Less than a decade ago, more than a dozen county jails and detention centers across Kansas held agreements with the federal government to hold people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Today, that patchwork of agreements is gone — with one exception.
The Chase County Detention Center in Cottonwood Falls is the last of these county facilities in Kansas to hold ICE detainees. Until February, ICE records listed the facility as the only place in the state with an active agreement to handle ICE detention.
That changed slightly when the Department of Justice signed a six-month deal with the Bureau of Prisons in February to allow ICE to house people in a small portion of the housing units in six prisons — including the federal correctional institution in Leavenworth.
Despite the limited facility space, Kansas has increasingly been part of the current administration’s calculus on how to expand detention space in the Midwest.
During his re-election campaign, President Donald Trump promised to deport 1 million people in his first year back in office. That plan is increasingly at odds with the actual number of beds available to house people in ICE custody.
When Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security was working with a budget that covered the cost of 41,500 detention beds. Those beds were scattered through a limited number of ICE facilities and contracts with community detention centers and private prisons.
As of mid-April, federal data showed that the number of people in ICE custody reached about 48,000 people — exceeding the number of funded beds. As arrests continue, the administration plans to add contracts to secure an additional 60,000 beds this year.
A proposed addition is a prison in Leavenworth that has sat empty since 2021. CoreCivic, one of the nation’s largest private prison companies, owns the 1,000-bed facility.
In early March, the company was awarded a $10.2 million contract with ICE to house detainees at the prison — now called the Midwest Regional Reception Center — for five years.
People detained by ICE in cities around the Midwest would have started arriving at that facility in June if the city of Leavenworth hadn’t launched a federal lawsuit against CoreCivic. Leavenworth officials are contesting the company’s attempt to open the prison without a permit from the city.
So while that court case winds on, Chase County — with its 148 beds — is the primary ICE detention facility in Kansas.
It’s an arrangement that has brought financial benefit to the county of 2,500 people for more than two decades. But now, some say it’s an arrangement that is now putting the facility at the center of an overstressed system.
Michael Sharma-Crawford is a Kansas City-based immigration attorney. He says Cottonwood Falls, and places like it, are feeling the intensity of a quickly changing approach to immigration.
“You’re stressing that community out because people are working extra and all of that kind of stuff,” Sharma-Crawford said. “And you’re stressing out these communities where you're taking these people (detainees) out — we're way past capacity.
“But the problem is you haven't satisfied those in charge."
Detention without discretion
Sharma-Crawford said that in his decades as an immigration attorney, he’s appreciated that immigration enforcement proceedings in Missouri and Kansas have often come with a “Midwestern sense of justice.”
He chalked it up to the size and interconnectedness of the communities here. He said more often than not, it led to a style of enforcement that left room for nuance.
“Law enforcement officers — in general — love to operate with discretion because they’re the ones on the ground,” Sharma-Crawford said. “They’re the ones seeing it. That discretion gives them the ability to utilize their resources in a very productive manner.”
That’s all changed. Sharma-Crawford said that ICE now has “zero discretion to give any humanity,” under the direction set by the new administration.
He described the new reality.
When someone is arrested by ICE in the Kansas City area, they’ll go to the ICE field office in that city to get fingerprinted, photographed and have a background check run. A mirror process plays out at the ICE field office in Wichita for people arrested in areas of Kansas like Garden City or Liberal.
Sharma-Crawford said that before this year, almost everyone who was arrested in western Missouri or Kansas was taken to Chase County. Some people arrested in southern Kansas were taken to Kay County Detention Center in Newkirk, Oklahoma.
Now people are being detained wherever there’s space. Due to newer agreements signed between ICE and Missouri communities, people who might once have been housed at Chase County are winding up in places like the Greene County Jail in Springfield, Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Ozark County Jail in Gainesville or the Ste. Genevieve Detention Center in Ste. Genevieve.
For those detained close enough — in Chase County or parts of Missouri — they’ll have their cases handled at the immigration court in Kansas City.
People sent to Kay County used to have their cases heard at an immigration court in El Paso, Texas. Sharma-Crawford said that court is now overloaded and a virtual court has been started in Newkirk, Oklahoma.
How long someone is detained at this point depends entirely on the specifics of their case. It could be a matter of weeks or months.
When a case ends with a removal order — or someone is arrested with an existing removal order — things move quickly. Chase County used to transport detainees to local commercial airports – including Wichita – for flights to receiving countries once a week. Now those flights, particularly to Mexico, are happening multiple times a week.
If ICE can’t fill a flight with the number of people being deported locally, they’ll move people further south to large detention centers like El Valle Detention Facility in Texas or staging facilities like the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana.
Communities trying to keep up
The new system, which is filling up detention centers and court rooms, is leaving little time for communities to keep up.
