The private prison industry has again come knocking in southwestern Wyoming, pitching the for-profit detention of immigrants as a potential boon for the region’s transitioning economy. 

But unlike during President Donald Trump’s first term, this time the corporations don’t seem to be finding a foothold. 

Last week, a company called Sabot Consulting pitched the Kemmerer City Council, and a packed room of townspeople, on the construction of a 900-bed jail to hold immigrants detained by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. 

Construction of the facility would have been paid for by the city through a bond issuance, two council members told WyoFile. Kemmerer would have owned the jail, and a third entity — an Alaskan Native corporation that is heavily invested in the private immigration detention business, including a controversial encampment in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — would have staffed it through a contract with the federal government. 

Sabot’s role was to work with the city, ICE and the Alaskan corporation, Akima, to bring the project to fruition. The jail would have brought both high-paying jobs and revenues to Kemmerer, Sabot cofounder Darren Chiappinelli told the city council. 

But the proposal got a poor reception from the public, and the council has no plans to pursue it, the two council members told WyoFile.

“There’s no interest among council members or even the majority of our constituents to keep it on our plate,” Kemmerer Mayor Robert Bowen said, describing the community reaction as “overwhelmingly ‘no.’” Council member Bill Ellis also told WyoFile the city wasn’t interested. 

“We said ‘We can’t do it, and we don’t want it,’” he said. 

ICE has put out notice to private prison companies that it is seeking an 850-950 bed facility within a two-hour drive of the Salt Lake City airport, according to a Facebook stream of the presentation that a Sabot Consulting official made to the Kemmerer council. 

Though the proposal came as President Trump does everything in his power to deport immigrants — both those here without documentation and increasingly those with it — the latest quest for large numbers of holding cells near Salt Lake City stretches back to former President Joe Biden’s administration. 

Promoters of the project first contacted the city last May, well before November’s election swept Trump back into office, Kemmerer City Administrator Brian Muir told WyoFile. 

Representatives for Sabot Consulting did not respond to messages from WyoFile seeking comment. It’s unclear if the company is pitching other Wyoming communities on the immigration jail idea. An elected official in nearby Uinta County, where Evanston saw years of divisive debate over for-profit prison companies’ proposals from 2017 into 2020, told WyoFile the county commission had recently received outreach from a company he believed was also Sabot. 

But Uinta County Commissioner Mark Anderson said this time around, his board is also choosing not to pursue the idea. 

The reluctance to engage with the private prison company comes even as Wyoming’s elected officials, including legislators and many county sheriffs, are moving the state in line with Trump’s deportation agenda. 

Kemmerer is the county seat of Lincoln County, where voters, as they did statewide, backed Trump by a large margin. Nearly 83% of the 10,580 Lincoln County residents who cast a vote for president in November chose to send Trump, with his campaign promises of mass deportation, back to the White House. But ideological support for more detainments and deportations doesn’t make a large immigration jail an automatic fit for the coal town, which is in the midst of an ongoing economic transition, the council members said.

Trona mine expansions, carbon dioxide storage projects and a $4 billion innovative nuclear power project have been driving a construction boom in southwestern Wyoming. Kemmerer in particular is benefitting from the nuclear plant, a project of Microsoft-founding billionaire Bill Gates, as its coal industry continues to contract. 

Gates visited Kemmerer in June for a groundbreaking ceremony on the project, which received its construction permit in January and is slated to be generating electricity in 2030. 

Amid those developments, getting into the private prison industry isn’t needed in Kemmerer and could even be counterproductive, Bowen said. 

“It’s not a bad thing,” Bowen said of Trump’s immigration initiatives, but the jail “is not the right fit for our community.” 

He wondered if Gates would have pursued his energy project in Kemmerer if it was known as the host of a large immigration jail. Though the Trump administration is determined to deport growing numbers of people, Bowen also noted that tech billionaire Elon Musk and the DOGE initiative are gutting government contracts, raising questions about the federal government’s reliability as a business partner. 

Since Kemmerer would have owned the facility, the city would have been responsible for making it pay for itself were a contract with ICE to change or dry up. He and Ellis both said they feared a day where the city was hunting for inmates of any kind to fill its big jail. 

“The risk versus reward wasn’t really there for us,” Bowen said, “not in a community of our size.” 

Evanston saw turmoil, then abandonment

During the first Trump administration, first one and then another large corporation pushed for an immigration jail in Evanston, a community of about 12,000 people about 50 minutes southwest of Kemmerer. Over three years, the idea drove local controversy, before the companies ultimately walked away from the idea. Management Training Corporation, a private prison company, first brought the idea to Evanston in summer 2017, proposing Uinta County use a county-owned property near Bear River State Park to build the jail. 

At the time, ICE was seeking 500 beds in the area. In 2019, however, the agency doubled the size of its request, to 1,000 beds. 

The proposal spurred contentious public hearings and drove a bitter divide in Evanston. Opponents accused Uinta County public officials of steamrolling them and operating in the shadows. Though the decision remained local, both the Wyoming Legislature and candidates during the bitter 2018 gubernatorial primary campaign debated the idea.

Local proponents of the private prison meanwhile suggested outside influences were keeping a possible boon from the economically struggling town. The American Civil Liberties Union of Wyoming threatened litigation to force state-level elected officials to weigh in, while local and statewide activists coalesced into a group called WyoSayNo to oppose the project.

In summer 2019, Management Training Corporation abruptly, and quietly, walked away from the idea it had pushed for two years. CoreCivic, another large and controversial, private prison corporation, stepped into the void, and pushed the project further, to the point of submitting environmental review documents to the federal government. The Uinta County Commission in January 2020 passed a resolution to sell CoreCivic the land it needed once the company had secured an ICE contract. But in April of that year, CoreCivic too walked away, without offering any detailed reason why.

Akima, the company Sabot’s representative cited as its partner on the proposal for Kemmerer, is another major player in the lucrative private prison industry. Akima is a subsidiary of the Nana Regional Corporation, one of 13 regional Alaskan Native corporations. Such companies pay dividends to indigenous Alaskans but are not staffed solely by Native Americans. Subsidiaries of the corporations like Akima are effective at securing government contracts as minority-owned businesses, according to a report in The Guardian. 

Akima’s detention centers have been faulted by federal auditors and advocates for poor conditions and civil rights violations, The Guardian reported.

It was Uinta County and Evanston officials who first directed the latest bid for a southwestern Wyoming immigration jail to Kemmerer, city manager Muir told WyoFile. 

During the previous effort in Evanston, the Uinta County Commission was staunchly supportive of the project, despite hard lessons from other communities that bet on private prisons and the often rancorous local opposition. 

But the ultimate abandonment of the idea by two consecutive companies left a bad taste behind, commissioner Anderson told WyoFile. “All the public hearings, all of these promises of jobs and then these companies pulling out,” he said, “it’s just been so inconsistent that the appetite for it is just not there right now.”

Anderson had received a voicemail in recent months from one of the private prison companies, and though he did not have the message at hand when he spoke with WyoFile by phone Wednesday, he said he believed it to have been Sabot. But it didn’t really matter which company had reached out.

“I haven’t even returned the phone call,” he said. 

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