Donald Trump took office at the start of 2025 vowing to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ramp up mass deportations. Even as voters have soured on the effort, contracts between ICE and Ohio’s local law enforcement agencies have exploded, the ACLU of Ohio reported on Monday.
At the end of 2024, just two counties — Geauga and Seneca — had contracts with the feds to house immigration detainees in their jails.
By the end of 2025 that number expanded to at least six, according to the ACLU’s report which is based on responses to numerous open-records requests.
“We knew that anti-immigration efforts would be a hallmark of President Trump’s second term,” said Jocelyn Resnick, ACLU of Ohio’s chief policy and advocacy officer. “But our findings reveal how severely the landscape shifted in just one year.”
At least 850 people were in Ohio jails on immigration-related detainers earlier this year, according to the TRAC database maintained by Syracuse University. They’re part of the 68,000 who are being held nationwide.
Perhaps more significant than providing jail beds are the “287(g)” contracts that give local police authority to participate in immigration enforcement.
No local law enforcement agency in Ohio had such a contract at the start of 2025. At least 12 did a year later.
Some police chiefs and sheriffs have long argued that involving their departments in immigration enforcement undermines public safety. That’s because it makes immigrants in their communities afraid to talk to police, they say.
Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrants Alliance, said that’s already happening.
“Signing on to a 287(g) agreement is just an advertisement that you’re not a safe police department for immigrants,” Tramonte said during a virtual press conference hosted by the ACLU.
“Not only are they victims of crime. They are witnesses to crime… People are not going to come forward if you are a 287(g) county. It leaves the population very vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. We know that abuse of immigrant workers has gone up in the past year because there’s a sense that they’re a captive population.
Some sheriffs are housing ICE detainees in their jails for financial reasons.
Mahoning County Sheriff Jerry Greene last year said that the $125 per inmate per day he received from ICE added $4.5 million a year to his bottom line.
That calculus puts underfunded local governments in an impossible position, Resnick said.
“There is this perverse financial incentive for counties to engage with ICE through these programs and agreements,” he said.
“If every single jail bed that was available to ICE was filled every single day of the year, the money coming into those locales would be over $54 million. That’s a lot of money.”
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.