Off The Beaten Path: How County Jails are Facilitating Trump’s Deportation Machine

The Vantage Point on Mass Deportations from Inside an Indiana Jail

On June 4, 2025, Chicago witnessed an assault of ICE agents targeting people checking at immigration offices in the South Loop of downtown Chicago. Cell phone videos captured frightening images of masked ICE agents attacking peaceful protesters and two city council members risking their own safety to challenge ICE arrests in this sanctuary city. Another vantage point on the mass deportations and detention is from inside a jail in Indiana where some of the immigrants arrested that day in Chicago were likely sent. Since passage of the Illinois Way Forward Act banning immigrant detention in the state, which I wrote about for Truthout in 2021, people are instead sent across state lines to county jails like the one in Clay County, Indiana. The Clay County jail, just east of Terre Haute, Indiana, recently expanded to hold 250 people for ICE. According to Robin Valenzuela, with the group Indiana Assistance to Immigrants in Detention (AID), which tracks the numbers of immigrants in the jail, just days after the raids in Chicago the jail population jumped to 315 people, well over capacity. She says immigrant detainees are sleeping on floors and in the recreational room. A professor at Western Kentucky University, Robin has been conducting her own research and collecting stories. I interviewed Robin about the work she and her group Indiana AID have been doing to hold monthly visitations at the jail, talk to the people inside, and provide them with resources.

BD: Tell me when you started organizing around immigration detention in Clay County?

Robin: We started just before COVID, so probably 2019, but we didn't quit because of COVID. We happened to start right as COVID hit so we started doing virtual work first. Once COVID wrapped up and the jail had to finally concede it was no longer a health threat, we were able to get a community stakeholder visit. That was in 2022. So we were able to then start coming in each month, which we’ve been doing ever since, to do in person visits the first Saturday of every month. We still do virtual work during the interim. We have a volunteer base that will have an immigrant partner in the jail, anybody who’s requested a visit, and then they’ll commit to visiting that person at least once a week until they’re no longer at Clay. We do commissary support. We send books. We try to hook them up with resources. If we can find immigration attorneys, bond funds, any kind of assistance they might need, if we can find a community resource we do so.

BD: When did the sheriff start holding immigrants for ICE in Clay County?

Robin: My understanding is that their contract began in 2013. They started by contracting with the US Marshals Service and then opened up space for ICE. I can’t really say how often prior to doing our work there how many people they held for ICE on a regular basis, or how often they made use of that space. What I can say is, when we first started, there were only two blocks that were siphoned off for folks under an ICE hold. We were looking at around 50 people on average, and their general length of stay was a couple weeks before being transferred to another ICE holding facility. That would have been when we first started our work, before the Illinois Way Forward Act went through (The law banning immigrant detention in Illinois was signed into law August 2021, and took effect January 1, 2022). A lot of our folks were transferred up to Chicago in one of their many locations, but then after the Illinois Way Forward Act, obviously all the Chicago locations that have been there went away. The Clay County jail expanded its physical facility and then amped up its contract to pay for it. Our coalition campaign tried to stop that expansion. Unfortunately, we lost.

BD: Tell me, when was the expansion? And how did that happen? How many beds?

Robin: They started around 2021. That was when a lot of the commissioners’ hearings were taking place, and contracts were being signed, and all the official stuff was happening. I want to say they finished in 2024. There was a point at which we went physically to the jail and it was the first time we had visited the new block.

BD: How many blocks are there now, and how many beds?

Robin: Ten blocks. Basically, what they had quintupled. They had ten blocks they had siphoned off. They had a completely separate wing just for ICE. That’s the new building. I can actually give you count, because we keep track.

It looks like as of yesterday (June 5, 2025), there were 323 people, just for ICE.

BD: On paper, I believe it says they can hold 250, right?

Robin: They put people on the floor. They use bunk beds. They’ll throw people in the rec room. They will definitely exceed capacity.

Just this week, June 1, 298; June 2, 279; June 3, 295, June 4, 298; and then today, 323 on Thursday.

BD: Are all those people from Chicago.

Robin: A majority, a lot, are from Chicago. I was actually visiting somebody a couple days ago in the jail, one of my partners, and he just volunteered this. He and his buddies when they were playing cards in the block were just like, there are a lot of people from Indiana here. They noticed that within the jail, that was a trend that they had noticed. I probed a little bit with, how do you know they are getting here from Indiana? Are they getting arrested in a specific way, or did they come from some kind of raid? They didn’t know, I don’t think they really asked each other those questions. But it does look like maybe, from their vantage more folks are coming in from Indiana.

