MARTY SCHLADEN, Ohio Capital Journal — As Donald Trump took office Monday, his team said he would issue a flurry of executive orders to stop asylum seekers from coming to the United States and to expel huge numbers of noncitizens who are already here.
But as Ohio sheriffs eye federal contracts to hold detainees, an immigrant advocate has a warning: The cost and difficulties of taking them in on behalf of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement could be greater than sheriffs and county commissioners might think.
“They have to factor in litigation because immigrants who are in ICE jail have rights,” said Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “They have the right to medical treatment, they have the right to decent food and access to legal resources and all these things. Are you getting enough money from the federal government to cover your costs — including the cost of potential litigation if you violate people’s rights?”
As evidence, Tramonte pointed to the last time Trump was president. Jails in Butler, Morrow and Geauga counties all took in ICE detainees after 2017, and all had problems they probably didn’t anticipate.
As relatively small facilities, Morrow and Geauga counties struggled to cope with COVID-19 as it swept through their jails. Before mid-2020, 100% of the inmates in the Morrow County Jail at some point had been infected with the potentially deadly virus.
That prompted claims that foreign detainees and others being held weren’t able to see doctors or otherwise receive the health care to which all incarcerated people are entitled. A federal judge eventually ordered the release of ICE detainees.
As Morrow County Sheriff John L. Hinton dealt with covid, escapes and a suicide, he said his jail was substantially understaffed, and that it was difficult to hire enough corrections officers at the rate of pay the county could offer.
That’s a problem across the United States for jails and police departments, law enforcement officials said at a conference held in November by the National Immigration Forum.
“Every police department and sheriff’s office in the United States right now is hiring,” Marshalltown, Iowa, Police Chief Michael Tupper said as he argued against tasking local police and sheriff’s deputies with enforcing immigration law. “For the last five years it’s been a constant battle to try to maintain staffing.”
Tramonte, of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said those problems can become especially acute if a jail holds ICE detainees.
“It’s an indefinite form of detention because immigration court cases don’t have a specific timetable,” she said. “You could have somebody in your immigration jail for years. When you have immigrants in your jail, it could be forever.”
Especially problematic can be jails with corrections officers who don’t understand that even though they’re not citizens, ICE detainees have the same rights everybody else has.
A still-pending federal lawsuit against Butler County alleges that officers there “have called Black detainees numerous racial epithets, including ‘dirty Africans,’ ‘monkeys,’ and ‘goats.’”
The suit also says guards repeatedly beat ICE detainees without reason. In one instance, the suit says, they pushed Bayong Brown Bayong of Cameroon down some stairs. In another, an officer punched him repeatedly in the face and knocked out a tooth, the suit says.
“The guards continue to make threats such as, ‘I hope you die, bitch,’ and after being pushed down the stairs, ‘When you get down the stairs I’m going to beat all the teeth out of your mouth,” the lawsuit says.
Lawyers for Butler County and the corrections officers themselves deny the charges.
Tramonte said there’s a price for keeping ICE detainees that goes beyond money or prisoners getting sick or beaten.
“I want the sheriffs to be thinking about the true cost of detaining people on civil charges,” she said. “The cost to these individuals is taking a breadwinner out of their family homes, the psychological impact on them and their families — and many of their families include U.S. citizens.”
If a sheriff says he cares about citizens first, “he should care about the children and the spouses of the people who are taken out of their homes because they’re waiting for the civil court process to conclude,” Tramonte said.