Some local law enforcement agencies in Kentucky are cooperating with ICE as immigration raids have ramped up under the Trump administration.
In Kentucky, 11 local agencies have entered official agreements with ICE, mostly in western Kentucky and outside Louisville.
That includes the Bracken County Sheriff’s Office, Bullitt County Detention Center, Daviess County Sheriff’s Office, Grayson County’s Detention Center and Sheriff’s Office, the Heritage Creek Police Department, the Kenton County Sheriff’s Office, the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, the Marshall County Sheriff’s Office, Oldham County Detention Center and the Union County Sheriff’s Office.
Judah Schept is a professor at EKU’s College of Justice Studies and writes about Appalachia’s prison economy. He says ICE is able to operate on a nationwide scale, but uses those agreements to work with local jails.
“One of the points is, in fact, to have that kind of cooperation,” he said. “Whether it's on the policing side of it, in terms of carrying out a raid, or the detention side for a local jail, for ICE to use it as a potential stopover.”
That can include working with local jails to identify undocumented inmates, training local officers to issue warrants to inmates or allowing officers to make immigration arrests during routine police work.
Schept says local jails sometimes have agreements with federal agencies, who pay them for each housed inmate. Local jails can house those detained by ICE on their way to federal facilities.
“It's a way for a given county, particularly, let's say, an economically struggling rural county, to bring in some amount of revenue by incarcerating people on behalf of a federal agency or a state agency,” Schept said.
FOX 56 reported last weekend that a group of 25 women were booked into the Laurel County Corrections Center under immigration charges by the Department of Homeland Security, but that information has since been removed from the jail’s database.
“We’re having difficulty tracking where these folks wind up going,” Schept said. “So as an example, the people who were arrested and detained on immigration charges in the Laurel County Jail, appeared on the Laurel County Jail website for about a day, and then that information was taken down. It looked like they were then moved up to Kenton County for a couple days, and then it looked like they weren't there anymore either.”
Schept says other federal groups, like the Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms are also carrying out immigration enforcement.
