The real reason CoreCivic won’t just get a permit in Leavenworth | Opinion

By now, you may have heard 2025 has been quite a legal saga between private prison giant CoreCivic and the city of Leavenworth, in four separate lawsuits over the requirement of a permit to operate a currently inactive facility as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. At the heart of the entire lawsuit collection is the real question: CoreCivic, why not just get the permit?

While CoreCivic’s multimillion-dollar contract to house ICE detainees in Leavenworth is on hold because of the litigation, CoreCivic apparently has a larger mission: Avoid even the small, intolerable amount of oversight of a permit. No amount of flip-flopping or expensive judicial gymnastics is too much for CoreCivic’s hope of a United States where it can disregard local government’s concerns anywhere it seeks to do business.

Once upon a time, CoreCivic insisted it would be a good partner to Leavenworth, touting tax benefits and investments — but now the multibillion-dollar company has dragged both parties through multiple cycles of costly, adversarial litigation. Similarly, CoreCivic once trumpeted flexibility and work-life balance to job applicants in Leavenworth, but within a few months, new staff members found themselves in quite the bait and switch of extra shifts and long stretches without a day off as the facility grew increasingly dangerous.

CoreCivic’s “Better the Public Good” slogan and its entire website are “1984”-level corporate doublespeak, gaslighting anyone who has read or lived through its record of human rights abuses under its current name or previous identity, Corrections Corporation of America. The Leavenworth prison itself has an indelible local reputation as a violent hellhole, and CoreCivic’s brand is consistent in recent reports of horrific conditions at its facilities across the country, from Tennessee to California.

This year, the dystopian corporate mind games continue. CoreCivic applied for a permit in February, then withdrew it. In March, when Leavenworth sued CoreCivic in federal court for attempting to open in violation of local law, the company claimed this was a zoning question suited more to state court, and the litigation moved accordingly. But when CoreCivic filed its own lawsuit in August, it suddenly insisted this was very much a federal question — now that it could call in the cavalry, the U.S. Department of Justice, to weaponize the supremacy clause and national immigration politics against Leavenworth.

Ultimately, the entire saga could end if CoreCivic were simply to apply for a permit. It could end the three active lawsuits, open its Leavenworth detention center and begin fulfilling its profitable contract. But this has clearly become about more than just Leavenworth to CoreCivic, which has clearly had enough of pesky voices concerned with human rights and local governance, in Leavenworth and beyond. Thus, CoreCivic reached for the wieldy, federal hammer of allies at the DOJ in its new mission: Weaponize the courts and be able to operate completely unregulated.

The scale and implications here for federal intrusion on local government cannot be overstated, for Leavenworth and cities across the nation. Were this a developer looking to install a nuclear waste dump by a residential neighborhood, in the reality that CoreCivic and the DOJ hope to create, all it would take is a friendly political connection to Washington, D.C., to shut up a local government and override any attempts to protect residents’ health.

Every city and county in the U.S. should be alarmed by CoreCivic’s arrogance and bullying of our local government. We should not allow corporate executives to reduce all of us — staff, immigrant detainees and entire surrounding communities — to the mere collateral materials for their profiteering.

Barry R. Grissom is former US attorney for the District of Kansas.