By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH and JOHN HANNA, Associated Press

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Leavenworth, Kansas, occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a short hand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term “the big house.”

Now Kansas’ oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations of those living in the U.S. illegally.

The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.

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ICE has cited a “compelling urgency” for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and another giant firm, The Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida.

That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge’s past description of the now-shuttered prison as “a hell hole.” The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president’s unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals.

To get more detention beds, the Trump administration has modified dozens of existing agreements with contractors and used no-bid contracts. One pays $73 million to a company led by former federal immigration officials for “immigration enforcement support teams” to handle administrative tasks, such as helping coordinate removals, triaging complaints or telling ICE if someone is a risk to community safety.

Just last week , Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants — and earn $66 million in annual revenue.

“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders.

A tax-cutting and budget reconciliation measure approved last month by the House includes $45 billion over four years for immigrant detention, a threefold spending increase. The Senate is now considering that legislation.

Declaring an emergency to expedite contracts

When Trump started his second term in January, CoreCivic and Geo had around 20 idle facilities, partly because of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations. But the Trump administration wants to more than double the existing 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and — if private prison executives’ predictions are accurate — possibly to more than 150,000.

A judge has halted CoreCivic, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, from housing immigrants facing possible deportation in a shuttered facility that the private prison operator now calls the Midwest Regional Reception Center, in Leavenworth, Kan., pictured Monday, March 3, 2025, unless it can get a permit from frustrated city officials. (AP Photo/Nick Ingram)

ICE declared a national emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico as part of its justification for authorizing nine five-year contracts for a combined 10,312 beds without “Full and Open Competition.”

Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE’s document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City, California, and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Michigan.

The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn’t been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical.

Charles Tiefer, a contract expert and professor emeritus of law at the University of Baltimore Law School, said letter contracts normally are reserved for minor matters, not the big changes he sees ICE making to previous agreements.

“I think that a letter contract is a pathetic way to make big important contracts,” he said.

A Kansas prison town becomes a priority

CoreCivic’s Leavenworth facility quickly became a priority for ICE and the company because of its central location. Leavenworth, with 37,000 residents, is only 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the west of the Kansas City International Airport. The facility would hold men and women and is within ICE’s area of operations for Chicago, 420 miles (676 kilometers) to the northeast.

“That would mean that people targeted in the Chicago area and in Illinois would end up going to this facility down in Kansas,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center.

Prisons have long been an important part of Leavenworth’s economy, employing hundreds of workers to guard prisoners held in two military facilities, the nation’s first federal penitentiary, a Kansas correctional facility and a county jail within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of city hall.

Resistance from Trump country

The Leavenworth area’s politics might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president.

But skeptical city officials argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn’t because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge last week issued an order requiring it.

An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the U.S. Marshals Service.

In late 2021, CoreCivic stopped housing pretrial detainees in its Leavenworth facility after then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. In the months before the closure, the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a letter to the White House. CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were “false and defamatory.”

Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23%, according to a Department of Justice report from 2017.

“It was just mayhem,” recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016 through 2020. He said repeated assaults sent him to the emergency room three times, including once after a blow to the head that required 14 staples.

The critics have included a federal judge

When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: “The only way I could describe it frankly, what’s going on at CoreCivic right now is it’s an absolute hell hole.”

The city’s lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force’s ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes.

The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. One unit for inmates had a painting on one wall featuring a covered wagon.

During the tour, when asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees’ experiences and said the company officials “do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.”

ICE moves quickly across the U.S.

Besides CoreCivic’s Leavenworth prison, other once-shuttered facilities could come online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, to help Trump fulfill his deportation plans.

ICE wants to reopen existing facilities because it’s faster than building new ones, said Marcela Hernandez, the organizing director for the Detention Watch Network, which has organized nationwide protests against ICE detention.

Counties often lease out jail space for immigrant detention, but ICE said some jurisdictions have passed ordinances barring that.

ICE has used contract modifications to reopen shuttered lockups like the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, New Jersey, and a 2,500-bed facility in Dilley, Texas, offering no explanations why new, competitively bid contracts weren’t sought.

The Newark facility, with its own history of problems, resumed intakes May 1, and disorder broke out at the facility Thursday night. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who previously was arrested there and accused of trespassing, cited reports of a possible uprising, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed four escapes.

The contract modification for Dilley, which was built to hold families and resumed operations in March, calls its units “neighborhoods” and gives them names like Brown Bear and Blue Butterfly.

