Saturday, October 17, 2026 • Sunny and cool. 59-60. 🌞

We received 299 votes on the Friday poll, “Should Oklahoma require candidates to disclose more details about personal loans to their campaigns?”

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes, voters deserve full transparency. (266)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No, current disclosure rules are sufficient. (12)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Only for loans above a certain amount. (15)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Not sure (6)

New poll question at the bottom of today’s newsletter. (You can also suggest a poll question by emailing me at [email protected].)

By Ari Fife & Greg Constantine, The Frontier
👉 Click here to support this newsroom

An empty prison in rural western Oklahoma was an ideal spot to house immigrants as part of the second Trump administration’s ambitious plan to deport millions of people.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement scrambled to buy warehouses and repurpose military bases and vacant prisons across the country in order to boost its capacity to detain people awaiting deportation proceedings.

The Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga once housed prison inmates for the state of Arizona, but had been closed for more than a decade. Its owner, the private prison contractor CoreCivic, now hoped to quickly fill the prison again as part of the growing immigrant detention business. But ICE needed help from the state of Oklahoma to get a deal done quickly.

ICE signed an intragovernmental service agreement with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for immigration detention at Diamondback in September 2025, a process that several experts told The Frontier can help the federal government bypass competitive bidding and contracting requirements.

The Department of Corrections then outsourced facility operations to CoreCivic, which is projected to earn about $100 million a year from running Diamondback. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections gets almost $10 million a year from the federal government to monitor CoreCivic’s compliance with the state’s agreement with ICE, including federal detention standards, and to “perform other administrative functions.”

Diamondback has rapidly become one of the largest immigration detention centers in the nation since reopening late last year. Data provided by the city of Watonga indicates that Diamondback held an average of 1,923 detainees per day in August.

👉 Click here to read the full story

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