Hundreds of Nebraskans gathered along U.S. 83 south of the McCook ICE detention facility Saturday, marking nearly a year since Gov. Jim Pillen announced the conversion of a state prison into an immigration detention center known informally as the "Cornhusker Clink."
The rally and vigil, titled "We Have Not Forgotten: Road to Solidarity," drew organizers and attendees from across the state — Lincoln, Omaha, Kearney, North Platte and others — many arriving on buses coordinated by ACLU Nebraska. Organizers had expected between 250 and 500 people.
Courtnei Swanson helped lead the event as an organizer with Nebraska Voices, the McCook-based organization involved. For Swanson, the fight over the facility isn't abstract — she worked at what was formerly called the Work Ethic Camp from 2018 to 2020, before it was converted, and has family members who work there today.
Saturday's turnout exceeded what Swanson had expected. She said it spoke to something bigger about the state itself.
"It definitely shows that there are more of us who care than you know," Swanson said. "It's a smaller state, it's a red state, and I didn't think we would have the amount of support that we'd have been shown to have."
That support hasn't been universal. Swanson said she's received pushback for her organizing — including a text from someone unhappy about the protest — though she said it's been minimal overall.
"It does really kind of put you in perspective," she said. "It makes you think, am I doing the right thing? If somebody is this mad about it, is this really the right thing to do? The answer is yes, the answer is yes."
More often, Swanson said, the response in McCook has simply been quiet.
"There has been a lot of indifference," she said. "There are people who are vocal and they dislike the facility, but I have seen a lot of indifference."
The facility's conversion has caused friction closer to home, too. Swanson said her father and one of her aunts still work at the facility, and that she's run into some former workers who stayed on after the transition.
"I have met a couple of people today who have worked out there," she said. "They told me that they just felt so horrible that they couldn't continue to do it."
When asked what the rally's name means to her, Swanson pointed to fading public attention.
"A lot of the coverage and a lot of the support has died down over time," she said, "whether that's from lack of coverage or people just being burnt out. We are still going. We have not forgotten. And we want to show others the same."
Why McCook, why now
The rally is the latest in a yearlong fight over the former McCook Work Ethic Camp, which Pillen and the Department of Homeland Security announced in August 2025 would be converted into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility nicknamed the "Cornhusker Clink."
The facility, which can house up to 300 people, opened to detainees in November 2025 despite a Nebraska Appleseed lawsuit challenging the state's authority to convert and operate it as an ICE detention center.
A Red Willow County judge let the case proceed in October, declining to block state spending on the facility, before dismissing it in March. Nebraska Appleseed has appealed, and the case remains pending.
Since the facility opened, ACLU Nebraska has filed separate federal lawsuits over detainee bond hearings and attorney access, and only five of 49 invited state lawmakers attended a December walkthrough of the site.
A June investigation by Nebraska News Service in partnership with the Midwest Newsroom also found inconsistencies in state financial records tracking the facility's federal funding. The reporting also found the facility has divided McCook, a city of about 7,500 where some residents welcomed the jobs and others say the decision was made without meaningful input.
Mindy Rush Chipman, executive director of ACLU Nebraska, told Nebraska Public Media News the gathering was meant to send a message to elected officials.
"We're here today to send a message to our elected officials that we do not support Nebraska being volunteered to be part of the Trump administration's mass deportation machine," Rush Chipman said. "We're also here today to show our immigrant friends, neighbors, and loved ones that we support them and that they make Nebraska better, and they make our country great."
She pushed back on characterizations of who is being held at the facility.
"There is a false narrative that the McCook facility is going to house the worst of the worst, serious criminals — and that is 100% not true," she said. "Our clients, for the majority, are moms, brothers, sisters. They're workers that we need in our communities. They've been ripped away from their families."
She described her organization's legal strategy as a constant back-and-forth with shifting federal policy.
"It's much like a game of whack-a-mole," she said, "where we figure out a strategy to release people from unlawful immigration, and then all of a sudden a policy or practice changes without precedent, and we're forced to find another legal strategy."
She said a recent Eighth Circuit ruling has made that litigation path more difficult, but that her office is still filing lawsuits attempting to free its clients.
When asked what she wanted Nebraskans to take from the day, Rush Chipman pointed to November's midterms.
