After the Oklahoma Highway Patrol arrested Yingchao Fan following a rollover accident on Interstate 40, he sat in Sequoyah County jail despite facing no criminal charges, not even a traffic citation. County officials held him for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"They had no authority whatsoever," said Ted Hasse, a federal criminal defense attorney who sought Fan's release. “So we filed a petition for habeas corpus, an emergency petition, and requested to immediately let him out. We filed that in the morning. Then we didn't hear anything. We contacted the jail and the jail said ‘ICE just came and picked him up.’”
ICE took Fan to the David L. Moss Correctional Center in Tulsa. That meant that the habeas corpus petition Hasse filed was no longer valid.
A habeas corpus petition is a court request demanding that the government prove it has lawful authority to keep someone in custody. However, it must be filed in the judicial location where the person is being held.
Fan's case illustrates what happens after ICE arrests someone in Oklahoma: a system of detention facilities, jurisdictional complications, and mounting pressure, moving detainees from one jurisdiction to another like the pea in a shell game before a writ of habeas corpus can be filed.
"It is not about the actual merits of any of the cases," said Alex Gavern, an assistant clinical professor of law at the University of Tulsa and an immigration attorney. “None of this has to do with whether, under the law, someone has a claim to an immigration benefit. It's about whether they have the resources, the time, and the strength of will in detention.”
The Infrastructure
ICE, prison corporations, and state agencies are rapidly expanding Oklahoma's detention infrastructure to accommodate an unprecedented surge in arrests driven by a July 8 federal directive that subjects most immigrants to mandatory detention without bond hearings.
The move reverses what many believed to be a shining example of judicial reform that was decades in the making: the closing of all the private prisons in Oklahoma and the transfer of prisoners to state control. The last handover occurred in July 2025.
But the direction changed.
CoreCivic, one of the nation's largest private prison operators, announced in October that it had secured a contract to reopen the Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, a 2,160-bed prison that sat vacant for 15 years. The prison is expected to generate approximately $100 million in annual revenue for the company once fully operational.
The contract, finalized between the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and ICE, is part of a broader expansion. CoreCivic announced it signed contracts in the third quarter of 2025 to reactivate four previously idle facilities across multiple states, adding 6,353 beds with approximately $325 million in aggregate annual revenue once the prisons are fully activated.
Requests to CoreCivic for comment went unanswered.
In addition to Diamondback, Oklahoma now houses ICE detainees at the Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, the Kay County Detention Center in Newkirk, and multiple county jails.
ICE's Diamondback CoreCivic contract is valued at $100 million. In return, the company expects to invest an additional $13 million in renovations requested by ICE. The facility is listed as having 64 detainees in the first quarter of 2026, with a guaranteed minimum of 1,200 inmates, according to TRAC Immigration.
CoreCivic told investors in its October announcement that reactivating Diamondback was another step toward realizing the company's growth potential.
The Access Crisis
For immigration attorneys, the rapid expansion created a crisis of access. Lorena Rivas, an immigration attorney, said reaching clients detained at Diamondback has been difficult.
"The facility's just not ready to process people," she said. "People need to have access to immigration attorneys, which, obviously, there's none in Watonga. So we all are trying to have these communications with our clients via telephone."
She described detention center personnel as overwhelmed and under-skilled, and said obtaining responses was difficult.
"A lot of times you call these detention centers, and nobody answers the call, and nobody's responding to emails," Rivas said. "You email it to deportation officers who are in charge of them, they don't respond, or their voicemail is full."
Calls to Diamondback were not returned.
The Transfer Shell Game
The problems compound when ICE transfers detainees without notice, a practice attorneys said is a kind of shell game designed to frustrate legal challenges.
"A lot of what we see right now is that ICE holds people in Oklahoma for a short period of time and then transfers them further and further south," Gavern said.
He described a pattern in which detainees move from Oklahoma to Bluebonnet Detention Center in Texas, between Lubbock and Fort Worth, then to facilities in South Texas near San Antonio or Houston.
"Every transfer makes things more cumbersome because, you know, you hire a lawyer in Oklahoma and then you get transferred to Texas, that lawyer probably is gonna struggle with taking your case," Gavern said.
The transfers create jurisdictional complications for habeas corpus petitions challenging detention.
"If you have someone who's detained at Cimarron and they think, OK, we're going to the Northern District of Oklahoma or the Western District of Oklahoma to file our habeas, and then with zero notice ICE transfers that person overnight to Texas, well, all of a sudden you can't file that habeas petition in Oklahoma anymore," Gavern said.
In Fan's case, the transfer to Tulsa came just as Hasse was preparing to argue a habeas corpus petition before a Sequoyah County judge.