The financial details for the Newark and Dilley contract modifications are blacked out in online copies, as they for more than 50 other agreements ICE has signed since Trump took office. ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.

From idle prisons to a ‘gold rush’

Private prison executives are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in new ICE profits. Since Trump’s reelection in November, CoreCivic’s stock has risen in price by 56% and Geo’s by 73%.

“It’s the gold rush,” Michael A. Hallett, a professor of criminal justice at the University of North Florida who studies private prisons. “All of a sudden, demand is spiraling. And when you’re the only provider that can meet demand, you can pretty much set your terms.”

Geo’s former lobbyist Pam Bondi is now the U.S. attorney general. It anticipates that all of its idle prisons will be activated this year, its executive chairman, George Zoley, told shareholders.

CoreCivic, which along with Geo donated millions of dollars to largely GOP candidates at all levels of government and national political groups, is equally optimistic. It began daily talks with the Trump administration immediately after the election in November, said Hininger.

CoreCivic officials said ICE’s letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing.

Tiefer, who served on an independent commission established to study government contracting for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said ICE is “placing a very dicey long-term bet” because of its past problems and said ICE is giving CoreCivic “the keys to the treasury” without competition.

But financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, “Great news.”

“Are you hiding any more of them on us?” he asked.

Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Morgan Lee, in Santa Fe, N.M., contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — To save its takeover of U.S. Steel, Japan’s Nippon Steel agreed to an unusual arrangement, granting the White House a “golden share” that gives the government an extraordinary amount of influence over a U.S. company.

New details of the agreement show that the structure would give President Donald Trump and his successors a permanent stake in U.S. Steel, significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions, an arrangement that could change the nature of foreign investment in the United States.

The terms of the arrangement were hammered out in meetings that went late into the night on Wednesday and Thursday, according to two people familiar with the details.

Representatives from Nippon Steel — which had been trying to acquire the struggling U.S. Steel since December 2023, but had been blocked by the Biden administration over national security concerns — came around to Trump’s desire to take a stake that would give the U.S. government significant control over the company’s actions.

Nippon had argued that this influence should expire — perhaps after three or four years, the duration of the Trump administration. But in the meetings, which were held at the Commerce Department, Trump officials led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted that the golden share should last in perpetuity, the two people said.

Under the terms of the national security pact, which the companies said they signed Friday, the U.S. government would retain a single share of preferred stock, called class G — as in gold. And U.S. Steel’s charter will list nearly a dozen activities the company cannot undertake without the approval of the American president or someone he designates in his stead.

Activities requiring the president’s permission include the company transferring production or jobs outside the United States, closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and making certain changes to how it sources its raw materials.

While the companies have called their deal a “partnership,” U.S. Steel has not issued any security filings to indicate that it has significantly altered the terms of its $14.9 billion sale to Nippon, which shareholders approved 14 months ago.

In an update Saturday to members of the United Steelworkers union, which had strongly opposed a sale to Nippon, its president, David McCall, expressed displeasure about the deal.

“We’re disappointed that President Trump reversed course, jeopardizing the future of American steel making by allowing the merger, now described as a ‘partnership,’ despite over a year of the president speaking forcefully against it,” he said.

Lutnick wrote on the social platform X on Saturday that the deal would revitalize U.S. Steel and help expand steel production in the United States.

“The Golden Share held by the United States in U.S. Steel has powerful terms that directly benefit and protect America, Pennsylvania, the great steelworkers of U.S. Steel, and U.S. manufacturers that will have massively expanded access to domestically produced steel,” he said.

In a statement, Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, said: “Steel is the backbone of a modern economy and military. The Trump administration is committed to ensuring that foreign business decisions do not undermine our national and economic security.”

A spokesperson for Nippon declined to comment. U.S. Steel did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s not uncommon for the U.S. government to raise national security concerns about foreign investments in American companies. The government generally has wide latitude on the conditions it imposes, and reaches dozens of deals each year with companies to address them. But the agreement with the steel companies — the details of which are not public — appears to give the U.S. government unusually expansive power.

The U.S. government has historically taken stakes in companies only when they were under financial duress or played a significant role in the economy. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, for example, it acquired a large stake in General Motors as part of a bailout and took control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The U.S. Treasury sold the last of its stake in General Motors in 2013. Trump has intermittently floated the idea of releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from government control.

It was not yet clear if the president might demand a golden share in other negotiations that have stalled over national security concerns, such as those involving TikTok, the Chinese social media platform.

