A Northwest Ohio jail entered a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement two weeks ago and began holding federal immigration detainees this week.
In an 8-2 vote, the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio’s board, which includes a commissioner and the sheriff from Lucas, Fulton, Williams, Henry and Defiance counties, approved a contract that allows ICE to use up to 96 beds in the Williams County facility.
Between Monday and Thursday, CCNO housed 22 ICE detainees, most of whom were from out of state, according to the detention center's booking information.
The corrections facility, located in Williams County west of Toledo, became the third in the state to hold detainees for ICE. The other two are in Geauga and Seneca counties, according to ICE.
In its second term, the Trump administration has pushed to crack down on illegal immigration and fulfill a campaign promise of mass deportations. The number of immigration arrests inside the country was up sharply in March compared to the Biden administration but was lower than levels seen when agents made a show of force shortly after Trump took office, according to analysis by the New York Times.
Trump’s push to increase arrests at times conflicts with challenges and on-the-ground realities. The Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday detention centers were at capacity, according to news reports.
White House officials have called on Congress to provide more funding, border czar Tom Homan has sought to cooperate with local and state governments to support ICE and DHS officials told NBC they are working with the Marshals Service, Department of Defense and Federal Bureau of Prisons to increase bed space.
Jails all over the country are being asked to become ICE detention centers, said Williams County Sheriff Thomas Kochert, who said he voted in support of housing ICE inmates because the center has been housing inmates for other federal law enforcement agencies since the 1990s.
“Kind of a no brainer — of course, yes, we’ll hold them because it really did not affect our operations or the normal course of operations,” Kochert said. “We enforce that law that we’re told to enforce, and this is the law of the land. Donald Trump said this is the law of the land.”
ICE will pay CCNO $117 per day per inmate, plus mileage and officer transport time, according to a correction center statement.
“If the federal government is willing to pay us to hold these folks and pay this extra money,” Kocher said, “we’re going to come out on the good end of that."
The board started discussing entering a contract with ICE in August 2023, the statement said.
But not everyone on the correction center's board supports the move.
“I don’t want to be part of this mass deportation system," said Lucas County Commissioner Peter Gerken, who voted against housing the ICE detainees. "It ruins families. It’s unjust. It doesn't follow due process.”
Toledo Farm worker and immigration activist Baldemar Velasquez attended the vote, which took place during a meeting open to the public but which was not open for public comment.
Velasquez said people arrested by ICE should not be held in jails.
“There’s the immediate issue of what to do about the so-called mass round up,” Velasquez said. “I suggest that the solution to that is expanding the immigration judging system, hiring more judges, expediting, processing more people.”
The jail estimates ICE detainees will be held there for about 40 to 45 days each.
“They will not be released in the community. When they leave CCNO, they will be placed on a flight that will relocate them back to their country of origin and will not be released from CCNO into the local communities,” according to the correction center statement.
CCNO won’t take in anyone considered a security risk, such as people on murder or gang-related charges, the statement says.
Gerken said he’s frustrated with how little information the jail has been providing him on the ICE detainees they took in this week. Gerken shared an email exchange with CCNO Executive Director Dennis Sullivan that explained the jail’s inmate record system doesn’t provide the criminal charges of any federal detainees.
“I noticed that the warden out there is getting a little more reluctant to answer some of my questions,” Gerken said. “They’re being held on immigration charges. We don’t know any criminal charges.”
The CCNO jail is equipped to hold people with high-end misdemeanor or low-end felony charges, Gerken said.
Cleveland immigration attorney says so far crackdown is more spectacle than substance
Trump’s crackdown creates a spectacle and adding a third ICE detention center in Ohio is part of that, said Cleveland immigration attorney Jose Juarez.
“Why are we wasting federal resources to establish contracts for new jails when they can’t even fill them right now?” Juarez said. “I feel like this is just a show. It’s just for the media. It’s just for [Trump's] base to think that he’s actually doing something.”
While DHS has said the federal detention centers are at capacity, the number of people in ICE detention centers in Ohio has not increased since Trump began his push, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks the average number of detainees in ICE detention centers across the country.
The Seneca County jail averaged about 62 ICE detainees daily since Trump took office and about 63 daily in the two months prior; The Geauga County jail averaged about 50 ICE detainees daily since Trump's inauguration and about 51 per day in the two months before.
Ohio has a smaller share of unauthorized immigrants living in the state compared to other parts of the country, according to figures from the Pew Research Center.
Estimates show that between 75,000 and 175,000 people, representing between .63% and 1.48% of Ohio’s population in 2022, were unauthorized. Nationwide, unauthorized immigrants represented about 4.8% of the workforce.
Juarez said expanding the number of ICE jails in areas further from the state's sole immigration court in Cleveland also contributes to family separations.
“It’s the humane thing to do with families — keeping them together and not separate them,” Velasquez said. “You have a moral foundation for that. I think that’s one of the things that should drive our nation because that’s what made our nation great.”
