In 2019 I published records on the work program for those in custody under immigration laws at the Butler County, Ohio jail, as well as my interview with the warden. The gist is that the program was paying people for work with coffee packets. The sherriff expressed his view that it was fine for him to employ the same protocols for people in custody under criminal laws for people in ICE custody.
In reporting on this, I contacted ICE's public relations office. When they failed to answer my questions about the discrepancies between the programs and the law, I filed an additional FOIA request.
Five years after failing to provide responsive records and four years into litigation, ICE yesterday released some damning emails - 169 pp.).
6:04 p.m.
The highlights: ICE confirms the Butler County program was not in compliance; the inspection group erroneously claimed the jail did not have a work program and omitted any evaluation of the unlawful practices; and other jails also were and likely are still out of compliance.
6:12 p.m. (DSM = Detention Service Manager, supposed to monitor compliance)
I'll fill in the details later but wanted to make this available asap. It is further evidence that the compliance reports are garbage and that ICE knows this. The good news is that ICE did finally release information underscoring the agency's disrespect for the rule of law. The bad news is that sitting on it so long -- part of a pattern and practice of violating the FOIA -- deprives the public of real-time accountability, though it may still be quite useful for suing Butler and other jails that violated their contracts and the law.
It also raises more questions about what is going with the DOJ's amicus brief supporting the work program protocols ICE officials internally affirmed to be unlawful.
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