Politics
Local Sheriffs Are Turning Their Jails Into ICE Detention Centers
Vans carrying immigrants arrive at Ohio’s Butler County Jail, about an hour north of Cincinnati, throughout the day and night. They come from across the state, from Illinois, Michigan and even Arizona. Some detainees will spend a few nights here, others weeks, as they wait to be deported.
Immigrant detainees are not new to Butler County. Except for a hiatus during the Biden years, the sheriff has held a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use space in his jail for nearly two decades. But now they fill nearly half the jail’s 860 beds.
Butler is among the largest of a growing number of county jails and other local facilities that now house a sizable chunk of ICE detainees, many of whom have never been charged with a crime. The agency’s use of these facilities has more than doubled since President Trump took office, and jails held about 10 percent of all detainees, or 7,100 people, on average, each day in July.
With detention numbers at a record high, jails have proven to be a quick and convenient way for ICE to expand its detention capacity beyond existing federal and private facilities. Many sheriffs are eager to assist in Mr. Trump’s mass deportation plans — and to shore up their budgets — by offering up their beds.
“We’re essential,” said Jonathan Thompson, the executive director and chief executive of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “ICE can’t do what they need to do under the current circumstances without sheriffs and our jails.”
County jails play a critical role in ICE detention
Jails are often the first stop on the way to somewhere else in ICE’s vast detention network, and they fill a geographic hole for ICE in the Midwest in particular, where there are few detention centers.
At most jails, ICE can easily spin up a contract through existing partnerships to hold federal inmates with the U.S. Marshals Service, reducing the time it takes to approve a new facility. County jails do not have to provide immigrants the same level of legal and medical services as those offered in dedicated ICE facilities, and the bed space is usually less expensive, too.
This year, the agency has inked new detention contracts with jails in both rural counties and urban areas. Most of the sheriffs signing up are in red states or from Republican-led areas of blue states, like Nassau County in New York. But the agency also holds large contracts for detention space at jails in Democratic-led states, including Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont.
Norman Chaffins, the sheriff in Grayson County, Ky., visited the White House during the first Trump administration to hear from leaders at ICE and Border Patrol. “That’s where I first understood that even though we’re not a border state, we’re still feeling the effects of illegal immigrants right here in our county,” he said. The jail now holds about 150 people each day for ICE.
Legal groups and immigrant advocates say local jails are ill-equipped to house immigrants, whose needs for legal, language and medical services are often different from those of other inmates. Inspections at some local facilities have turned up violations of ICE standards — water leaking from ceilings into beds, no daily change of clean socks and underwear — though conditions at county jails can vary widely.
During the Biden administration, ICE went as far as ending one jail contract in Alabama and pausing another in Florida, citing “serious deficiencies” and concerns about medical care. Under Mr. Trump, both facilities are once again holding hundreds of immigrants.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said that both facilities were recently inspected.
“If county jails are good enough to hold U.S. citizens, then they are sure good enough to hold illegal aliens,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.
Reviving an old model
Jails have been part of the ICE detention system since the agency’s creation. During the George W. Bush administration, ICE had contracts with around 350 jails, and about half of all immigrant detainees were held in local facilities. The detention model, at the time, was to seek out contracts with lots of jails for little bits of use — five, 10, 20 beds.
At the start of the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security overhauled its approach to detention and began to contract with dedicated facilities designed specifically for ICE, mostly by private prison operators.
“At the county jails, oversight was complicated, and there were concerns about mixing civil immigration detainees with criminal inmates, and bad things were happening,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations. “The thinking was: Let’s reduce the number of county jails and focus on building civil detention.”
Under Mr. Trump, ICE is seeking both new and old ways to find space for the tens of thousands of people in its custody. The administration has reopened several private facilities that sat dormant, and it has struck deals in Indiana and Nebraska to use beds in their state prisons. And it has turned back to the county jails.
“All you sheriffs in the room, we need your bed space,” Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, said at a National Sheriffs’ Association’s conference in February.
Average daily population at local facilities with the largest growth in ICE detention this year
County jails have made room for ICE detainees
A single county jail provides ICE with at most 500 beds a day, though many operate above their contracted capacity. In July, there were about 163 local facilities being used by ICE, and, on average, they each held about 44 people a day.
“ICE doesn’t have the capacity for what they’re doing,” said Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Pinellas County, Fla. He said that ICE needs more beds for longer stays — 60 to 90 days — which some jails can provide. “You can deputize tons of local cops, but if the system doesn’t have enough room, what are you doing?”
In many cases, the size of the jail is less important to ICE’s strategy than its location. People arrested in nearly any state can be held locally until ICE can find space in one of its large, private detention facilities clustered in the South. Since the start of Mr. Trump’s crackdown, more than a third of all people arrested by ICE have been held in a local facility at some point.
