A new, more aggressive national policy on immigration has revived a familiar challenge for Alamance County’s sheriff, who has a longstanding arrangement to house immigration detainees on behalf of the federal government.
As the administration of President Donald Trump presses ahead with a campaign pledge to deport illegal aliens with criminal records, sheriff Terry Johnson has found his jail beds in increasing demand with his clients at the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Johnson admits that it hasn’t been easy to accommodate the federal agency’s seemingly boundless appetite for detention space since these roundups started in earnest.
“I was on the phone with them today,” the sheriff recalled in an interview on Monday. “They want more and more space. We don’t have as much as they want. But we have some.”
By the time that Johnson spoke to his ICE contacts, federal authorities had already begun to conduct massive immigration sweeps in large urban centers like Chicago, L.A., and Atlanta. Johnson noted that ICE is also preparing to carry out similar operations in North Carolina, giving an added impetus to the bureau’s need for readily available detention space in this area.
Johnson, for his part, has generally been one of ICE’s more reliable partners since he first agreed to open the county jail to the federal agency’s detainees in 2007.
The sheriff initially entered into a detention agreement with ICE as part of a broader working relationship that he and the bureau had forged under a federal program dubbed 287(g). At the height of this partnership, federal immigration detainees were routinely passing through Alamance County’s jail as they awaited court hearings or repatriation. In the meantime, specially trained deputies inside the jail were filing federal charges against any who turned out to be in the country illegally.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security abruptly broke off this arrangement in 2012, shortly before a division of the U.S. Department of Justice took legal action against the sheriff over allegations of discriminatory policing. In 2015, a federal judge tossed out the Justice Department’s lawsuit, which had alleged that, among other things, that the sheriff’s office was deliberately targeting Latinos for traffic stops and arrests in order to run them through the jail’s immigration checks. It nevertheless took four more years and a change of Presidential administrations before ICE welcomed Johnson back into its good graces.
In February of 2019, the sheriff inked a new detention contract with ICE that enabled the federal agency to reserve a “guaranteed minimum” of 50 jail beds a day in return for a corresponding minimum payment. The contract obligated ICE to make this minimum payment, which initially amounted to about $2 million a year, even if it didn’t ultimately use all of the beds it had reserved.
This deal, which was renewed with a rate increase in 2021, has remained in place ever since despite various vicissitudes in the fortunes of both the sheriff’s office and its federal partner.
In 2022, ICE issued a news release to announce the reappraisal of Alamance County’s jail and several other local detention facilities that it had previously patronized. This apparent about-face came as a complete shock to the sheriff’s own contacts at ICE, and in the end, it didn’t presage any actual change in the agency’s use of the jail.
In the meantime, however, a persistent shortage of detention officers has prompted the sheriff to rethink his commitments to ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service, which also has a longstanding detention agreement with Alamance County. In the opening months of 2023, Johnson told the county’s board of commissioners that he may have to bail on these federal agencies if he can’t recruit some additional jailers.
In response to this staffing crunch, the commissioners authorized a series of compensatory increases, including a signing bonus of $10,000 to new jailers and deputies who remain in the sheriff’s employ for at least 22 months. Since their adoption in the summer of 2024, these bonuses have apparently turned the tide in the sheriff’s desperate battle with turnover. Even so, Johnson insists that he’ll need a lot more names on the duty roster if he intends to make the most of ICE’s growing yen for detention space.
In a conversation with The Alamance News, the sheriff conceded that staffing, rather than available space, is currently the biggest obstacle to his fulfillment of the federal agency’s needs.
“We’re going to do what we can,” he added. “But we need about 33 more detention officers to be at full capacity.”