We are maybe behind in understanding some of the specific ways that people end up in the Clay County jail, because we are not doing the same kind of on the groundwork that other groups are doing to intervene at ICE check ins and moments of arrest. We catch up to the story when people are at Clay.

BD: To some degree, your information is more accurate than these high-profile arrests that people capture on their phones.

Robin: I think a lot of people in Indiana don’t know about Clay. That’s something we discovered when the coalition was doing a lot of canvassing. Even in Clay County itself, people had low awareness about ICE having a foothold in the jail. I think it’s important to understand the scope of what’s happening and how places that seem off the beaten path are involved.

BD: My assumption would be that when we banned immigration jails in Illinois, that is when ICE started sending people from Chicago to Clay County. How much of that is going on?

Robin: I think we did notice a surge of sorts once the Illinois Way Forward Act passed, and that was very aspirational legislation. Obviously, the hope and intent behind the law was that people would be released and would be able to deal with their immigration cases while free, perhaps checking in with ICE, perhaps having an ankle monitor, which is not a great solution, but it’s a preferred alternative to being in jail. That was the hope and intent behind that bill.

Unfortunately, ICE basically just moved people around within the Chicago Field Office region. We got quite a few people. I don’t think we were the only jail in the Chicago Field Office region that absorbs some of those folks. Dodge County, which is up in Wisconsin, also absorbed some. We noticed that Kay County, which is all the way out in Oklahoma, was sort of added to the Chicago Field Office region around that time. We theorized that it was to help absorb some of the Chicago folks. We do regularly see people moved from Clay to Dodge to Kay to Boone County, which is in Kentucky. ICE will move people in and around the Chicago Field Office region. Sometimes, you’re visiting someone, and all of a sudden they’re moved to Kay County, Oklahoma, for God knows what reason. We’ve definitely noticed anytime that there’s a big raid in Chicago, we get quite full at Clay, but I know that we’re not the only ones.

BD: What was the sheriff's attitude, was it explicit that they were expanding the jail for ICE?

Robin: Yes, it was explicit. I recall Clay County Sheriff Paul Harden getting up at a commissioners meeting. He had a kind of rap sheet, a print off of the different crimes people had committed, ostensibly. He basically said, we don’t want these people as our neighbors. He also stated that he wasn’t anti-immigrant because he had immigrant friends and suspected that some of them were probably undocumented. But largely it was explicit that this contract was going to expand with ICE. That was something that members of our group, including me, addressed during public comment of these hearings. The county saw this as a boost to their economy. It was pitched as, this makes good financial sense, and you wouldn’t want these people as your neighbors anyway.

BD: How do you all respond to the issue of criminalizing immigrants?

Robin: First of all, we don’t ask people about their background. Nor do we check their background. We understand that there are people in jail who have committed some kind of misdemeanor, potentially a felony. We see people who are all in the same block, wearing the same uniform. The things that we have learned, because people will disclose voluntarily, we know that we see a lot of minor traffic violations. Some gets pulled over for speeding and then the police officer checks their driver’s license. Perhaps they don’t have a driver’s license. Because if you’re undocumented in Indiana, you can’t get a driver’s license, which is an issue that some of our coalition partners have been fighting. We know that there are definitely people who haven’t committed any crime at all. They’re just there because somebody found out they were undocumented.

We believe as a group that no matter what you’ve done, you deserve to be treated with dignity, and you deserve to have your civil and human rights preserved. Largely these county jails, including Clay, do not uphold those rights. And ICE does not uphold those rights.

We also see a lot of people who have already paid their debt to society. They committed whatever crime, they served time in prison, and then immediately after serving their sentence, ICE picked them up and put them in Clay. So they’re serving more time simply for being undocumented.

We also see people who went through the criminal justice system and believed in their own innocence and wanted the opportunity to prove their innocence, but on the recommendation of a criminal defense attorney, took a plea bargain. Oftentimes, those criminal defense attorneys don’t know that accepting a plea bargain might impact somebody’s immigration case. This person ends up coming to the attention of ICE due to a criminal record, even if they are very sure they didn’t commit that crime.

As far as we’re concerned, it’s important to uphold people’s civil and human rights, and their human dignity, regardless of the crime that they’ve committed. Obviously right now, even their most basic rights are not being upheld. If you violate the rights of one group, it’s very likely to capitulate into more and more groups being violated and stripped of their rights. That’s why everybody’s rights are important.