'Perverse' incentives: How local governments might cash in on Trump's migrant detention
The Marshall Project spotlights local officials who see President Donald Trump's promise of mass deportation as an answer to their budget woes.
'Perverse' incentives: How local governments might cash in on Trump's migrant detention
Updated
Just before the 2024 presidential election, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said that if former President Donald Trump won, he would get back into the "deportation business." Now, the suburban Ohio sheriff has set aside 250 to 300 beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detainees—around a third of Butler County Jail's capacity, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, and a boon to the county's revenue.
Overwhelming evidence shows immigrants are less likely to commit crime than people born in the U.S. Sheriff Jones himself concedes that immigrants are not more prone to crime. However, he has echoed Trump's immigration rhetoric and vowed to do his part to enforce Trump's plans to deport undocumented immigrants. "I believe in American citizens first. People who have blood and sweat into this country have fought for it, them first. These other countries aren't first. We are," Jones told WLWT.
The detention part of the "deportation business" could be a profitable one for Butler County, The Marshall Project reports. In 2024, the county made over $6.7 million renting jail beds to other local and federal government agencies, including the U.S. Marshals and the Bureau of Prisons. Even before Trump's re-election, Butler County budgeted for an increase in that revenue to an estimated $8.5 million in 2025, according to the Journal-News.
A county commissioner offered support for the sheriff's plans to rent more beds to ICE: "Obviously, the more prisoners we have, the more revenue it produces," Commissioner Don Dixon said.
Butler County isn't the only entity that could see revenue rise with the deportation of immigrants.
Trump's plans will require building a massive nationwide infrastructure, including centers to detain people awaiting deportation, contracts to provide food and health care services during their incarceration, and planes to fly them out of the country.
The Biden administration has already laid the groundwork for deportations by extending private detention contracts. Still, Trump will face significant financial, legal, and logistical limitations in building or expanding any kind of deportation infrastructure. But even if he only partially delivers on his promises, the financial and human impacts could be significant.
Since the election, there has been a lot of attention on how many for-profit companies, especially private prisons, stand to rake in big profits from mass deportations. Some have already seen their stock prices skyrocket. But local governments may also assist Trump, for both political and financial reasons.
As The New York Times reported last month, it would be nearly impossible for Trump to execute his immigration plans without cooperation from local law enforcement.
Local law enforcement officers can check people's immigration statuses after an arrest and pass them along to federal officials. And The New Yorker recently described how the Trump administration might make it so even more people who are arrested locally may face deportation proceedings.
The job of detaining immigrants, though, is where local governments most clearly stand to profit. County jails may rent beds to ICE, expanding detention capacity. Local governments can also sign intergovernmental agreements to provide detention for ICE, and then subcontract to private companies to actually run the jails — essentially acting as middlemen between private jails and the federal government. That allows ICE to bypass rules about documentation and competitive contracting, according to a government report.
Local jails are the most common type of detention facility that ICE uses, according to a recent report from Vera, an advocacy organization working to end mass incarceration. These kinds of agreements already exist under the Biden administration, but could expand under Trump's deportation plans.
A 2022 report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public policy institute, found that local governments sometimes use jail space to generate income, by building "jails that are bigger than they need with the expectation of selling the extra space."
In some cases, immigrant detention is filling voids left by declining prison and jail populations.
In Louisiana, more than a dozen facilities closed after the state passed laws reducing mandatory minimums and increasing chances for parole. But some buildings were quickly repurposed to house migrants. The complex interplay between state, federal and local governments and also between public and private entities often makes oversight and accountability difficult, according to Bloomberg News. The journalistic investigation looked specifically at Louisiana's Winn Correctional Center, which is run by the private company LaSalle Corrections.
"The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections owns the facility," reporters at Bloomberg wrote. "The Winn Parish Sheriff's Office leases the property from the state. The sheriff's office then signs a contract with the federal government to allow the facility to be used for ICE detainees. Finally, LaSalle Corrections is subcontracted to handle day-to-day operations."
When lawyers with an advocacy organization tried to get records to investigate troubling allegations of abuse, each agency insisted someone else was responsible for keeping them.
While such arrangements may grow under Trump, there is already a long history of local jails playing a role in immigration detention. "The Migrant's Jail," a recently published book by Brianna Nofil, shows how these practices stretch back to the 1920's and '30s. "By the end of the 20th century, sheriffs are funding city emergency services, buying new police technologies, and eliminating personal property tax off of migrant incarceration revenue," Nofil told Princeton University Press.
The conditions of those jails were often inhumane. According to Nofil, in 1925, a grand jury found the situation at a Galveston, Texas jail so terrible, it declared it "a crime against humanity."
Problems with poor conditions continue today. In August, Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey wrote a letter to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns about deficient medical care and allegations of staff violence at Plymouth County Correctional Facility. But since then, the county has signed a new contract that more than doubles the jail's revenue, according to The Boston Globe, "paying the sheriff's office $215 per detainee per day."
Some states have taken action to limit how much local governments can contract with ICE, but have met resistance for financial reasons. Illinois passed a law banning ICE detention in 2021, but two counties sued the state. In court records, Kankakee County Sheriff Michael Downey said the county's contract with ICE generated $16 million over four years, which paid for many aspects of local government. Losing the contract would lead to a need to increase taxes, cut budgets, and lay off staff, the sheriff testified. A federal judge ruled against the counties.
Stacy Suh, Program Director at Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that opposes immigration detention, told me that these kinds of incentives are perverse. Suh also argued that prisons and jails don't always deliver the jobs or economic boons towns hope for.
"We're very concerned that this detention expansion is happening—both through local governments that are struggling with shrinking budgets, or private prison corporations that are looking to profit," Suh said.
This story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Originally published on themarshallproject.org, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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