But the talks with the U.S. steel titan and its Japanese acquirer provide another example of Trump taking an expansive interpretation of his power as commander in chief.

Under the terms of the deal with the steel companies, the president could exert significant influence over U.S. Steel’s board. The president has the authority to directly appoint one of the board’s three independent directors, and approve or reject appointments for the other two, the two people familiar with the negotiations said.

The golden share in U.S. Steel cannot be transferred or sold by a future president, they said. They also described the share as “noneconomic,” meaning that it would not affect the size of other U.S. Steel shareholders’ stakes or give the U.S. government the chance to directly profit from U.S. Steel in the form of dividends.

For many national security experts, the concept of the golden share itself is perhaps more seismic than the terms of the actual security agreement.

Aaron Bartnick, an official in the Biden White House and Treasury Department who worked on national security reviews of foreign investments, said that taking equity in a company as a condition for such an approval was “pretty unprecedented.”

“It’s not at all clear to me how the equity stake — as opposed to just the associated governance rights — is necessary for safeguarding national security,” he added.

Lutnick, a former New York bond broker, has been particularly interested in injecting out-of-the-box thinking from the investment world into Washington. He has expressed interest in helping to establish a sovereign wealth fund, and has been a strong proponent of the golden share, a concept familiar to Wall Street investors who have dealings in countries such as Britain, China and Brazil.

While such investment deals are typically led by the Treasury Department, it was Lutnick who led the negotiations with Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel, partly because of his advocacy for the golden share idea. David E. Shapiro and Michael Grimes, senior officials at the Commerce Department who work on its newly created “investment accelerator,” also played key roles in the discussions last week, shortly after Lutnick had returned from trade talks with Chinese officials in London.

Trump had ordered a new national security review of Nippon’s deal with U.S. Steel soon after taking office. Government agencies offered Trump suggestions for ways to mitigate any national security concerns arising from Nippon’s acquisition, but Trump had rejected them. The concept of the golden share, however, appealed to Trump. About a week and a half ago, Trump asked Lutnick to finalize the arrangement.

While Lutnick agreed to some concessions, he also demanded that the president be able to veto the company’s actions in nearly a dozen areas, including decisions around relocating U.S. Steel’s headquarters or factories.

While talks were held at the Commerce Department on Thursday night, Israel had attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. The conflagration diverted Trump’s and the White House’s attention Friday. But by late Friday afternoon, Trump had signed the papers finalizing the deal.

“We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”

Globally, golden shares have typically been reserved for companies that countries consider national champions: Brazil owns a stake in the plane maker Embraer; China has an indirect stake in TikTok’s parent, ByteDance; and the United Kingdom holds a golden share in the defense company BAE systems.

U.S. officials have historically taken issue with these structures, arguing instead for freer markets. European courts have struck down a number of golden shares on grounds that they limit the flow of capital.

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Security experts said the adoption of a golden share in the United States could permanently alter the way that foreign investors view deal making in the country.

“A bigger issue is the messaging that it sends to the market, which is the U.S. government is intervening increasingly in transactions that don’t seem to have — by traditional standards — significant national security risks,” said Stephen Heifetz, a partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

“It is going to cause people to spend more time thinking about the obstacles to investing in the U.S. market,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Nearly every Tuesday night at Gambit Brewing in Lowertown, professional comedians headline the open-mic comedy show there. But which headliner is the funniest?

A contest this week will decide — and they need you to judge.

During preliminary rounds over the past two weeks, 30 competitors have been narrowed down to six finalists: Jason Schommer, Ci Ci Cooper, Chris Maddock, Jodie Maruska, Ahmed Kalaf and Linda Aarons.

During the competition’s finale, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 17, each comedian will perform a 10-minute stand-up set. Audience members will have scorecards and can award each comedian up to 10 points, and at stake for the winner is a $1,000 prize.

Tickets, which are $5 apiece and include a 10-ounce Gambit beer, can be purchased online or at the door. Reserved seating for $10 is also available.

In addition to Gambit, Lost Fox cafe and Story Line Books are also supporting the event, which is hosted by comedian (and real-life therapist) Jesse The Shrink, who also produced last year’s Funniest Person in St. Paul competition. A local musical comedian who goes by the stage name Lefty Crumpet will also perform.

Gambit Brewing Funniest Headliner: 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 17 at Gambit, 141 E. 4th St., Ste. LL2; tickets and additional info at funniestheadlinerweek3.eventbrite.com.