The timing, Hasse said, illustrates how ICE uses transfers to avoid judicial scrutiny.
Gavern said the online ICE detainee locator, which family members use to find loved ones, often doesn't update when transfers occur.
"People will just disappear from the system for days," Gavern said.
He said he recently learned of predatory practices in which non-lawyers charge families between $500 and $1,000 simply to find detained relatives.
The Pressure Campaign
Rivas said habeas corpus decisions are taking approximately two months, a time during which detained individuals face mounting pressure to accept so-called voluntary departure. ICE is offering detainees $2,500 plus a plane ticket to sign deportation orders and leave voluntarily, up from $1,000, according to both Gavern and Rivas.
"I think there's an understanding that if you make it hard enough, you generally hit about 90 days in detention and people are going to start just saying, ‘I'll sign whatever,’" Gavern said. "People are forced into a place where leaving their families behind is better than spending another month in an immigration prison … they are forcing people into these terrible decisions."
The strategy, attorneys said, allows the government to avoid adjudicating the merits of immigration cases entirely.
"What the government gets then is they don't have to do any work," Gavern said. "There's no concerns about due process because they're saying, oh, well, people made this choice to leave or sign their deportation order. But these changes are making it so cumbersome, basically they’re forcing people into these, you know, terrible decisions."
Gavern said the system can’t sustain the caseload.
"And so what's the way that you get around that?” Gavern said. “Well, you find a way to squeeze people into signing their own deportation orders."
The pressure is particularly acute for people such as Fan, who have valid work authorization and pending asylum cases but find themselves caught in a system that treats them as if they just arrived at the border illegally. Fan applied for asylum in California and, later, for work authorization, which he was granted.
An Alternative Vision
The most significant pushback came from Oklahoma City, where residents and city leaders successfully blocked a proposed ICE processing facility.
On January 27, more than 60 residents spoke at a five-hour City Council meeting opposing the Department of Homeland Security's plan to purchase a warehouse at 2800 S. Council Road, near Western Heights High School and its large Hispanic student population, and convert it into a facility that could hold 500 to 1,500 people for immigration processing. The crowd that showed up was loudly opposed.
Before them, Ward 2 Councilman James Cooper delivered an impassioned speech opposing the facility. He read a sworn affidavit from a pediatrician who witnessed Alex Pretti's killing in Minneapolis by federal agents.
"The victim had at least three bullet wounds in his back," Cooper read. "I saw an additional gunshot wound on the victim's upper left chest and another possible gunshot wound on his neck."
When he finished, Cooper made clear his disdain.
"I think it is bold that our current federal government can fund $45 billion dollars to fund this network of terror, and to do so at a time when what America's cities and towns are asking for is for us to put our people to work rebuilding our critical infrastructure," he said.
Two days later, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced that the property owners had discontinued talks with the Department of Homeland Security. The facility would not be built at that location.
"People will just disappear from the system for days."Alex GavernIn a similar move, the Choctaw Nation voiced its opposition to a proposed ICE detention facility at a former Big Lots distribution warehouse in Durant, near the Texas border.
"We oppose the location of the proposed ICE holding facility near the Choctaw Nation headquarters in Durant," Chief Gary Batton said. "We are extremely concerned about the proposed facility's close proximity to our day care, child education center and large employee base, which provides programs and services to our tribal members, including children and elders."
The statement came as Native Americans are often caught up in sweeps being conducted by ICE.
Questions remain about whether ICE will seek other properties in Oklahoma. Similar resistance has emerged in communities across the U.S. as the administration expands enforcement infrastructure nationwide.
The Human Cost
For people like Fan, who called 911 seeking help during a snowstorm and found himself arrested instead, the detention system means being held far from family and attorneys with little meaningful chance to present their cases.
ICE records now show that Fan was moved again, this time to the Cimarron Correctional facility in Cushing, which restarts the process. And again, his attorneys must attempt to reach him there.
Whether Fan or others like him will ultimately succeed in challenging their detention remains uncertain. What is clear is that Oklahoma has become a central player in a national strategy that treats detention not as a means of ensuring public safety, but as an end in itself, a system designed to pressure immigrants into giving up their legal claims and leaving the country voluntarily.
The new policy is dehumanizing, Rivas said, and can lead to mistreatment and abuse of the immigrant. The guards know no one is coming for the person they have imprisoned.
“ It changes the attitude as to how they treat them,” Rivas said. “They're not treated even as a criminal might be treated. A criminal is allowed access to their lawyer. Someone who robbed a bank would be allowed access to their lawyer.”
This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.