Thousands of ICE detainees have been moved through county jails
“We have the largest jail infrastructure in the world, and it’s an easy thing for ICE to fall back on,” said Silky Shah, the executive director of the Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that opposes immigrant detention. “The jail is a really central component of the deportation machine.”
Political and other benefits
Many sheriffs see the decision to partner with ICE as good policy — most support tougher immigration restrictions, according to a 2022 survey — and good politics. Often, their constituents do too.
“There’s an ideological role that’s played where sheriffs are excited about participating in the deportation process and supporting President Trump’s agenda,” said Mirya Holman, a professor of public policy at the University of Houston who studies the role of the sheriff’s office.
Inside Butler County Jail, Sheriff Richard K. Jones’s office displays several photographs of Mr. Trump, including one of both men thumbs-upping together after a campaign rally in Cincinnati in 2016 where the sheriff took the stage.
Mr. Jones first signed on to accept ICE detainees in 2008 but canceled the jail’s contract under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in part because he didn’t like the administration’s immigration policies. (The jail was also facing a lawsuit brought by two immigrants who alleged they were beaten by guards.)
Mr. Jones said he got interested in helping ICE 20 years ago after an undocumented immigrant released from his jail went on to rape a 9-year-old girl. He feels his motivations line up with the administration’s enforcement priorities, even as they have expanded to include people without a criminal record.
His corrections staff members, he said, prefer to work in the cellblocks housing immigrants.
“They don’t cause any trouble. They stay to themselves. They have tables they can play cards on,” he said. “My local homegrown prisoners want to fight all the time.”
ICE typically pays jails $70 to $110 per day per detainee, usually more than counties budget for local inmates. For some counties, that is a small but significant — and reliable — source of revenue. In Butler County, the total budget for the sheriff’s office this year is $49 million, and the county expects to earn about $4 million from ICE.
But at least some sheriffs say it’s not worth it.
“We were making $1 million a year holding federal inmates,” Joe Kennedy, the sheriff in Dubuque County, Iowa, said about an earlier contract with the federal government. He declined an invitation from ICE to offer detention space in his jail this year.
“The problem was, logistically, it was very difficult. You’re responsible for moving the inmates, getting them to court hearings — we were running people all over,” he said. “We’re not interested in putting our staff through that again.”
‘Carceral, punitive places’
One of the chief criticisms of ICE’s jail partnerships is that jails are meant for criminal, not civil, detention. Most immigration violations are a civil offense, and about a third of people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal history.
“People hate private detention because they hate the profit motive, but the local jails are jail — they are carceral, punitive places,” said Royce Murray, who was a senior D.H.S. official in the Biden administration.
In interviews, immigrants who spent time detained at county jails in Florida, Indiana and Kentucky described what they said was cruel and unfair treatment by corrections staff, including taking away their mattresses and bedding, or refusing to provide basic necessities like cups and spoons. One detainee said he would rinse out old potato chip bags in order to have something to drink water from.
Unlike local inmates arrested on charges like drunk driving or drug possession, immigrant detainees are rarely given the option to bond out of jail. While most are transferred to bigger ICE facilities after 72 hours, in some cases, they have spent weeks or months inside jails not designed for long-term stays.
Average length of stay for ICE detainees held at county jails this year
There was once an effort to make the rules governing ICE facilities consistent — provisions like no less than five hours per week of access to law libraries for detainees, and at least one hour per day of outdoor physical exercise — but the agency has loosened those requirements for some facilities over the years, including many jails.
This year, there have been reports of overcrowded, unsanitary and inhumane conditions at some of the local facilities ICE uses. Detainees at a state corrections facility in Anchorage said they had been pepper sprayed and denied access to their lawyers. At the Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Mo., — which signed its first ICE detention contract this year — a 27-year-old Colombian man died by suicide in April. (As of this month, the jail will no longer accept new ICE detainees and will transfer existing ones, citing cost concerns.)
Federal officials declined to answer specific questions about these cases and said all jails used by ICE meet federal detention standards. “Routine inspections are one component of ICE’s multilayered inspections and oversight process that ensures transparency in how facilities meet the threshold of care outlined in contracts with facilities, as well as ICE’s national detention standards,” Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, said.
On a visit in July, the Butler County Jail appeared clean and organized. It was not crowded. The jail holds about 90 people per cellblock, or “pod,” with two people per cell. Male ICE detainees were held in a separate area of the jail from regular inmates, but the few women were mixed with the local population. Small televisions showing Bounce TV played in the cells.