In mid-April, Blanca Lopez started getting texts from the messaging group she organized in Coffeyville. She was told ICE agents were making arrests in traffic stops around the local high school.
Lopez, a Spanish-English interpreter and community organizer, said that fear spread quickly in the Hispanic community. Parents skipped pickups and had their children walk home from school. Kids were absent from classes and extracurricular activities for days after.
One family contacted Lopez in the days after the arrests. They told her that they learned that their father, who was from Guatemala, was detained by ICE and that they were able to figure out that he was being held in Kay County Detention Center. They asked Lopez to call and find out more about his situation.
Lopez called the detention center and asked for information about the man. She was told that the center couldn’t give her any information without the man’s alien registration number.
An alien registration number, or A-number, is a specific number given to a nonresident by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The number is what the government uses to track a person’s interaction with immigration through work and residency requests or detention.
Not everyone in the United States has an A-number, especially if they’ve never had an interaction with immigration agencies or if they originally entered on a tourist or business visa.
Lopez was able to get the man’s A-number from his family and called back to Kay County only to be told that she needed to call between specific hours.
While the family waited for information, the man’s son decided to try to visit his father. Lopez said the son had a work permit and an active immigration case. He felt more comfortable interacting with ICE than other family members.
He traveled to Kay County to see his father and try to learn more about his father’s immigration case. Lopez, in late April, said that the family hadn’t heard from him since.
“Everybody is assuming that he’s been detained as well, but they don’t know anything about it,” Lopez said.
Families like the one Lopez is working with often rely on the ICE detainee locator for information about their relatives. While searches conducted with an A-number typically turn up results, name searches are less successful and susceptible to spelling mistakes made in ICE records.
The system is hit or miss, though. Location records only show where a person is currently in ICE custody. When someone is in transit or after they’ve been deported, the system turns up no results.
That leaves families in the dark.
How Chase County became an ICE hub
At one point in time, the squat jail house off the main drag in Cottonwood Falls was mostly full of people from the surrounding towns and neighboring counties.
Built in 1992, the detention center started with a 32-bed capacity. The then-sheriff told the Council Grove Republican newspaper that building the jail constituted “a necessary evil” to help the county save on the cost of the seven people a day the county housed at neighboring jails.
Chase County leaders sold residents on the project by promising them that detention would be a moneymaker for the county. Reporting by the Associated Press in 1992 shows that the county quickly signed an agreement with the U.S. Marshal Service to house a handful of inmates for a fee of $50 a day.
This relationship with the Marshal Service set the tone for the county’s detention policy. As Chase County’s population declined, its detention center grew.
By 2001, the detention center expanded to 70 beds. The following year, the county signed an intergovernmental service agreement with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to house their detainees at a rate of $37.50 per person per day.
A third and final expansion in 2006 brough the capacity to 148 beds. Two years later, county officials signed a new agreement with ICE to house more detainees at a $48.50 person-day rate.
Chase County also agreed to take on transportation duties, using two officers to drive a county van to Wichita and Kansas City — or sometimes to St. Louis — to pick up people entering the detention system. In 2011, ICE paid the county $15 an hour per officer as well as for mileage for those trips.
In 2018, ICE detainee counts at the facility hit an inflection point. That year, ICE data shows that the average daily population of detainees reached 86 people. That meant that more than half of the available beds were occupied by someone in ICE custody each day.
Since then, the detention center has primarily served as a revolving door of ICE detainees.
That has never been more true than in the last two months.
Between the end of March and beginning of May, nearly 400 people with 54 different nationalities were listed on the detention center’s inmate log. The average daily detainee count in that month was 128 people.
ICE detainees are housed alongside local inmates, who, during this period, averaged about 22 people. The total population of the detention center was more than its 148-bed capacity 18 times in the last 33 days. Three of those days, there were more than 148 ICE detainees on the inmate log alone.
Chase County Sheriff Jacob Welsh did not respond to requests for comments in the last month. But statements the sheriff made to Chase County commissioners in the last year during monthly updates give insight into what may be happening inside the jail.
In the mid-December update to commissioners, Welsh said that he’d contacted the U.S. Marshal representative for the state and Sen. Roger Marshall’s office to get a sense of how immigration detention would play out after the inauguration.
He said neither office had any advice for what was to come, but Welsh guessed the facility could see a lot of “in-and-outs, it may be requests for triple bunks … we’re just trying to be prepared as we can as a facility to meet the needs of whatever is asked of us.”
The 2019 National Detention Standards allow facilities to “utilize emergency capacity/temporary bed space, to include triple bunks, on an as needed basis,” as long as the move is approved by ICE first.
Meg Britton-Mehlisch is a reporter for KMUW and the Wichita Journalism Collaborative. This piece was originally published as part of her work for the collaborative by Planeta Venus in both English and Spanish.
