CoreCivic Signs $536M, 5-Year Contract to Reopen Appleton MN's Prairie Correctional as 1,600-Bed ICE Facility

ICE and CoreCivic signed a 5-year, $536 million contract to reopen the Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Swift County, Minnesota — a private prison that has sat closed since 2010 — as the state’s first dedicated immigrant detention center. The facility will hold 1,600 beds, with detainee intake beginning in Q4 2026 and full capacity reached by Q2 2027. The contract runs at approximately $75 million per year, roughly $67 per bed per day. Minnesota has until now had no dedicated ICE detention facility, instead shipping detainees out of state or housing them in local jails. As of the signing, no organized local-government opposition has been reported — this is a completed deal, not a fight in progress. Rep. Angie Craig has pressed the administration on the contract.

Update (Aug 5, 2026): Minnesota Reformer/Sahan Journal reporting the following day characterized the transaction as a direct DHS purchase of the facility from CoreCivic — a structural shift from lease-based IGSA contracting to outright federal ownership — rather than an operating contract on CoreCivic-owned property. DHS simultaneously purchased CoreCivic’s Midwest Regional Reception Center in Leavenworth, Kansas in the same deal. Swift County (pop. ~9,000) has minimal organized detention-resistance capacity. This purchase-vs-lease pattern matches DHS’s earlier acquisition of CoreCivic’s Otay Mesa, California facility (2026-07-02–dhs-buys-corecivic-otay-mesa-california-city-1-5b-oversight-shield).

The Appleton contract extends the 2026 pattern of ICE reactivating shuttered or underused private-prison capacity at scale: GEO Group’s $529M Hudson, Colorado Big Horn contract signed weeks earlier (2026-07-09–geo-group-529m-hudson-colorado-big-horn-detention-contract), which itself drew a zoning lawsuit (2026-07-23–weld-hudson-county-co-geo-big-horn-zoning-lawsuit), and Target Hospitality’s Dilley restart (2025-03-05–target-hospitality-dilley-5-year-246m-contract-restart). It also lands amid a documented buildout that AP found had produced a record pace of in-custody suicides across CoreCivic and GEO facilities (2026-05-27–ap-investigation-ice-detention-suicides-record-fy-pace-corecivic-geo-facilities) and a broader 2026 expansion tracked at 152 new detention facilities across 39 states alongside 17 in-custody deaths as of that May count (2026-05-07–ice-custody-deaths-reach-17-152-new-detention-facilities-39-states-2026-record-pace). Swift County’s rural courts, public defenders, and medical infrastructure have no prior track record handling a 1,600-bed detention population — the same capacity mismatch that preceded IGSA extension fights elsewhere, such as Torrance County, NM (2026-02-04–torrance-county-nm-corecivic-igsa-extension-12-hours-after-ban).

Update (2026-10-29, publication date of the report): The $495,639,588 purchase and the earlier $75M offer

Eyes on ICE, in a report dated Oct 29, 2026, citing KARE 11, reports that CoreCivic offered the state the facility for $75M and that in August 2026 DHS and ICE bought it for $495,639,588. It quotes CoreCivic’s statement: “The federal government ultimately determined the sale price.” It reports that Secretary Mullin has refused to answer and that Rep. Betty McCollum has formally demanded a congressional investigation.