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Immigration and Customs Enforcement will open its first detention center in North Carolina this year, the New York Times is reporting, citing internal ICE documents.
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The report Thursday comes after weeks of speculation from local residents who say that they’ve noticed a fence that was put up around the property and have seen construction trucks go in and out of Rivers Correctional Institute, a shuttered for-profit prison in Hertford County owned by The GEO Group.
Caroline Stephenson, one of the leading advocates against ICE detention centers in North Carolina, said that although Hertford County needs jobs, bringing something so “politically divisive” is the opposite of what residents need.
“It’s being kind of sold to residents of the county as economic development … but they come with so much baggage. So really, they’re not great at all,” Stephenson, an Ahoskie resident, told The News & Observer on Friday. “GEO Group is the one who is benefitting and profiting off of all this chaos and toxicity and division basically.”
Neither ICE nor GEO Group responded to emails from The N&O in recent weeks.
In August 2025, the Washington Post reported that internal documents showed that the Trump administration was considering opening Rivers Correctional Institution as a part of its plan to double immigration detention space. In an August call with investors, George Zoley, executive chairman of The GEO Group, said that he hoped to reopen Rivers and had been negotiating with ICE.
The facility, according to The Times, is expected to hold about 1,400 beds.
The prison lost its federal contract in 2021 when President Joe Biden passed an executive order that aimed to phase out contracts with all private prisons, saying that “reducing profit-based incentives” could help lower incarceration levels.
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Stephenson said that bringing ICE detainees to rural Hertford County will put a strain on local law enforcement and hospital staff at ECU Health Roanoke-Chowan Hospital, a small, rural hospital.
“Other people … local people and people around the state, maybe even out of state, are gonna come and protest at Rivers,” she said. “It’s gonna happen. And who’s going to deal with that? Local law enforcement.”
Stephenson also worries that if people detained at Rivers Correctional Institute don’t receive adequate healthcare and nutrition, they’ll be sent to the hospital, which has just 114 beds.
An unnamed state official said the facility could open as soon as late September, The Times reported.
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This is a developing story and will be updated.