Leavenworth Commission Votes 4-1 to Let CoreCivic Reopen the Prison a Judge Called a 'Hellhole'

The Leavenworth City Commission voted 4-1 on March 10, 2026 to grant CoreCivic a special-use permit to reopen its medium-security private prison in Leavenworth, Kansas as an ICE detention facility. The vote followed an hour of public comment in which speakers ran heavily against the reopening, at the end of what the Kansas Reflector called an “agonizing yearlong fight.” The facility had been closed in 2021 under a Biden executive order winding down federal private-prison contracts, after a federal judge described conditions there as a “hellhole.” CoreCivic — the same operator — was rehired to run it. By May 2026 the facility held roughly 250 immigration detainees, against a planned capacity of 1,104. The Intercept’s September 18 investigation centers the staffing record that produced the original characterization: guard Marcia Levering was severely burned at the facility in 2021 when an overwhelmed colleague accidentally released a high-risk prisoner.

A public-comment period running lopsidedly against a permit the commission granted anyway is the structure worth recording, and it is not a story about persuasion failing. Special-use permitting is the one point in this pipeline where a local body holds a genuine veto, which is precisely why the yearlong fight concentrated there — and the outcome shows what that veto is worth when the applicant is the county’s largest available employer and the alternative is a vacant building. The reopening belongs to the wider reactivation of shuttered private capacity that the corpus has tracked through CoreCivic’s $300M in ICE contracts (2025-10-05–corecivic-wins-300-million-ice-contracts), the $536M Appleton, Minnesota reopening (2026-08-04–corecivic-536m-contract-reopen-appleton-mn-prairie-correctional), and the 14-site private-prison acquisition RFEI (2026-07-20–ice-private-prison-acquisition-14-sites-rfei-2026). The pattern is consistent: facilities closed on documented conditions grounds are reopened by the same operators without the conditions record being addressed, in a procurement track where the closure reason is not a disqualifier.

Dating note: the entry is dated to the March 10 commission vote — the operative event — not to the September 18 Intercept publication that resurfaced it.

Named harm-subject: Marcia Levering, the injured guard, is a documented-act entry for the victim-story index — the record establishes what happened to her, sourced through The Intercept, and she is a worker rather than a detainee, which places her in a different deployment category than the facility’s detained population.

Sourcing note: the capture ledger reported the public-comment split as 42 speakers against and 3 in favor. Those specific counts could not be confirmed in any of the three cited sources on a full-text check, so they are not carried in this entry. The 4-1 commission vote is confirmed in the Kansas Reflector. Anyone needing the speaker counts should pull the March 10 commission minutes directly.