But there was no library, no internet access or computers. In the pod reporters visited in July, there was one cart of about two dozen books. The pods at the jail each have their own recreation area: a concrete basketball half-court with a single window. Detainees are not allowed outside.
new video loaded: Lawmakers Spar with Bondi Over Epstein Files
transcript
transcript
Lawmakers Spar with Bondi Over Epstein Files
Attorney General Pam Bondi, sitting in a room with survivors of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, refused to apologize for the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
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“No, I’m going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question. Your theatrics are ridiculous.” “It is shocking that the department did not redact the names of Epstein’s victims, but it did redact the names of their abusers. “It is about you taking responsibility… … and are waiting for you to turn to them and apologize.” “Have you apologized to President Trump?” “Who’s responsible? Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did.” “I have spent my entire career fighting for victims and I will continue to do so.”
By Shawn Paik
February 12, 2026
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Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida has introduced legislation aimed at eliminating the nation’s controversial H-1B visa program.
“Prioritizing foreign labor over the well-being and prosperity of American citizens undermines our values and national interests,” Steube said, according to a press release.
“Our workers and young people continue to be displaced and disenfranchised by the H-1B visa program that awards corporations and foreign competitors at the expense of our workforce,” he continued.
ARE AMERICAN WORKERS BEING REPLACED? INSIDE THE H-1B VISA CONTROVERSY
Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., makes his way to a House Republican Conference meeting with President Donald Trump on the budget reconciliation bill in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“We cannot preserve the American dream for our children while forfeiting their share to non-citizens. That is why I am introducing the EXILE Act to put working Americans first again,” the congressman said in the statement.
“EXILE Act” is short for “Ending Exploitative Imported Labor Exemptions Act.”
In September, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation to require a $100,000 payment with each petition for an H-1B worker.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S $100K ONE-TIME FEE FOR NEW H-1B VISA APPLICATIONS SPARKS RAGING DEBATE
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before departing from the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 6, 2026. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)
“The Secretary of State shall verify receipt of payment of the amount described in section 1 of this proclamation during the H-1B visa petition process and shall approve only those visa petitions for which the filing employer has made the payment described in section 1 of this proclamation,” the proclamation reads, in part.
The congressman argued that H-1B is bad for Americans.
TRUMP’S BACKING OF H-1B VISA PROGRAM EXPOSES CRACKS WITHIN MAGA MOVEMENT
U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., wears a campaign hat for U.S. President Donald Trump during the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House June 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“American workers have been ripped off by the corrupt H-1B visa program for far too long. Corporations have repeatedly abused this system to help their bottom line by importing cheaper foreign labor which has suppressed wages and left millions of Americans locked out of good-paying jobs,” Steube wrote in a post on X.
Carlos Aranibar is a former Downey public works commissioner and remains involved in local Democratic politics. But until a few weeks ago, the son of Bolivian and Mexican immigrants hadn’t joined any actions against the immigration raids that have overwhelmed Southern California.
Life always seemed to get in the way. Downey hadn’t been hit as hard as other cities in Southeast L.A. County, where elected officials and local leaders urged residents to resist and helped them organize. Besides, we’re talking about Downey, a city that advocates and detractors alike hyperbolically call the “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its middle-class Latino life and conservative streak.
Voters recalled a council member in 2023 for being too wokosa, and the council decided the next year to block the Pride flag from flying on city property. A few months later, Donald Trump received an 18.8% increase in voters compared to 2020 — part of a historic shift by Latino voters toward the Republican Party.
That’s now going up in flames. But it took a while for Aranibar to full-on join the anti-migra movement — and people like him are shaping up to be a real threat to President Trump and the GOP in the coming midterms and beyond.
On Jan. 27, Aranibar saw a Customs and Border Protection truck on the way home from work. That jolted Aranibar, an electrician with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Local 11, into action.
“It’s not something like that I was in a bubble and I was finally mad — I’ve been mad,” the 46-year-old said. “But seeing [immigration patrols] so close to my city, I thought ‘That’s not cool.’”
He Googled and called around to see how best to join others and resist. Someone eventually told him about a meeting that evening in a downtown Downey music venue. It was happening just a few days after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti after he tried to shield a fellow protester from pepper spray, and a few weeks after immigration agents tried to detain two Downey gardeners with legal status before residents hounded them away and recorded the encounter.
Aranibar joined more than 200 people standing shoulder to shoulder for the launch of a Downey ICE Watch group. They learned how to spot and track immigration agents and signed up for email updates. A box of whistles was passed around so people could alert their neighbors if la migra was around.
“Who here has been a member of a patrol?” an organizer asked from the stage.
Only a few people raised their hands.
“I saw familiar faces and new faces, energized — it was really nice,” Aranibar said afterward. “I got the sense that people in Downey have been fired up to do something, and now it was happening.”
A similarly unexpected political awakening seemed to be happening just down the street at Downey City Hall, on the other side of the political aisle.
Mayor Claudia Frometa set tongues wagging across town after video emerged of her whooping it up with other Latino Trump supporters the night he won his reelection bid. Activists since have demanded she speak out against the president’s deportation deluge, protesting in front of City Hall and speaking out during council meetings when they didn’t buy her rationale that local government officials couldn’t do much about federal actions.
