exceeded its authority, and that the repayment plan was a backhanded attempt to wipe debts clean.The SAVE program, which has enrolled eight million borrowers since it opened in August, isn’t a new idea. It’s based on a roughly 30-year-old design that ties monthly payments to a borrower’s income and household size. But SAVE has more generous terms than previous plans and a heftier price tag. More than four million borrowers qualify for a $0 monthly payment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kansas supreme court rules state constitution does not provide the right to vote

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      In a bizarre mixed ruling combining several challenges to a 2021 election law, Kansas’s supreme court has ruled that its residents have no right to vote enshrined in the state’s constitution.The opinion centering on a ballot signature-verification measure elicited fiery dissent from three of the court’s seven justices. But the majority held that the court failed to identify a “fundamental right to vote” within the state.The measure in question requires election officials to match the signatures on advance mail ballots to a person’s voter registration record. The state supreme court reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged that. The majority of justices on the state supreme court then rejected arguments from voting rights groups that the measure violates state constitutional voting rights.In fact, writing for the majority, Justice Caleb Stegall said that the dissenting justices wrongly accused the majority of ignoring past precedent, holding that the “fundamental right to vote” within the state constitution “simply is not there”.That finding is contrary to the US constitution, which dedicates large portions of itself to the right to vote for citizens.Justice Eric Rosen, one of the three who dissented, wrote: “It staggers my imagination to conclude Kansas citizens have no fundamental right to vote under their state constitution.“I cannot and will not condone this betrayal of our constitutional duty to safeguard the foundational rights of Kansans.”Conversely, the high court unanimously sided with the challengers of a different provision that makes it a crime for someone to give the appearance of being an election official. Voting rights groups, including the Kansas League of Women Voters and the non-profit Loud Light, argued the measure suppresses free speech and their ability to register voters as some might wrongly assume volunteers are election workers, putting them at risk of criminal prosecution.A Shawnee county district court judge had earlier rejected the groups’ request for an emergency injunction, saying that impersonation of a public official is not protected speech.But the high court faulted the new law, noting that it doesn’t include any requirement that prosecutors show intent by a voter registration volunteer to misrepresent or deceive people into believing they’re an election official, and it thus “criminalizes honest speech” where “occasional misunderstandings” are bound to occur, Stegall wrote in the majority opinion.“As such, it sweeps up protected speech in its net,” Stegall said.Because the lawsuit over the false impersonation law’s constitutionality is likely to succeed, the state supreme court ordered the lower court to reconsider issuing an emergency injunction against it.“For three years now, Kansas League of Women Voters volunteers have been forced to severely limit their assistance of voters due to this ambiguous and threatening law,” said the state chapter’s president, Martha Pint. “The league’s critical voter assistance work is not a crime, and we are confident this provision will be quickly blocked when the case returns to the district court.”Loud Light’s executive director, Davis Hammet, said he hopes the lower court “will stop the irreparable harm caused daily by the law and allow us to resume voter registration before the general election”.Neither the Kansas secretary of state, Scott Schwab, nor the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach, responded to requests for comment on that portion of the high court’s ruling.Instead, in a joint statement, Schwab and Kobach focus on the high court’s language bolstering the signature-verification law and its upholding of a provision that says individuals may collect no more than 10 advance ballots to submit to election officials.“This ruling allows us to preserve reasonable election security laws in Kansas,” Schwab said.Supporters have argued the ballot collection restriction combats “ballot harvesting” and limits voter fraud. The Republican-led legislature passed it over a veto by Kansas’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.Critics have said it’s a Republican reaction to baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump, was not valid, prompting a wave of misinformation and voter suppression laws across the country. More

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      Tornado Destroys Homes, Kills at Least One in Kansas

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      A powerful tornado ripped through a community in northeastern Kansas on Tuesday afternoon, destroying dozens of homes and structures and killing at least one person, officials said.A powerful tornado shredded homes and killed at least one person in a small Kansas town on Tuesday, as severe weather threatened millions of people across the region.The tornado hit Westmoreland, a community of about 700, roughly 100 miles west of Kansas City, at about 4:40 p.m., Pottawatomie County officials said.The storm left at least one person dead, destroyed at least 22 homes and damaged another 13, according to Vivienne Leyva, a public information officer for nearby Riley County. Additionally, four commercial buildings were destroyed and another was damaged, Ms. Leyva said.Westmoreland was the only community struck by the tornado, she added. The destruction came amid a night of severe weather across the Central United States. More than four million people were under a severe thunderstorm or tornado watch Tuesday night, according to the National Weather Service. More