Cash-strapped jails are taking in immigrants to help Trump’s agenda and fill their coffers

Donald Trump’s administration is relying on the nation’s vast correctional system to detain and deport immigrants — and cash-strapped local jails could see a massive windfall from federal contracts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is contracting with or operating 147 public and private detention facilities, according to data reviewed by The Marshall Project.

That’s an increase of 40 facilities from the end of Joe Biden’s administration, and ICE is planning to spend another $45 billion on new contracts to ramp up Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, according to federal requests for proposals reviewed by the nonprofit criminal justice news organization.

“It’s a pain in the butt because this is a whole new ground that we are covering, but then, you know, when you are one of the poorest counties in the state of Missouri, I’ve got to figure out how to pay for law enforcement,” Ozark County Sheriff Cass Martin told the Marshall Project.

The county received a $1.1 million contract with ICE, and the sheriff is putting the funds towards higher wages and hiring new recruits.

“Nobody wants to be in law enforcement. It’s dying,” Martin said.

House Republicans, meanwhile, are proposing more than $150 billion in new spending for immigration enforcement, with a goal of jailing more than 100,000 people in detention centers across the country.

Federal facilities are running out of space to keep up with the president’s demands for sweeping arrests. The administration is instead relying on sympathetic state and local law enforcement officials, eager to boost funding for their own agencies.

More than 49,000 people are currently in ICE detention, according to nonpartisan data research group TRAC at Syracuse University. Nearly half of the people in custody do not have a criminal record.

The vast majority of people in ICE detention — 90 percent — are jailed in privately run prisons.

At least nine people have died while in ICE custody this year, including one death in a rural Missouri jail that the local coroner ruled a suicide. In 2024, ICE reported 11 deaths.

In 2023, Brayan Garzon was detained by immigration authorities for three months before settling in St. Louis, Missouri. Earlier this year, he was arrested for theft and shoplifting and detained in the Phelps County Jail, which had just received a $21 million expansion that doubled the size of the facility to 400 beds.

At the same time, Phelps County sheriff’s office was reporting it was struggling to pay bills “due to lack of funds,” and that an ICE agreement would generation an additional $3.6 million a year on top of the sheriff’s typical budget of $5.5 million, according to the Marshall Project, citing county records.

On April 7, Garzon was found near death in his cell with a blanket wrapped around his neck. He was pronounced dead the next day.

Democratic lawmakers have argued that increased spending on detention doesn’t address humanitarian concerns but merely puts more money into the president’s demands to swiftly remove millions of immigrants from the country.

At the start of the year, only two county jails in Ohio were jailing 120 immigrants in ICE detention. Now, the state has at least four times the capacity, with five more county jails offering up space for ICE detainees.

“We’re talking about people who are awaiting a decision on a federal civil immigration matter,” according to Ohio Immigrant Alliance director Lynn Tramonte. “Taking these people from their homes and communities, while they await a federal process that could take years, is unconscionable.”

The expansion of immigration enforcement into local jails dovetails with the administration’s push for state and local law enforcement officers to work with federal agents. So-called 287(g) agreements — named after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act — effectively deputize local law enforcement to work with federal agencies to enforce federal law.

ICE has signed 571 of those cooperative agreements covering 40 states as of May 18, according to ICE.

The expansion of the 287(g) program “further fuels Trump’s mass deportation agenda by expanding the dragnet for putting people into the arrest to deportation pipeline,” according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

In New York, where three counties have signed “detainer” agreements to hold immigrants in local jails while waiting to be picked up by federal agents, Democratic state lawmakers have repeatedly proposed legislation to ban the state from contracting with ICE.

And in Wisconsin, Republican state lawmakers have proposed legislation to force local sheriffs to comply with ICE or risk losing federal funding altogether.

The administration is meanwhile redirecting officers from several federal agencies — from agents focused on drug trafficking and illegal guns to agents in the law enforcement wing of the US Postal Service — to combat immigration instead, shifting roughly 2,000 officers into the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump also signed executive orders last month directing federal agencies to target so-called “sanctuary” states and cities that they allege are interfering or not complying with federal immigration law, with threats to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding.

A coalition of 20 Democratic attorneys general are now suing the administration, accusing the president of threatening to cut off unrelated funding for emergency services and infrastructure support to “bully” them into supporting the president’s agenda.