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When an assassin visited the homes of two Minnesota lawmakers Saturday, it exposed the long-standing tension between a public official’s accessibility and their security.

Both state Rep. Melissa Hortman, who along with her husband Mark was killed, and state Sen. John A. Hoffman, who along with his wife Yvette was wounded, readily shared their home addresses with constituents. Hortman’s address was listed on her campaign website, and Hoffman’s address had been listed on his official legislative webpage, a common practice in many states.

But in the hours after the shootings, while police officers were still searching for the assassin, lawmakers across the country began to rethink their approach to privacy and safety. The Michigan State Police held security briefings for legislators. The police in Fairfax County, Virginia, increased patrols around lawmakers’ homes. And in North Dakota, officials decided by midday Saturday to scrub home addresses from legislator biography pages.

“In light of the tragedy in Minnesota, we quickly decided to remove all addresses until our leaders have time to assess the proper balance between transparency and safety of our elected officials,” John D. Bjornson, the director of the North Dakota Legislative Council, said in an email.

In interviews with lawmakers across the country, some said sharing their home address helped reassure constituents that they were part of the community and could be easily reached. But unlike governors and presidents, most state lawmakers have no special security protection when they are away from work. The country’s coarsening public discourse has left them to weigh difficult trade-offs.

“Part of the reason why my address is easily found is to make it clear that I actually live in my district,” said Stephanie Sawyer Clayton, a Democratic state representative in Kansas. “If you have a P.O. box, you don’t look authentic, right?”

“But for authenticity,” Clayton added, “you kind of pay that price of vulnerability.”

Although recent political violence has cut across party lines, both Minnesota lawmakers who were shot were Democrats, and the suspected assassin was said to be carrying a list of targets that was filled with more Democrats.

In Ohio, state Sen. Casey Weinstein thanked his state’s Republican governor on Saturday for increasing security for lawmakers, a decision that the governor’s office declined to confirm.

“Honestly I’m struggling with this news,” Weinstein, a Democrat, wrote on Facebook after the Minnesota attacks. “I’m worried for my family. I worry I’m putting them in harm’s way by being in office. It’s a terrible feeling.”

In Michigan, state Rep. Karen Whitsett said she had no plans to remove her home address from her campaign website. Having it there, she said, showed constituents in her Detroit-based district that “I’m right here, I’m with you” and “that I’m not disconnected.”

But Whitsett, a Democrat who sometimes votes with Republicans in her state’s closely divided Legislature, said she had faced threats over the years.

After the Minnesota attack, Whitsett said she decided to seek a permit to carry a concealed gun. Whitsett said she previously had such a permit and used it to carry a weapon inside the State Capitol, where she does not always feel safe. She plans to do so again.

“I’m not going to depend on security,” said Whitsett, who on Sunday attended a video briefing on legislator safety that the Michigan State Police scheduled after the Minnesota attacks.

Another Michigan state representative, Bill G. Schuette, a Republican, said he had purchased a home security system in recent years after angry people showed up at his house on multiple occasions. His address, he said, was required to be public under state law.

“You sign up in this business to be accessible to your constituents and to be a voice that’s always listening,” Schuette said. “You really have to be grateful and thankful for our brave women and men in law enforcement, and hopeful, too, that people will try and respect some personal boundaries.”

Lawmakers, of course, are hardly alone in having personal information widely exposed online, and even legislators who do not actively publish their addresses might be easily found with a quick Google search.

Some legislators also bristled at the idea that they might receive extra protections. In Michigan, Whitsett said many of her constituents live with a daily threat of violence that politicians have not done enough to address. And in Kansas, Clayton said that “I am no different or no more special than any other constituent of mine who goes to work and faces the risk of getting hurt or killed on the job.”

When lawmakers want to limit what personal information is available about them, there are limiting factors. Some campaign finance forms and other public documents list politicians’ addresses and phone numbers. And because elected officials must generally live in the districts they represent, there is a level of accountability in the public knowing where a lawmaker claims to live.

In North Dakota, state Sen. Ryan Braunberger said he had been comfortable with his address being posted online before state officials decided to take it down this weekend. Braunberger, the Democratic leader in his chamber, said he had heard from the police in his home city of Fargo that they would be increasing patrols near legislators’ homes following the shootings near Minneapolis, about three hours away by car.

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“Honestly I don’t feel unsafe today,” he said. “But I also refuse to live in that world of fear, because it only encourages the perpetrators. Because that’s what they’re trying to do, is incite fear.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.