Federal Detention in 2019. Map by Jacob Kang-Brown and Jack Norton.

(co-authored with Jack Norton for the New York Review of Books website.)

There are over 3,000 counties in the United States, and almost every one has a jail, usually run by the local sheriff’s department. ICE and the USMS use space in many county jails to detain immigrants, people seeking asylum, and those in pre-trial custody on federal charges. Federal detention in county jails is an often-overlooked facet of mass incarceration in the US. During the past four decades, this relationship between federal agencies and county jails has encouraged jail expansion, and has, in many cases, rewarded anti-immigrant policy among sheriffs and county administrators. At the same time, increased jail capacity nationwide has provided ICE with more sites for detention, forcing advocates and organizers to find new approaches to combat the arbitrary and capricious ways that federal agencies can transport people to jails and detention centers all over the country. . . . . The geographic extent of federal detention and the local jail bed market laid out here is based on documents obtained from the US Marshals by a Freedom of Information Act application and from ICE through new congressional disclosure requirements, and has not been previously reported.