KSHB 41 reporter Rachel Henderson covers neighborhoods in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. Share your story idea with Rachel.
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Community members and activists held a press conference Thursday morning, thanking the city of Leavenworth for filing a lawsuit against CoreCivic for its efforts to open an ICE detention facility in town.
The press conference included various organizations, including the Cross-Border Network for Justice and Solidarity, ACLU Kansas, Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, the Leavenworth branch of the NAACP, and Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth.
It was held at Ray Miller Park, which sits across the street from the building CoreCivic owns that formerly housed the Leavenworth Detention Center.
City officials were invited to attend and speak, but none attended or commented due to pending litigation.
“We applaud the city commissioners for their action in listening to our community and protecting the city by suing CoreCivic,” said Jean Panisko on behalf of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth. “Scripture calls us to welcome the stranger and shelter the oppressed.”
The city’s lawsuit against the private prison company came after CoreCivic withdrew its application for a special use permit in March.
“We knew this was a whole other battle, a lot of us were not prepared for,” said Ashley Hernandez, the Organizing and Policy Coordinator for SCL’s office of Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation. “As a woman of Mexican descent, and I have friends who are immigrants themselves, it was important for me to be here and speak on behalf of that.”
Hernandez joined other speakers opposing the facility, including two former CoreCivic officers, William Rogers and Marcia Levering.
“These people are humans in there,” said Rogers, who says he was attacked and stabbed when he worked as an officer at the former Leavenworth Detention Center from 2016 to 2020. “They're inmates, but they're humans.”
CoreCivic says it still plans to operate an ICE detention center in town and does not see a need for an SUP.
The city withdrew its temporary restraining order Monday in exchange for CoreCivic postponing housing detainees until June 1.
In an email, CoreCivic’s Senior Director of Public Affairs, Ryan Gustin, provided the following statement in response to Thursday’s gathering:
“Today’s lackluster protest proves that our facility’s opponents are politically extreme, out-of-touch, outsider groups that want to tell the people of Leavenworth what to do. The fact is the Leavenworth community wants our facility, the 300 jobs it will create, and the $2 million in annual local revenue it will generate. It’s time for the city commission to reject outside groups from hijacking this issue for their own political gain at the expense of the Leavenworth economy. Elected leaders should tell these outside groups to stop sending the message that the public safety profession is not welcome in Leavenworth. CoreCivic will operate a safe, transparent, and accountable facility that will be positive for the community.”
In the city’s lawsuit, which KSHB 41’s Rachel Henderson reviewed in-depth with a Washburn University law professor earlier this week, it cites the city’s development regulations as reasoning for CoreCivic’s ineligibility as an adequate candidate for operating a facility without a SUP.
The city’s ordinance states that a nonconforming use abandoned for 24 consecutive months shall comply with the regulations of the zoning district in which such land is located.
In the lawsuit, it explains that the city resided CoreCivic’s special use of the property after it stopped using it as a detention center for 12 months.
The federal government called for the Leavenworth Detention Center to close in 2021, which is when CoreCivic stopped housing inmates.
CoreCivic says it never closed because it always kept 24-hour maintenance on site.
“Lawsuits alone won't stop this,” Hernandez said. “What we need is continued public pressure and community resistance.”
The issues of immigration and CoreCivic’s track record are intertwined for Marcia Levering, who KSHB 41 first spoke with in March, before the city sued CoreCivic.
"I was shocked, to be honest," Levering said about the lawsuit. "I didn’t know if they would go that far."
Levering says her focus is simple.
“My sole intent is to save the immigrants,” Levering said.
Before she took on this battle, she fought one of her own.
The same year CoreCivic stopped running the Leavenworth Detention Center, Levering — a former corrections officer at the center — was attacked on the job.
“Unit 4 accidentally buzzed open the wrong door, allowing an inmate to come out, throwing boiling water in my face and stabbing me four times,” Levering said. “I now have paralysis to the right side of my face, and a rod and tin pins inserted into my right arm and removed. Two broken ribs, a punctured lung, and I lost 24 inches of my colon and later my spleen.”
Sixteen surgeries later, Levering now walks with a cane.
"It’s still raw, and I didn’t think it would be," Levering said. "I thought four years was enough to get over it, but I’ve also spent four years going to hospitals. When you’re in there fighting, you don’t realize how severe it is because you’re just trying to get through it."
That didn’t stop her from driving over two hours from her new home to be in Leavenworth on Thursday.
She’s standing firm in her new mission to share her story.
“I foresee it being far worse, and far more dangerous,” Levering said.
That fear alone is enough to keep one message loud and clear.
“The community's not gonna stay quiet, we're going to keep fighting back,” Hernandez said.
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