West Virginia has lengthy turned federal prisoners into state income. Mary Ann Kulla Owaki/The Picture Financial institution by way of Getty Pictures
In January 2026, throughout Operation Nation Roads, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and state and native regulation enforcement detained roughly 600 immigrants throughout West Virginia.
A lot of these arrested had been held within the state’s already overpopulated jail system, which till this spring was a part of a nationwide community of immigrant detention facilities.
Inside this market, ICE ships detainees across the nation, paying tons of of services a per-day fee for housing them. Many of those services are in rural communities the place federal funding cuts have hollowed out social companies, from healthcare to meals stamps, leaving them determined for financial aid.
Federal immigration detention in native services hearkens again to earlier eras of increasing American incarceration. As a sociologist of regulation and punishment, I’ve explored how rural locations have lengthy constructed and expanded prisons to faucet into federal funds throughout instances of financial precarity.
The 1876-1908 blueprint
Rural incarceration isn’t new. Greater than a century earlier than ICE was established, West Virginia was holding out-of-state federal prisoners to gather income – a historical past I reconstructed utilizing the West Virginia Penitentiary’s administrative data.
As fashionable prisons proliferated throughout the nation, main cities exported prisoners to state prisons in much less populated areas. West Virginia was one of some states – alongside Maryland and Texas – to obtain these extra city prisoners.
Starting in 1876 and lasting till round 1908, federal and District of Columbia prisoners despatched to West Virginia drove an growth of the state’s jail system. Throughout this time, the state’s jail inhabitants grew greater than sevenfold, booming from about 160 in 1876 to greater than 1,200 in 1908. Controlling for inhabitants development, the incarceration fee tripled.
West Virginia was paid for housing every federal prisoner, and the state’s jail administration was determined for this income. Reviews that I reviewed from the penitentiary’s wardens and supervisory board present that by 1908 income from the federal authorities was US$77,000 over a two-year interval, or the equal of $2.8 million in in the present day’s {dollars}.
Starting in 1908, after federal prisons opened in Atlanta, Georgia, and Leavenworth, Kansas, most federal prisoners had been despatched to those new federal prisons, and cells started to empty on the West Virginia state penitentiary.
Filling empty beds
The nationwide incarceration fee – which incorporates each jails, for short-term detention, and prisons, for sentences of greater than a yr – has roughly crept downward since 2010. However that decline is just not even throughout place or establishment; it has been concentrated in cities and liberal-leaning states which have applied expansive felony justice reforms and diversion courts.
In the meantime, jail stays are booming, particularly in rural and suburban locations. Prolonged pretrial durations and useful resource shortages account for a lot of that development. So does the rental of jail beds to exterior entities, together with state departments of correction and federal immigration authorities.
Rural communities have typically vied for prisons, simply as they lobbied for federal prisoners within the 1800s. These rural areas search new prisons for the infusion of cash and jobs into the native economic system. In response to sociologist John Eason, these services typically perform as a “state-sponsored public works program for deprived rural communities,” creating “perverse financial incentives for jail proliferation.”
In the present day, as felony justice reforms drive down jail admissions in some areas, immigration detention is filling jail and jail cells that may in any other case be empty. The variety of individuals detained by ICE elevated by 58% – or greater than 25,000 individuals – between 2025 and 2026, in response to the Jail Coverage Initiative, which advocates to finish mass incarceration. Expanded immigration detention, the group’s March 2026 report says, “accounts for just about all the development in mass incarceration” since its final report.
Indiana gives an instance of this shift: Its Miami Correctional Facility in rural Bunker Hill had 1,000 beds it couldn’t correctly workers with a restricted funds. The state now rents these beds to ICE for $291 per detainee per day.
Within the rural city of Baldwin, Michigan, in one of many state’s poorest counties, a closed jail has reopened as an ICE facility. A state legislator advised The Washington Put up in August 2025 that the power was on monitor to change into the realm’s greatest employer and taxpayer.
Equally, in August 2026 officers introduced {that a} long-closed non-public jail in rural Minnesota will quickly reopen as an ICE detention middle. As sentencing decreased throughout the state, the jail in Swift County, which was as soon as one of many space’s largest employers, closed in 2010 for lack of demand. However its reopening presents an financial alternative: Minnesota state Sen. Torrey Westrom pointed to some 450 new jobs that the power will deliver to the realm.
ICE pays tons of of services a each day fee to carry detainees.
David Madison/Stone by way of Getty Pictures
Historical past repeats itself
Following the decline of prisoner importation within the early twentieth century, West Virginia ceased to obtain direct federal funds for housing prisoners. However the same apply, one fueled by immigrant detention, has returned to the Mountain State.
As immigration enforcement ramped up underneath the second Trump administration, West Virginia, like many states – together with Ohio and Florida – opened its services to ICE, which paid the state $90 per day per detainee.
Starting in early 2026, federal judges ordered the discharge of immigrants held within the state’s jails, discovering due course of violations. In late March, the regional jail system quickly suspended accepting new immigrant detainees.
Nonetheless, West Virginia has continued to collaborate with federal immigration enforcement for monetary achieve. The state hosts a just lately expanded Customs and Border Safety coaching middle and can proceed taking part within the federal 287(g) program, by way of which native regulation enforcement businesses are paid to collaborate with the federal authorities on immigration enforcement.
Up to now, rural states and counties have constructed out their carceral programs with revenue from imported prisoners. Immigration detention is reviving that mannequin. As long as states see immigration detention as a possible income stream, it seems that custom will proceed.
Ella Siegrist doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.
