Some rural places are benefiting financially from a large number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests because of revenue generated from incarcerating people in their local jails. In Kentucky, “four county jails earned $2 million or more by holding people for ICE during (President) Trump’s second term, as of April 2026,” Morgan Watkins
reports for
Louisville Public Media.
A review by the
Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and the
Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom analyzed ICE open-records data requested by the
Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Los Angeles.
They found that ICE arrests by local law enforcement in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia have increased since last year.
They were up by 18% in Kentucky in June 2026, 30% in Tennessee in May, and 87% in West Virginia in January. These increases happened following “Operation Country Roads,” a federally assisted crackdown resulting in 650 arrests.
Watkins reports that ICE conducts arrests in three different ways: taking custody of immigrants who are already in jail or prison for non-immigration reasons, through street arrests, and through 287(g) programs, which deputize local law enforcement officers as immigration agents. Tennessee’s state government incentivizes local officers if they sign up. More officers in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia have signed up in the first nine months of 2026 than in all of 2025.
Immigrants aren't just taken into custody, Watkins writes, they are held in local jails as de facto detention centers. Watkins reports that in Kentucky "ICE earnings help offset the sizable costs of running their jail.”
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