Indiana’s Miami Correctional Facility is ramping up its detainment of unauthorized immigrants, despite a recent media investigation that found the maximum-security prison to be among the state’s most violent and deadly.
Nearly 430 were detained there as of Wednesday — a dramatic increase from about 160 at the end of October.
Undocumented immigrants held in detention are awaiting civil removal proceedings, and a majority have not been convicted of any U.S. crime that would warrant high-level security. Yet, inmates who had been imprisoned longer than six months reported a high prevalence of worsening physical and mental health, according to a recent Journal of the American Medical Association study.
Policymakers should be considering alternatives to detention to optimize the health of detained immigrants. Instead, Indiana requested nearly $15.8 million from the federal government to upgrade a portion of the facility to hold as many as 1,000 adult male immigrants.
That would make the “Speedway Slammer” — a flippant and dehumanizing moniker coined by the Trump administration — one of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in the Midwest.
ICE continues to state that nearly 70% of arrested undocumented immigrants have criminal convictions or pending charges. But that percentage doesn’t track with what the NIJC has learned from interviews with many detainees.
“Of the 1,400 immigrants arrested in Indiana in the first six months of this year, somewhere around 70% had no criminal legal contact,” said Lisa Koop, national director of the NIJC’s legal services and an adjunct law professor at Notre Dame. “And just to be clear, when they talk about people with criminal convictions, they’re including single-mother survivors of domestic violence who are stopped for driving without a license.”
Maximum-security prisons are designed for individuals convicted of serious criminal offenses, and Miami Correctional has struggled keeping its offenders secure. Its total number of violent incidents over the past decade outnumbers other state facilities, according to an Indianapolis Star investigation published Nov. 4. That includes nearly half of publicly reported homicides at all Indiana Department of Correction facilities.
From 2019 to August 2025, Miami Correctional has seen 35 deaths unrelated to illness. That amounts to nearly 19 deaths for every 1,000 inmates.
The facility has faced significant staffing shortages, with the number of correctional officers decreasing in recent years. Low staffing levels were cited by many of the nearly four dozen people the Star interviewed as one of the reasons for the violence, but Miami Correctional is not intermingling its criminal and immigrant detainees.
Koop said primary concerns undocumented immigrants raised with her and others from the NIJC were related to due process, family separation and length of incarceration. Shouldn’t the majority of immigrants be allowed to attend their court hearings when provided with less restrictive alternatives like community-based case management?
“There was a woman, an asylum seeker, who was apprehended right at the beginning of the year and was held in detention until eight months in,” Koop told The Journal Gazette. “She just couldn’t tolerate it anymore and requested removal to the country where she had been harmed.”
The woman saw no end in sight to her detention, and no shot at having a day in court where a judge would meaningfully examine her case and consider her evidence.
In a different era, this woman would have been supported, housed, given food and clothing. With the help of Catholic Charities and other local sponsors, Fort Wayne began welcoming Burmese refugees in 1991. Today, the city is home to one of the largest Burmese and Rohingya communities in the U.S., adding to its diversity.
Considering the current practice of detaining undocumented immigrants has been associated with health harms, especially those who are held for more than six months, lawmakers must implore the Trump administration to explore alternatives to long-term detention with no end in sight. America is better than this.