This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, and News 5 Cleveland. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s Cleveland newsletter and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
Based on the legal advice of federal officials, Geauga County Jail officials will not release records that detail who is inside its facility awaiting deportation proceedings.
The Geauga County Jail is one of two jails in Ohio contracted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to admit people suspected of being in the country illegally.
Seneca County Jail officials have provided The Marshall Project - Cleveland with the past six years of monthly ICE invoices.
Monthly invoices from Seneca County show ICE paid $90 a day per detainee, contributing about $2.2 million toward the sheriff’s $2.8 million annual budget. The bills include names and the number of days each detainee spent in jail — at a time when immigration attorneys, civil rights groups, family members and journalists seek to understand the complex workings of the federal government’s murky immigration enforcement system and cooperation from local officials.
Seneca County, located about 50 miles south of Toledo, also hosts an online “inmate locator” with immigrant detainees charged as fugitives from justice. Geauga County has no online portal to locate incarcerated people.
In an email to The Marshall Project - Cleveland, the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office said Ohio law prohibits the release of records shielded by two federal laws: the Privacy Act of 1974 and a 9/11-era Records Rule, originally enacted to conceal the names of people allegedly involved in terrorism held in New Jersey county jails.
“We have been advised by legal counsel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security [DHS] that the release of requested records would be a violation,” a records clerk said.
The withholding of records in the early weeks of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort mirrors similar legal tactics across the country. A Michigan lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union alleges that “ICE instructs these county jails to withhold these records in response to state-law records requests, rendering most information about these detained immigrants completely secret. A huge aspect of ICE detention is hidden in a black box.”
