GOSHEN — A request to rezone land in Elkhart County to allow the construction of a $100 million immigrant detention facility has been withdrawn.
According to Elkhart County Commissioner Mike Yoder, CoreCivic officials informed the three county commissioners Monday shortly before 11 a.m. that they would withdraw the petition to rezone farmland along C.R. 7 for the detention facility.
The formal request for withdrawal had not been received by late Monday morning, according to planning department director Chris Godlewski.
Yoder said the company did not say why it was withdrawing the request.
He added he doesn’t expect the commissioners to make any formal statement about the situation.
“The only thing we could say is that CoreCivic was good to work with throughout this process,” Yoder said. “We always had good communications with them and that is demonstrated by them calling the commissioners ahead of time to let us know about their decision.”
Goshen Mayor Jeremy Stutsman, who wrote a letter last week opposing the construction of the detention center and gained a number of co-signers from the business community, was pleased with the company’s decision to leave the county.
“(I’m) obviously pretty happy they decided to move on and very grateful for the amount of community members, businesses leaders and elected officials for their work to benefit our county.”
CoreCivic, a Nashville, Tennessee company that builds and operates private prisons, told The Goshen News last fall that the idea for the immigrant detention center came from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s request for information about such a facility. ICE published that request last October. ICE was seeking information on possible facilities within 100 miles of its Chicago office, according to that request.
CoreCivic had proposed building a $100 million facility that would eventually be expanded to hold up to 1,400 detainees. The company would have paid about $1 million a year in property taxes for the facility, according to Yoder.