Since September, retired evangelical pastor Dale Dalman has been driving north from his West Michigan home in Rockford to the North Lake Processing Center, sometimes two, three times a week.
Winter storms and frigid temperatures haven’t stopped him from making the four hour round trip to Baldwin, Michigan, so that he can spend 90 minutes visiting people inside.
“It all started when a former member of my congregation was picked up in Indiana as a truck driver, when [federal agents] were pulling over immigrant truck drivers,” Dalman explained. “He’s been detained in Baldwin since.”
Visitors “give them hope”
During one of his visits Dalman bumped into Illinois resident Rebecca De La Luz.
At the time, she was also making the trip on her own to visit immigrants taken from her community, and whose families were worried because they hadn’t been able to reach them.
“I would give them some resources that I would write on my hand and my arm, because you can't bring a paper in there, and then I would report back to their families how they were doing,” De La Luz said.
Meeting Dalman, who lives much closer, made this work a lot easier.
“It's such a huge help that I can just pass him some names of the people I know who are struggling and they go up there and go visit these people and give them hope,” she explained.
Dalman has managed to recruit other people to make these visits with him. Most, like his friend Penny Gutierrez, are retirees.
“We don't know these individuals, but we care for them because they're our neighbors,” Dalman said. “Penny and I, we're followers of Jesus, and we believe this is exactly what Jesus would be doing if he was here.”
Gutierrez first found out about “the opportunity” to visit North Lake during a Bible study group at their church. Recently, she said, the group talked about immigration and what it means to uphold the law while supporting vulnerable people.
“Through that Sunday morning group, which was a significant number of people, this came up during class time as a way to apply what we were discussing,” Gutierrez said.
For Dalman, bringing others along is an opportunity to expose them to the reality inside.
“If I feel that if I can expose people to this and they start telling their story to other friends, I hope it changes people's perception about what's really going on regarding the current immigration enforcement actions,” he said.
“Detaining many innocent people”
Custody data Immigration and Customs Enforcement released in December shows the vast majority, 90% of the daily average population at North Lake, have not been charged with a crime.
But the group of buildings surrounded by barbed wire fence at the end of a dirt road used to be North Lake Correctional Facility, a privately run federal prison. It closed down in 2022 after the Biden administration ended all federal contracts with privately owned prisons.
The facility reopened in June as an immigration detention center after rebranding as the North Lake Processing Center. It’s still run by Geo Group, one of the country’s largest operators of private prisons. It could hold up to 1,800 people.
Visitors are allowed five days a week, with each of the five housing units assigned its own visiting day.
No personal items are allowed in. The visitor dress code is pretty strict - closed toe shoes, no sweatshirt or shirts with pockets.
The visiting room is tucked at the end of a sequence of hallways and locked metal doors. Inside, a few rows of small tables face large windows overlooking an asphalt courtyard.
Near the entrance two vending machines hum, stocked with chips, candy, microwavable pizza, and soda. Off in the corner is a ghost of a children’s play area, toys on a patch of green carpet, and small chairs that look too soft for a place this hard.
This is where Dalman first met Kimberlin Atencio. At the time, Atencio had been at North Lake nearly a month. After her release on Christmas Day, she said she remembers crying and telling the pastor how much she missed her kids.
“It's a terrible feeling to be detained,” she said through a translator. “You long for freedom. You want to be with your family…I thought about my children all the time. It was very distressing, really truly, very distressing,” she said.
Atencio is originally from Venezuela but lives in Detroit now with her husband and her three kids.
Before her detention, Atencio had a pending asylum case, one that allowed her to work while her children attended school. But in November, she was detained and threatened with deportation.
Court records show federal officers broke the passenger-side window of her car during the arrest. She said she still has scars on her hands and arms from being dragged out of the vehicle.
“They [ICE] told me that they had a warrant for my arrest but it turned out that that wasn’t true at all,” she said.
After spending over a month at North Lake, Atencio was released on bond, following the filing of a habeas corpus lawsuit in her case.
“They [Trump administration] said they were going to detain criminals, people with deportation orders, but instead they are detaining many innocent people,” she said.
Atencio said she was always cold inside the detention center, and phone calls to family were a luxury, available only for a fee.
“We suffer a lot there—we don’t have good food. As for medical care, the attention in those places is quite poor. Many injustices are happening,” she said.
Inside the North Lake Processing Center, more than 1,300 people wait. They wait for hearings, for decisions, for word from family.
For Dalman, every visit is heartbreaking. But because of that - he keeps going back. He’s hoping others will choose to do the same and take him up on his offer and visit with immigrants too.
