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.
Politics
Trump calls on House Republicans to vote to release Epstein files: ‘We have nothing to hide’
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President Trump is calling on House Republicans to vote to release files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, insisting he has “nothing to hide” and accusing Democrats of using the case as a distraction from GOP accomplishments.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump urged House Republicans to vote in favor of releasing the documents, describing the controversy as a “Democrat hoax perpetrated by radical left lunatics.”
“As I said on Friday night aboard Air Force One to the Fake News Media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown,’” Trump wrote.
WHITE HOUSE SLAMS DEMS’ ‘BAD-FAITH’ EPSTEIN DOC RELEASE AS DEMAND FOR FILES INTENSIFIES
US President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One as he departs Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 16, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump pointed to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) previous release of thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents.
He also noted that the agency is investigating possible ties between Epstein and “Democrat operatives” including former President Bill Clinton, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
“The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!” Trump said.
He added, “All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT, which is the Economy, ‘Affordability’ (where we are winning BIG!), our Victory on reducing Inflation from the highest level in History to practically nothing, bringing down prices for the American People, delivering Historic Tax Cuts, gaining Trillions of Dollars of Investment into America (A RECORD!), the rebuilding of our Military, securing our Border, deporting Criminal Illegal Aliens, ending Men in Women’s Sports, stopping Transgender for Everyone, and so much more!”
EPSTEIN DOCUMENTS RAISE NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT TRUMP CONDUCT AS HE DENOUNCES DEMOCRATS
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are pictured here. (Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Trump also argued that if the Democrats “had anything,” it would have surfaced prior to last year’s presidential election.
“Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it before our Landslide Election Victory,” Trump said. “Some ‘members’ of the Republican Party are being ‘used,’ and we can’t let that happen. Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein ‘TRAP,’ which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
AG BONDI ANNOUNCES DOJ INVESTIGATION INTO BILL CLINTON, OTHER DEMOCRATS OVER ALLEGED EPSTEIN TIES
Former President Bill Clinton speaks onstage during the Clinton Global Initiative September 2023 Meeting at New York Hilton Midtown on September 18, 2023, in New York City. (Noam Galai/Getty Images for Clinton Global Initiative)
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday the DOJ would probe prominent Democrats after new emails revealed ties to Epstein.
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In an X post Friday afternoon, Bondi said Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, would take the lead on the investigation.
“Clayton is one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country,” Bondi wrote in the post. “As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman and Larry Summers for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Alexandra Koch contributed to this report.
Politics
Indictment of ex-Newsom aide hints at feds’ probe into state’s earlier investigation of video game giant
An indictment unveiled this week charging Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff with political corruption threw California’s top political circles into chaos — and stirred speculation in the state capital about what triggered the federal investigation.
Authorities have not revealed any targets beyond Dana Williamson and two other influential political operatives associated with the state’s most powerful Democrats, all of whom are accused of fraud and siphoning campaign funds for personal use.
But details contained in the indictment and other public records indicate that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice had a keen interest in Williamson and other operatives’ involvement in the handling of a legal case involving “Corporation 1.” The facts revealed about “Corporation 1” match details of a controversial sex discrimination investigation that the state of California led into one of the world’s largest video game companies, Santa-Monica based Activision Blizzard Inc.
Williamson — an influential deal-maker and one of the state’s premier Democratic political consultants before and after she ran Newsom’s office — was arrested on corruption charges Wednesday. Two longtime associates, lobbyist Greg Campbell, a former high-level staffer in the California Assembly, and Sean McCluskie, a longtime aide to former state Atty. Gen. and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, have agreed to plead guilty to related charges.
After Williamson pleaded not guilty in a tearful court appearance Wednesday, her attorney, McGregor Scott, said that federal authorities had charged his client only after first approaching her to seek help with a probe they were conducting into Newsom, the nature of which remains unclear. Williamson declined to cooperate.
The governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Still, Republicans already are using the indictments to attack Newsom, who has openly said he is considering a run for president in 2028.
Williamson’s attorney did not offer any specifics on what federal officials may have been investigating.
But numerous threads in the indictment echo details in the Activision saga.
Williamson and Campbell both worked as advisors to Activision Blizzard, according to financial disclosures on file with the state. Williamson reported receiving income from the company prior to her appointment in Newsom’s office, state records show. According to records first filed earlier this year, Campbell disclosed that his lobbying firm started being paid by Activision around the time Williamson joined the governor’s office. Activision reported paying $240,000 to his firm in 2023 and 2024. The amount Williamson was paid from Activision was not disclosed.
Activision officials did not respond to emails requesting comment. Lawyers for Williamson, Campbell and McCluskie also did not respond or declined to comment.
The state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing in 2021 sued Activision Blizzard, which distributes video games such as “Call of Duty” and “Candy Crush,” alleging that company officials discriminated against women, paid them less than men and ignored reports of egregious sexual harassment.
The complaint alleges: The company “fostered a pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture that continues to thrive. In the office, women are subjected to ‘cube crawls’ in which male employees drink copious amounts of alcohol as they ‘crawl’ their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees. Male employees proudly come into work hungover, play video games for long periods of time during work while delegating their responsibilities to female employees, engage in banter about their sexual encounters, talk openly about female bodies, and joke about rape.”
Activision officials denied the allegations.
The allegations also were investigated by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Activision Blizzard agreed to a consent decree, approved in March 2022, with the agency that required the company to set up an $18-million fund for employees who experienced sexual harassment or discrimination, pregnancy discrimination or retaliation.
