This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Amid record immigration arrests nationwide, New York county jails billed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement around $20 million for detaining thousands of immigrants for the agency since early last year, records obtained by New York Focus show.
A law passed earlier this year prohibits counties from detaining people for ICE. Most county jails have stopped holding ICE detainees ahead of the law’s November 25 deadline.
But the spending records offer a window into how New York county jails profited from President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and help explain why some county sheriffs are fighting the new law.
The Orange County Jail, one of the largest ICE detention centers in the New York City area, billed ICE an average of more than $800,000 a month from January 2025 to July 2026, more than twice its average in 2024. The Broome County Jail, which did not detain people for ICE until after Trump took office in 2025, housed around 50 immigrants during a peak month and charged the agency nearly $170,000.
Four other counties held smaller numbers of ICE detainees but still brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nassau County, where county executive and gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Blakeman has expanded the county’s relationship with ICE, held dozens of people for the agency at a time. But the county has not yet turned over documents in response to New York Focus’s request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.
The records consist of monthly invoices county sheriffs sent to ICE and generally list the number of immigrants detained and the number of detention days. They reveal the pivotal role New York county jails played as part of a national network of detention sites during the historic surge in immigration arrests.
Available records show that New York county jails billed ICE nearly $18.1 million between January 2025 and July 2026. Those records don’t include the Nassau County Jail, one of the largest ICE detention centers in the state, though jail population data and ICE reimbursement rates suggest that the Long Island facility billed ICE at least $1.3 million since early 2025.
Some jails, such as Montgomery County’s, held people for a day or two before ICE transferred them elsewhere, the records show. Others functioned as long-term ICE detention centers, sometimes holding detainees for months at a time, contrary to their sheriffs’ claims.
Shortly after Broome County, on the Pennsylvania border, began housing ICE detainees, Sheriff Fred Akshar told constituents that most “do not stay longer than a week.” By this April, however, 18 of the 22 people the jail was holding for ICE had been there for months, a housing report shows. Five had arrived at the jail in summer 2025. The county charged ICE $110 per day for each detainee, reaching a total of over $1.2 million through this June.
The Broome County records show the sheriff’s department also had to assign deputies to guard an ICE detainee at a hospital for nearly three months through the end of February. The county billed ICE $107,000 for the associated overtime. The records don’t explain the hospital stay, and the patient’s name was redacted.
Neither Akshar nor ICE responded to requests for comment.
Some sheriffs say the new law banning them from detaining people for ICE will eliminate an important revenue stream. Akshar and Orange County Sheriff Paul Arteta joined others in a lawsuit seeking to strike down the law, which Governor Kathy Hochul signed as part of the state budget in May. Their complaint claims that Orange County’s agreement with ICE has offset “a meaningful portion of the cost of operating the jail,” though it didn’t offer specific numbers.
Last year, Orange County billed ICE $8.4 million, up from $3.5 million in 2024, according to the records New York Focus obtained. The revenue rose not only because the jail held more people for ICE, but also because its reimbursement rate rose 75 percent, from $133 to $233 per detainee per day, starting in November 2025.
During the first seven months of 2026, the county billed ICE $7.2 million.
The revenue increase came as a surprise to Orange County Legislator Matthew Fascaldi, who told New York Focus he hadn’t received recent figures from the sheriff.
“That’s pretty jarring,” he said.
While counties will no longer receive revenue from ICE, they also won’t incur the costs of housing the agency’s detainees. For David Favro, sheriff of Clinton County, at the northeast corner of the state, those costs were so significant that he stopped housing ICE detainees earlier this year.
“It was a financial decision, not a political decision,” he said.
Favro said ICE was paying his department $109 a night for each detainee.
Two county jails — Allegany and Niagara — provided ICE with its only bed space for women in western New York. Allegany billed the agency about $270,000 starting in February 2025, while Niagara billed about $415,000 starting in April 2025. By July 2026, neither held any ICE detainees, records show.
ICE is seeking to make up for that loss. Investigative Post reported that the agency plans to build a “soft-sided facility” at the large federal detention center in Batavia, outside Buffalo, to house up to 100 immigrant women.
Benjy Sachs contributed data analysis.
