The Phelps County Jail — which has held hundreds of detainees on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's behalf in the last year and a half — has drastically reduced its populations of people in ICE custody this month.
The jail in Rolla has transferred out most of its detainees held solely on federal immigration detainers, according to Abide in Love cofounder Lucy Behrendt. The nonprofit aids ICE detainees held in Missouri and has been tracking how they are being moved from jail to jail for more than a year.
As of Monday morning, the Phelps County Jail only held five people in ICE custody — all individuals who are also facing various criminal charges. One of the five was booked in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Behrendt said the agency moved 34 ICE detainees out of the Phelps County Jail on Oct. 14. Of those, 18 were transferred to the Greene County Jail and six to a federal detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas, according to the organization's records. That facility is operated by the for-profit private prison company, CoreCivic.
The locations of 10 ICE detainees who were moved out of Rolla are unknown. Four of the unaccounted individuals had removal orders documented in Abide in Love's records. But advocates and lawyers have said changes to ICE's online detainee locator — which now excludes people with removal orders — has made tracking detainees challenging.
It is unclear whether the sudden transfers signal an end to the jail's arrangement with ICE. Phelps County Sheriff Michael Kirn, who is in charge of the jail, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Last year, jail leaders told the Phelps County Commission they would no longer take in new federal detainees because the $85-per-night federal reimbursement did not cover their costs. The jail backtracked after two months.
An ICE spokesperson declined to answer questions about the transfers or its relationship with the Phelps County Jail on Monday, citing concerns around operational security and the safety of the agency's officers.
"ICE makes custody determinations daily, on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. law, and various factors to ensure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States," the spokesperson wrote in a statement, adding that the Department of Homeland Security was working to deport the individuals in ICE custody "despite a historic number of injunctions.".
The spokesperson did not comment on the specific injunctions the agency was referring to or if any had specifically affected its operations at the Phelps County Jail. But there have been multiple recent examples of Missouri-based legal action against ICE.
A federal judge last week issued a preliminary injunction stopping ICE from carrying out certain election-related field operations related to an investigation and publicity campaign into unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud by people without legal status in nine states, including Missouri, through the end of Election Day.
Earlier this month, the Archdiocese of St. Louis sued ICE alleging Ste. Genevieve Jail officials are denying the religious rights of Catholic detainees. There have also been multiple federal cases across the state where ICE deprived detainees of their rights to due process.
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