"I think one of the most time-sensitive requests that we are making to all of Nebraskans is that it is time to raise your voice at the ballot box," she said. "We're approaching midterms, and we need to send lawmakers a message that we do not support this."
A McCook resident's view
Diane Lyons has watched the fight over the facility unfold from inside McCook — a small, largely conservative city, she told the crowd Saturday.
In the weeks after last August's announcement, she said, rumors spread on local Facebook groups that busloads of armed "instigators" were headed to McCook to disrupt the town's Heritage Days parade. The chamber of commerce director was worried enough to call police for an escort, Lyons said.
When someone online asked who was organizing the buses, another resident blamed "those liberal damn Democrats" — a label Lyons said applied to almost no one she knew in town. She and her husband called around to the few other local Democrats they could think of; no one had organized anything.
"So we figured we were safe," Lyons said. "But everybody at the park was very nervous."
In the end, six protesters showed up — one with ties to a former McCook resident who was upset by what was happening at the facility.
Lyons said the moment marked the start of nearly a year of small, sustained local organizing — organizing McCook hadn't seen in decades. Even now, she said, rumors persist online that outside protesters are bused in for every demonstration.
"So you guys have ruined it today, because you brought the damn bus," Lyons said — a nod to the ACLU-organized buses that carried Saturday's attendees in from across the state.
Lyons said the town's relationship to the facility is more complicated than outsiders might assume.
Before its conversion, she said, the Work Ethic Camp's inmates were a familiar, valued presence in the community — moving heavy museum exhibits, maintaining rural cemeteries, and setting up the town's annual Santa Claus Lane display each December. The facility also employed more than 80 people in stable jobs with good benefits, she said.
"And then all of a sudden it was gone," Lyons said. "The inmates were sent away. The garden was bulldozed. Rows and rows and rows of barbed wire were put up."
Many of those employees who kept their jobs after the conversion have told her privately that they're struggling, she said.
"They don't like what's happened. They don't like the atmosphere," Lyons said. "They certainly don't like a lot of the other ICE employees that have been brought in from out of state to work out there."
She closed with a direct appeal to the crowd to vote in this fall's elections.
"We need a new governor," Lyons said. "Take your frustration, take your worry, take your fear, and take it to the ballot box."
Other community voices
For many attendees, the drive to McCook was personal. A group of University of Nebraska at Kearney students rode one of the ACLU-organized buses, leaving around 8:30 a.m. and stopping in North Platte before arriving shortly after noon.
Ava Lindstrom, a UNK student who has lived in Kearney her whole life, said a restaurant owner she had known for years — a business she had "many memories" of — was detained by ICE and deported in the middle of a semester.
"It just felt really important for me to come here today to try to right that wrong myself," Lindstrom said. "But also just because this is an issue that people should be showing up for."
Lindstrom said she came because she believes the country is failing to guarantee basic rights.
"The fact that we can't give people even basic human rights ... is ridiculous," she said. "I think that there needs to be significant changes, and the only way that we can do that is united as a people."
Emma Risinger, another UNK student, said she came because of what she sees as a disconnect between the state's values and its actions.
"I think so much of the culture of Nebraska is built on loving your neighbor and helping your community," Risinger said. "And I think what's going on is deeply, deeply hypocritical. And I don't think it's right to stay silent about that."
For Risinger, that disconnect is personal. She said she sees more common ground with the people detained at the facility than with the officials responsible for putting them there.
"I and everyone else here has so much more in common with the people who are in that camp than they ever will with the people who put those people there," she said. "So that's why I'm here."
Risinger said she believes a lot of people care about what's happening with ICE, but that campus attitudes vary.
"It's definitely a different culture than what you'd get at UNL," she said. "It's a more conservative campus for sure."
Risinger closed simply: "I love Nebraska. I know we can be better than this."
What's next
Organizers gave no indication Saturday's rally would be the last. Swanson said the event had been in the works for roughly three months, made possible in part by local landowners who allowed the rally to use their property along U.S. 83. She said Nebraska Voices’ ultimate goal is for the facility to close.
Rush Chipman said ACLU Nebraska's legal work at the facility will continue, alongside a broader push to get Nebraskans to the polls this fall.
Gov. Pillen's office and the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.