Miami Correctional
Friends and Constituents,
I hope you’re well. I tend to stay very busy - but even for me, this time of year is exceptionally busy for a City County Councilor. There have been 890 minutes of dense meetings so far this month, including 413 minutes last week alone. I take the appropriation and direction of my constituents’ tax dollars extremely seriously, which means the next few months of budget discussions and deliberations for the $1.9 billion in the City budget are arduous and time-consuming. I’ve also had a half-dozen physical therapy sessions for arthritis in my neck and an accompanying pinched nerve that has kept me off my bike and in pain most days.
But today, despite all of these competing priorities, I wanted to spend time talking about a statewide issue that is moral, fiscal, and precedent-setting. This week, we’re talking about Miami Correctional Facility and the detention of hundreds of people abducted and imprisoned by ICE.
Watch the video and then keep reading:
https://youtu.be/97loaIQiIyI
Miami Correctional Facility is a massive prison just north of Kokomo, Indiana - the largest in the entire state. Even before last year, it was known as one of the most violent and deadliest prisons in Indiana. From 2019 to 2025, 35 inmates who were not ill ended up dead. They died from suicides, accidents, overdoses - and at least seven homicides, more than at any other prison in the state. Hundreds and hundreds of use of force incidents were reported in 2024 and 2025.
Worse, the private, for-profit healthcare company that the State of Indiana contracts with to provide medical services for the prison is extremely problematic. Centurion Healthcare, which was the most expensive bidder for their $643 million four-year contract, has had a reputation for abuse and scandal in many of the thirteen states where it operates.
Despite these red flags, Governor Mike Braun and Donald Trump made a deal in 2025 to use Miami Correctional as a massive ICE detention facility. Jokingly calling the facility the “Speedway Slammer”, the MAGA leaders inked a deal to house up to 1,000 detainees a day in the facility.
Predictably, this has led to horrific outcomes. Journalist Kristine Phillips from the Indianapolis Star led a massive investigation that utilized dozens of whistleblower interviews to highlight horrific problems in the facility.
Significant evidence suggests that Centurion blatantly and intentionally lied about the inhumane and insufficient care they have provided at Miami Correctional. This includes lying about staffing, lying about medical backlogs, lying about how many inmates reported being sick and in need of care, and hiding documents from Indiana Department of Corrections officials.
Nurses at the facility believe that at least two people died at Miami Correctional due to these lies.
Lorth Sim, a 59-year-old man from Cambodia who turned himself in to ICE to self-deport, ended up being found dead in his cell after six weeks at Miami Correctional, after he wasn’t given necessary diabetes medication.
A month and a half later, Tuan Van Bui, a 55-year-old man from Vietnam, collapsed in a medical emergency. Though fellow detainees rushed to start chest compressions and called for help, detainees report it took up to 45 minutes for medical staff to arrive. Bui died that day - a seemingly totally preventable and unnecessary death.
Detainees describe conditions at the prison: mentally ill men screaming at night; one person walking around naked, covered in feces. A man woke up after having two seizures, lying in a pool of blood where he had been for six hours - with medical staff only checking on him once.
Nurses on staff describe similarly inhumane and horrific conditions: sixteen-hour shifts, no space or medication for seriously ill inmates, and an impossible workload.
It’s important to understand these horrific conditions as part and parcel of the racist, cruel system of immigration that the Trump and Braun administrations have pushed for.
Over 70% of the people detained by ICE - meaning over 46,000 human beings - have never been convicted of a crime. Of the 30% with criminal convictions, many were convicted only of minor offenses such as traffic violations. In Fiscal Year 2026, fewer than 2% of cases brought by ICE to immigration courts sought deportation on the basis of alleged criminal activity other than crossing the border.
ICE and CBP (Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, formally), as well as associated work through the Department of Homeland Security, have been given $200 billion in funding at the federal level. That includes $70 billion added by Republicans using reconciliation in June 2026.
As a few points of comparison - the most recent estimates about flood damage to homes and businesses in Indianapolis are about $40 million - that’s the cost to repair hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed or drastically damaged. That is two ten-thousandths of the immigration enforcement budget.
The entire country of Russia - a major world power actively fighting a war - had a total budget in 2024 of $400 billion. That’s only double the ICE budget.
The cuts to the FDA and CDC that have led to a horrific outbreak of diarrhea and illness this summer were major - and yet only represented under $10 billion in savings. That’s one twentieth of what the country is spending on immigration enforcement.
Or another way of thinking about it: there are roughly 165 million individuals who file taxes in the United States each year. That means each person’s share of the cost of armed immigration enforcement is $1200.
But actually, “immigration enforcement” is itself an increasingly misleading characterization of ICE’s activities.
ICE has invested in biometric trackers, mobile phone location databases, and social media monitoring programs. They have received the federal authority to force anyone they encounter - including US citizens - to submit to facial recognition and fingerprint scans that are saved in federal databases for fifteen years. ICE uses private software to geofence areas to track the mobile phones of anyone they want in specific areas.
ICE is now spending over $500 million on surveillance technology, including massive contracts with Palantir and Anduril - two nerdy-named companies who build AI-powered surveillance systems and even weapons.
Just in the last few weeks, international media confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents to infiltrate anti-ICE protest groups in what the Guardian calls a “mass spying campaign.” Beyond the “usual suspects” of left-wing groups like socialists and Abolish ICE activists like me, DHS infiltrated and surveilled unions like the Communications Workers of America and Service Employees International Union - the CWA and SEIU.
And, of course, ICE has murdered people in the streets. Along with more familiar names like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, this has included dozens of deaths of people in detention and a total of 41 shootings leading to 11 deaths since January 2025.
In the United States, we often overuse comparisons to Nazi Germany. There’s even a name for this phenomenon - Godwin’s Law.
But the increasing violence, intentional use of terror, and lawlessness of ICE draws striking parallels to the rise of the SA in 1930s Germany. Remember: the horrifying concentration camps that began exterminating “undesirables” in 1941 were first opened as merely harsh prison camps in the early 1930s.
So how do we prevent a further slide into authoritarianism?
We fight back now and insist on civil rights, due process, and basic decency. We demand our Governor end the contract with ICE that has led Miami Correctional Facility to become the hellhole it is today.
We organize.
Next weekend, from Friday through Sunday, there is a statewide Weekend of Public Witness, with events being held all over the state. I’m going to do my best to attend an event on every one of the three days, and hope you can make it a point to attend at least one.
If your schedule won’t allow you to be there in person with your friends, loved ones, and neighbors, chip in a donation to help the organizers continue to grow this movement. And share information about this weekend on your social media, at the water cooler at work, and in your family group text.
This is an issue that affects all of us - and it will continue to affect us more and more until we put a stop to these injustices.
In love and solidarity,
Jesse