The jail in Sweetwater County took custody of 12 people Thursday for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The sudden influx, which consisted entirely of males between the ages of 21 and 41, is well above the jail’s daily average of ICE detainee bookings. But it’s not unheard-of, Sweetwater County Sheriff’s spokesman Jason Mower told Cowboy State Daily.
“In a lot of ways it’s business as usual, because we can go days or weeks at a time where you’ll check the jail roster and see one ICE detainee,” said Mower in a phone interview on Monday. “Then a lot of times out of nowhere, not through our doing, suddenly we’ll have 15 of them.”
By Monday, the jail was down to one ICE detainee, he added.
A point-in-time glance through the sixth day of every month starting in March of 2024 and ending in February 2025 showed that for each of those dates except Nov. 6 and Jan. 6, the county did not book any ICE holds, according to jail rosters published by a local news outlet, Sweetwater Now. The jail booked two people for ICE on Nov. 6 and one on Jan. 6.
Last month, February, the detention center booked an average of fewer than one (0.89) ICE detainee per day, according to a Cowboy State Daily breakdown of the local publication’s pages.
Last month’s highest influx was of seven detainees, on Feb. 7.
But in 2024, the February average was zero, with zero ICE holds booked throughout the month, according to Cowboy State Daily’s breakdown of the local news pages.
Ten of Thursday’s 12 detainees did not have towns of origin listed under their names, in the booking sheet publication. Two did: one was from Salt Lake City, Utah, and another from LaPuente, California.
ICE House
The Sweetwater County Detention Center is the only Wyoming jail with a federal contract in place by which it doubles as a long-term holding facility for ICE detainees, according to ICE’s roster. Other jails throughout the state will hold people for ICE for a short while after booking or adjudicating them on local charges.
The sheriff’s office is in negotiations to send four of its detention deputies to a four-week training course in South Carolina, so they can conduct immigration investigations as well, Mower said.
As far as ICE is concerned, that maneuver is in the works: the agency lists Sweetwater County as having a jail enforcement contract in place as of March 7.
The Wanted List
Though Mower generally characterized Thursday’s influx of ICE detainees as sporadic, he noted other factors that may be in play.
ICE recently entered several administrative removal warrants into the National Crime Information Center database, Mower noted. Some news outlets reported the agency now has more than 700,000 warrants in the system.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sweetwater County’s influx, or a late-day text request for comment on the number of ICE warrants in the database.
But with more warrants, the odds of a person being arrested in a county that has an ICE holding facility increases, said Mower.
Law enforcement agents may notice the warrants when they come into contact with someone during normal patrol or other operations, he said, though he did not confirm which agencies were involved in arresting Thursday’s 12 detainees.
ICE agents did not conduct a street arrest operation in the county last week, he said.
The Beds
The local sheriff’s office has recently doubled its ICE-designated jail beds from 15 to 30, said Mower. That increase will continue as long as it doesn’t interfere with routine and necessary crime enforcement, he said.
But the jail is fairly new, contains more than 200 beds and is typically at just 30-35% capacity, said Mower.
That change stems from “the priorities of the new presidential administration and anticipating an increase in active ICE (enforcement and removal operations activities),” he said, adding that it’s also a good budgeting move. The county is trying to renegotiate its federal hold rates of $40 a day, which haven’t been increased since 2006.
Mower declined to say what the new goal rate is, citing ongoing negotiations.
The county can generate “a couple hundred thousand dollars a year” under its existing rates, but “big picture, potentially (looking at) up to a couple million dollars a year,” he said.
“While our priority is obviously, of course public safety, and our community here comes first, those are things we’ll always consider from a financial perspective,” he said. “Because it makes good business sense… (to generate) revenue that stays here in Sweetwater County.”
Mower said the federal revenue stream is “more money that we don’t have to ask local taxpayers for every year when it comes time to prepare our budget requests at the sheriff’s office.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
