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Rural Law and Justice

ICE Detention Across the Rural-Urban Continuum Sarah Walton*, Sarah Walton, Steve Garcia, Matthew Dube, Kristen Gleason,

This paper investigates rural-urban differences in rates of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. In this analysis, we address three core questions:

1. To what degree do metro and nonmetro counties vary in ICE detention rates?
2. What sets of community characteristics are important correlates for understanding these differences in ICE detention rates?
3. To what extent do ICE detention rates correspond with rates of jail contracting?

While broader social science research, particularly the work of John Eason and Jessica Simes, has examined the role of rural places and economic development in prison siting, rural areas have also been the site of increased jail incarceration. While increases in local arrests are a part of this boom, jail contracting is also an important contributor. Jail contracting is a process through which localities temporarily lease empty jail beds in city or county facilities as a revenue generation strategy. In this way, jails (the local punitive institution, the city/county counterpart to the state or federal prison) also function as both a punitive and economic institution. The practice of jail contracting and its correlates are not broadly studied. A number of these beds are leased by federal authorities, including ICE. While ICE is a federal agency and operates independent detention facilities, often immigration detention is embedded in local carceral systems and institutions, such as jails. Understanding the extent to which ICE detention relies upon pre-existing carceral leasing practices and also the extent to which ICE detention more broadly is spatially patterned is of both substantive and sociological importance.

To answer these questions, we use secondary data, drawn from the Vera Institute of Justice (VIJ) and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) from 2013, 2018, and 2023. A left outer spatial join was used to match facility locations from the VIJ with county shapes from the Census Bureau which was then merged with the 2023 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC) from the USDA Economic Research Service. This leaves a total of 1415 facilities across 707 counties with 1,517,670 daily detention records. Preliminary analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and standard data visualization techniques.

Preliminary findings indicate that ICE detention rates across the rural-urban continuum are disproportionate across both overall incarceration levels and turnover. Urbanized areas with a population greater than 250,000 account for three out of four people entering or exiting detention centers on average (RUCC 1 and 2). Generally, the less urban a county is, the lower its contribution is to the overall population of ICE detainees. Nonmetropolitan counties which are metro-adjacent house a disproportionate amount of detainees compared to their share of detention facilities with an average daily population and average midnight population similar to metropolitan counties with populations between 250,000 and 1,000,000 despite having roughly half the share of detention facilities. Excluding those counties, nonmetropolitan counties have very low average rates of daily change, indicating that while the number of people being detained here is lower, they are held for longer durations of time.