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.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order blocking U.S. courts from seizing Venezuelan oil revenues held in American Treasury accounts.
The order states that court action against the funds would undermine U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
President Donald Trump is pictured signing two executive orders on Sept. 19, 2025, establishing the “Trump Gold Card” and introducing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas. He signed another executive order recently protecting oil revenue. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump signed the order on Friday, the same day that he met with nearly two dozen top oil and gas executives at the White House.
The president said American energy companies will invest $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s “rotting” oil infrastructure and push production to record levels following the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The U.S. has moved aggressively to take control of Venezuela’s oil future following the collapse of the Maduro regime.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
One of the most important political stories in American history — one that is particularly germane to our current, tumultuous time — unfolded in Los Angeles some 65 years ago.
Sen. John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had just received his party’s nomination for president and in turn he shunned the desires of his most liberal supporters by choosing a conservative out of Texas as his running mate. He did so in large part to address concerns that his faith would somehow usurp his oath to uphold the Constitution. The last time the Democrats nominated a Catholic — New York Gov. Al Smith in 1928 — he lost in a landslide, so folks were more than a little jittery about Kennedy’s chances.
“I am fully aware of the fact that the Democratic Party, by nominating someone of my faith, has taken on what many regard as a new and hazardous risk,” Kennedy told the crowd at the Memorial Coliseum. “But I look at it this way: The Democratic Party has once again placed its confidence in the American people, and in their ability to render a free, fair judgment.”
The most important part of the story is what happened before Kennedy gave that acceptance speech.
While his faith made party leaders nervous, they were downright afraid of the impact a civil rights protest during the Democratic National Convention could have on November’s election. This was 1960. The year began with Black college students challenging segregation with lunch counter sit-ins across the Deep South, and by spring the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had formed. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not the organizer of the protest at the convention, but he planned to be there, guaranteeing media attention. To try to prevent this whole scene, the most powerful Black man in Congress was sent to stop him.
The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was also a warrior for civil rights, but the House representative preferred the legislative approach, where backroom deals were quietly made and his power most concentrated. He and King wanted the same things for Black people. But Powell — who was first elected to Congress in 1944, the same year King enrolled at Morehouse College at the age of 15 — was threatened by the younger man’s growing influence. He was also concerned that his inability to stop the protest at the convention would harm his chance to become chairman of a House committee.
And so Powell — the son of a preacher, and himself a Baptist preacher in Harlem — told King that if he didn’t cancel, Powell would tell journalists a lie that King was having a homosexual affair with his mentor, Bayard Rustin. King stuck to his plan and led a protest — even though such a rumor would not only have harmed King, but also would have undermined the credibility of the entire civil rights movement. Remember, this was 1960. Before the March on Washington, before passage of the Voting Rights Act, before the dismantling of the very Jim Crow laws Powell had vowed to dismantle when first running for office.
That threat, my friends, is the most important part of the story.
It’s not that Powell didn’t want the best for the country. It’s just that he wanted to be seen as the one doing it and was willing to derail the good stemming from the civil rights movement to secure his own place in power. There have always been people willing to make such trade-offs. Sometimes they dress up their intentions with scriptures to make it more palatable; other times they play on our darkest fears. They do not care how many people get hurt in the process, even if it’s the same people they profess to care for.
That was true in Los Angeles in 1960.
That was true in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
That is true in the streets of America today.
Whether we are talking about an older pastor who is threatened by the growing influence of a younger voice or a president clinging to office after losing an election: To remain king, some men are willing to burn the entire kingdom down.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
1986 Movie Reviews – Black Moon Rising | The Nerdy
Video: Owner of Swiss Bar Detained in Fire Investigation
Video: Raising a Baby in Altadena’s Ashes
The Best Time To Take Turmeric for Weight Loss and How To Maximize Results
Washington National Opera leaves Kennedy Center, joining slew of artist exits
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
Video: Raising a Baby in Altadena’s Ashes
Trump signs order to protect Venezuela oil revenue held in US accounts
What Canada, accustomed to extreme winters, can teach Europe
New video shows fatal Minnesota ICE shooting from officer’s perspective
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
-
Detroit, MI7 days ago2 hospitalized after shooting on Lodge Freeway in Detroit
-
Technology4 days agoPower bank feature creep is out of control
-
Dallas, TX5 days agoDefensive coordinator candidates who could improve Cowboys’ brutal secondary in 2026
-
Iowa4 days agoPat McAfee praises Audi Crooks, plays hype song for Iowa State star
-
Dallas, TX2 days agoAnti-ICE protest outside Dallas City Hall follows deadly shooting in Minneapolis
-
Health6 days agoViral New Year reset routine is helping people adopt healthier habits
-
Delaware1 day agoMERR responds to dead humpback whale washed up near Bethany Beach
-
Nebraska3 days agoOregon State LB transfer Dexter Foster commits to Nebraska