“Mayor Frometa is not a good Californian right now,” councilmember Mario Trujillo told me before the Jan. 27 council meeting. During the previous meeting, Frometa cut off his mic and called for a recess after Trujillo challenged Frometa to talk to “her president” and stop what’s going on. “It’s not a time to deflect, it’s not a time to hedge — it’s a time to stand up. She’s giving us a bulls—t narrative.”
Even Downey Mayor Claudia Frometa, a supporter of President Trump, has called out his immigation policies.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
That night, Frometa listened to critics like Trujillo slam her anew while wearing a wearied smile. When it was her turn to speak at the end of the night, she looked down at her desk as if reading from prepared remarks — but her voice and gesticulations felt like she was speaking from somewhere deeper.
“This issue [of deportations] which we have been seeing unfold and morph into something very ugly — it’s not about politics anymore,” Frometa said. “It’s about government actions not aligning with our Constitution, not aligning with our law and basic standards of fairness and humanity.”
As she repeatedly put on and removed her glasses, Frometa encouraged people to film immigration agents and noted the council had just approved extra funding for city-sponsored know-your-rights and legal aid workshops.
“This is beyond party affiliation,” the mayor concluded, “and we will stand together as a community.”
Suddenly, the so-called “Mexican Beverly Hills” was blasting Trump from the left and the right. Among Latinos, such a shift is blazing around the country like memes about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. Trump’s support among former voters has collapsed to the point that Florida state senator Ileana Garcia, co-founder of Latinas for Trump, told the New York Times that the president “will lose the midterms” because of his scorched-earth approach to immigrants.
Former Assembly member Hector de la Torre said he’s not surprised by what’s happening in a place like Downey.
“When it hits home like that, it’s not hypothetical anymore — it’s real,” he said. De La Torre was at the Downey ICE Watch meeting and works with Fromenta in his role as executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, which advocates for 27 cities stretching from Montebello to Long Beach to Cerritos and all the southeast L.A. cities.
“People are coming out the way they maybe didn’t in the past “ he continued. “It’s that realization that [raids] can even happen here.”
Mario Guerra is a longtime chaplain for the Downey police department and former mayor who remains influential in local politics — he helped the entire council win their elections. While he seemed skeptical of the people who attended the Downey ICE Watch — “How many of then were actual residents?” — he noted “frustration” among fellow Latino Republicans over Trump and his raids.
“I didn’t vote for masked men picking people up at random,” Guerra said before mentioning the migra encounter with the gardeners in January. “If that doesn’t weigh on your heart, then you’ve got some issues. All this will definitely weigh on the midterms.”
Even before Frometa’s short speech, I had a hint of what was to to come. Before the council meeting, I met with the termed-out mayor in her office.
The 51-year-old former Democrat is considered a rising GOP star as one of the few Republican Latino elected officials in Los Angeles and the first California Republican to head the nonpartisan National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Her family moved to Downey from Juarez, Mexico when she was 12. Whites made up the majority of the suburban city back then, and it was most famous in those days as the land that birthed the Carpenters and the Space Shuttle.
Now, Downey is about 75% Latino, and four of its five council members are Latino.
So what did Frometa expect of Trump in his second term?
“I was expecting him to enforce our laws,” she replied. “To close our border so that we didn’t have hundreds of thousands coming in unchecked. I was expecting him to be tough on crime. But the way it’s being played out with that enforcement and the tactics is not what we voted for. No. No.”
Over our 45-minute talk, Frometa described Trump’s wanton deportation policy as “heartbreaking,” “racial profiling,” “problematic,” “devastating” and “not what America stands for.” The mayor said Republicans she knows feel “terrible” about it: “You cannot say you are pro-humanity and be OK with what’s happening.”
Asked if she was carrying a passport like many Latinos are — myself included — she said she was “almost” at that point.
A home in Downey shows support for Trump in 2024.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Frometa defended her relative silence compared to other Latino elected officials over the matter.
“We live in a time that is so polarizing that people want their elected officials to come out fighting,” she said. “And I think much more can be accomplished through different means.”
Part of that is talking with other Southern California Republicans “at different levels within the party” about how best to tell the Trump administration to “change course and change fast,” although she declined to offer details or names of other GOP members involved.
I concluded our interview by asking if she would vote for Trump again if she had the chance.
“It’s a very hard — It’s a hard question to answer,” Frometa said with a sigh. “We want our communities to be treated fairly, and we want our communities to be treated humanely. Are they being treated that way right now? They’re not. And I’m not OK with that.”
So right now you don’t know?
“Mm-hmm.”
You better believe there’s a lot more right-of-center Latinos right now thinking the same.
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