GEO Group Set to Reopen Empty North Carolina Prison as 1,400-Bed ICE Detention Center

A prison that's sat empty for five years is coming back online

Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, North Carolina, has been dark since 2021. That's about to change.

Internal ICE documents obtained by the New York Times show plans to reopen the facility as a 1,400-bed immigrant detention center, making it one of the largest on the East Coast. GEO Group, the private prison company that ran Rivers for two decades before its federal contract ended, would operate it again.

The signs have been visible for months. GEO Group posted a job listing for a "facility maintenance manager" at Rivers on July 11, according to a recruiting website cited by Truthout. Local residents and immigration advocates started noticing construction equipment and heavy machinery at the site earlier this year, according to the Washington Post's reporting from last August and follow-up accounts from advocates on the ground.

Kristi Graunke, legal director for the ACLU of North Carolina, said her organization had been watching the site for months. "We had an inkling that this would be looked at, and certainly we were also hearing from community partners who were essentially seeing signs that Rivers would be reopened in Winton," Graunke said. She described trucks and construction equipment showing up well before any official confirmation.

ICE isn't confirming the reopening. A spokesperson told NC Newsline: "We have no new detention centers to announce at this time." The agency added that expanding detention capacity nationwide shouldn't be a surprise, given the scale of enforcement activity happening across the country.

The statement doesn't say Rivers won't reopen. It just says there's no announcement yet. Given the job postings, the internal documents, and the construction activity, the gap between ICE's public statement and what's visibly happening on the ground is significant.

A troubled history at this specific facility

Rivers wasn't a clean operation before. From 2001 to 2021, it operated as a "criminal alien requirement" prison, holding non-citizens convicted of federal crimes. During that run, inmates filed repeated complaints alleging understaffing, inadequate medical care, and discrimination by staff.

A 2007 class action lawsuit accused the facility of a pattern of denied medical treatment that led to severe injury and, in some cases, death. The complaint alleged: "The health care system at the Rivers facility is broken." GEO Group was dismissed from that suit before the claims were resolved on the merits, so the allegations were never fully adjudicated in court.

GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment on the planned reopening, according to Truthout's reporting.

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein condemned the move on social media Friday, stressing that the facility is not state-owned and his administration had no role in its reopening as a detention center. That's an important distinction. Federal immigration enforcement and federal contracts with private companies like GEO Group operate outside state control, even when the facility sits inside state borders.

Citizens Bank cuts financial ties, but says it's not about politics

Separately, and on the same day North Carolina's governor was blasting the Rivers plan, Citizens Financial Group announced it will exit its credit facilities with GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two largest private prison operators in the country.

Citizens, a $233.8 billion-asset regional bank, framed the move as strictly financial. The bank said in a statement that the companies' capital needs and financing structures have changed now that the federal government is directly buying some of their prison facilities, reducing the need for private financing. Citizens explicitly denied that activist pressure drove the decision, adding that it would be illegal to debank a company based on political or religious ideology.

"This is a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances and does not reflect any change in our view regarding these companies' business models or operations," the bank said.

Citizens also pushed back on activists directly, saying it has been "disappointed that the activists have dragged it into what is largely a political matter" and that public characterizations of the bank don't reflect its actual record.

Activist group De-ICE Citizens Bank called the announcement a win regardless of the bank's stated rationale. The group is now demanding Citizens go further, publicly committing within 10 days to end all current and future banking relationships with CoreCivic, GEO Group, and every other private prison company. Citizens declined to comment on that request.

Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun, asked directly about the activist pressure in an interview with American Banker, didn't address it head-on. "We are very proud of who we are," he said, pointing to the bank's track record with customers and communities.

The bank's announcement landed one day before a scheduled round of protests at Citizens branches across the Northeast and Midwest. Whether that timing was deliberate or coincidental, Citizens isn't saying, and there's no evidence in the record settling that question either way.

What's unresolved

ICE has not confirmed Rivers will reopen as a detention facility, despite the mounting circumstantial evidence. No contract details, opening date, or bed-capacity confirmation have been made public by the agency itself. Whether the site's troubled operational history from 2001 to 2021 will factor into any oversight this time around is an open question nobody in a position of authority has answered yet.