Just weeks later, the case drew national attention again when the lawyer overseeing the case for the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, Janette Wipper, was fired by the Newsom administration, and her chief deputy resigned and alleged that she was doing so to protest alleged interference of Newsom’s office in the investigation.
“The Office of the Governor repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and of next steps in the litigation,” the deputy, Melanie Proctor, wrote to her colleagues. “As we continued to win in state court, this interference increased, mimicking the interests of Activision’s counsel.”
A member of Activision’s board of directors contributed $40,200 to Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, and an additional $100,000 to a committee opposing the 2021 recall campaign against Newsom — an effort that failed.
Newsom’s office denied it was meddling. “Claims of interference by our office are categorically false,” Erin Mellon, Newsom’s then-communications director, said at the time.
As case continued to grind through Los Angeles Superior Court, the company stepped up its lobbying presence in Sacramento, according to disclosures filed with the state. Documents show Activision began paying Campbell starting in late 2022 to lobby on its behalf.
Around this time, Newsom announced that he was hiring Williamson to be his chief of staff.
In December 2023 the state announced it had reached a settlement agreement with Activision for $54 million, with the bulk of the funds going to compensate women who had been underpaid. The company did not admit any wrongdoing.
The FBI has made inquires about the Activision settlement, though the focus of the inquiry is unclear. When reached recently, Calabasas attorney Alan Goldstein, who handled a sexual harassment suit against Activision, said he received a call from an FBI agent looking to investigate California’s settlement — but that he couldn’t recall a “substantive conversation.”
Federal investigators were also looking at how Campbell, Williamson and another Sacramento political consultant, Alexis Podesta, conducted their affairs. In unveiling their charges this week, the U.S. Attorney’s office said the investigation began more than three years ago. All three consultants were members of the Sacramento-based Collaborative, a cooperative of top Democratic political operatives.
Podesta from 2017 to 2020 served as secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, which included the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing — the agency that launched the investigation of Activision in 2018.
Williamson received a federal subpoena for information about her handling of a government loan her business had received during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, according to details in the indictment. The indictment accused Williamson of spending vast sums on luxury items — including a Gucci bag, Chanel earrings and a $150,000 Mexican birthday vacation and party, plus yacht rental and private jet travel — and then claimed them as business expenses on her taxes.
She and Campbell had also allegedly conspired with McCluskie to siphon money from Becerra’s dormant campaign account to pay McCuskie’s wife for a fake, “no-show” job working for Williamson. When Williamson went to work for Newsom, the indictment alleges, Podesta took over handling the pass through payments.
By June 2024, someone in the circle was cooperating with federal investigators and wearing a wire, recording Williamson’s private conversations, according to transcripts included in the indictment.
On Nov.14, 2024, according to the indictment, FBI agents interviewed Williamson, questioning her about the Becerra campaign funds and about the pandemic funds.
Investigators also asked her about her actions “while serving in public office to influence the litigation involving the State of California and a former client — Corporation 1,” according to the indictment. The indictment doesn’t identify Corporation 1, but details match the Activision litigation. The indictment notes that Corporation 1 was Williamson’s former client and that it was involved in settlement discussions over a lawsuit with the state in 2023. It also references a state lawyer who had been fired in connection with the litigation.
Williamson, according to the indictment, told the FBI she did not pass any inside information to Campbell or other associates outside the government. But based on their recorded conversations, the indictment said, investigators believed that was not true.
They alleged that in January 2023, shortly after Williamson started as Newsom’s chief of staff, she revealed to Podesta that she had “told a high level government attorney to … get [the case] settled.”
The indictment notes that Corporation 1 was not only Williamson’s former client, but also now Podesta’s current client.
In June 2024, Williamson complained to Podesta that someone had submitted a California Public Records Act request seeking information about meetings and communications between Newsom officials and the company, according to the indictment.
Proctor, the state attorney who resigned in 2022 and had alleged that the Newsom administration was meddling in the Activision case, posted on her Bluesky social media account in July that she had submitted a public records request on May 29, 2024. She also posted the response from Newsom’s office, showing a meeting in January 2024 in the governor’s office among Williamson, Podesta and Robert Kotick, the former chief executive of Activision.
In their June conversation, according to the indictment, Williamson told Podesta, “I just wanted to alert you to the PRAS that we’re starting to get,” the indictment stated. PRAs refer to public records requests.
“Yeah. Ugh. F— her. They really don’t know who they are messing with,” Podesta responded.
“They really don’t,” Williamson said.
Podesta, who is identified in the indictment as “Co-Conspirator 2,” was not charged. On Thursday she sent a message to numerous associates offering her take on the situation.
“While I cannot discuss the details of the ongoing investigation, I want to state plainly that I have always conducted myself — and my business — with integrity.” She also said that she continued to “cooperate fully with federal authorities.”
On Friday afternoon, McCluskie and Campbell appeared in federal court in Sacramento to be arraigned on conspiracy charges in back-to-back proceedings.
Both men had previously reached plea agreements with prosecutors and will be back in court to enter those pleas, McCluskie in late November and Campbell in early December.
Prosecutors did not seek detention for either man, but they were ordered to surrender their passports and avoid associating with other alleged co-conspirators.
In brief remarks to reporters, Campbell’s attorney, Todd Pickles, said that his client “takes full accountability for his actions” and would “in appropriate time further discuss the charges.” But, Pickles noted, those charges “do not include Mr. Campbell engaging in advocacy or lobbying on behalf of any client.”
Times staff writers Katie King and Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.
By Nicholas Nehamas, Michael H. Keller, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, James Surdam, Joey Sendaydiego, Karen Hanley, Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Zach Wood and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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