TOPEKA — The Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe’s chairman compared immigrant detention to Indian reservations in an online video address Friday, and declared the tribe’s intention to jettison a recently secured contract to design detention centers.
“We know our Indian reservations were the government’s first attempts at detention centers,” said Joseph Rupnick, chairman of the Tribal Council. “We were placed here because we were treated as prisoners of war. So we must ask ourselves why we would ever participate in something that mirrors the harm and trauma once done to our people.”
A company affiliated with the tribe’s business arm signed a year-long, $29.9 million contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Nov. 29. The contract requested the recipient, KPB Services, which is affiliated with Prairie Band LLC, design warehouse structures on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house detainees, according to a public federal contract database. Before KPB Services signed the contract, the federal government upped the dollar amount.
The Tribal Council fired members of Prairie Band LLC’s leadership Tuesday after Topeka TV station KSNT made news of the contract public the day before.
Rupnick, in a nearly 3-minute video address, said the tribe is “working on canceling this contract and fully disassociating the nation from it.”
He said the tribe risks losing future government contract awards in its efforts to extract itself from this one, but he said the tribe’s values must come first.
“I am sick to my stomach and frankly heartbroken that members of our nation put economic development — though it is sorely needed — above our moral obligations to other persecuted people,” Rupnick said.
The Tribe owns Prairie Band LLC, and Rupnick said it was created to secure employment and economic opportunities, “but it is also why we cannot compromise our values and seek to profit off the backs of our brothers and sisters in struggle.”
The second Trump administration has targeted immigrants, sometimes regardless of citizenship status or criminal history, detaining more than 65,000 people as of Nov. 16, according to ICE data analyzed by TRAC, a nonprofit data research project. Most of those people, nearly 48,000 did not have a criminal conviction.
Kansas has three facilities that house detainees and the potential for one more. Authorities at the Chase County jail in Cottonwood Falls, the Finney County jail in Garden City and the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth detain a combined average of 175 people on a given day. CoreCivic, the private prison company, is attempting to open a fourth detention center in a shuttered state prison.
This story was originally published by Kansas Reflector.
