At the far end of the Boone County Detention Center lobby is a thick, green metal door that can only be opened from a control room at the center of the facility. It opens with the clanking of internal locks and closes with a slam.
Behind that door lies a world that has been thrust into the national spotlight since President Donald Trump took office for the second time.
The Boone County jail is the only full time Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Kentucky. Trump wants federal officers to arrest 1,200 people for immigration violations every day. His administration has so far not hit that goal, but the immigration crackdown has stretched ICE detention capabilities beyond their limit; ICE facilities were at 109% capacity earlier this week, forcing some to release detainees.
Jason Maydak, the Boone County jailer since 2019, said he doesn’t expect Trump’s fiery rhetoric to impact operations at his facility.
“The last time Trump was president nothing changed,” Maydak told the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting during a recent tour of the jail. “Until we see it, I'm not expecting it to change.”
But by Feb. 3 the jail was at capacity, holding 175 ICE detainees. ICE populations at Boone County fluctuate day-to-day, and by Friday Feb. 7 the ICE population was down to 166. The jail last hit capacity in Nov. 2022 under President Joe Biden. Spikes in jail populations aren’t necessarily indicative of increased enforcement, Maydak said; the vast majority of people held for ICE in Boone County were previously held in other local jails or prisons.
The 166 people held in Boone County on Feb. 7 were from 44 different countries and most — 72% — are from countries in Central and South America.
According to weekly population reports compiled by the Kentucky Department of Corrections, Boone County’s average ICE population from January 2019 through the end of President Trump’s first term was 151, and hit capacity six times. The weekly average under the Biden administration was 121, and hit capacity four times.
Inside the secure area on Jan. 30, two men on their way to meet with an ICE agent place their hands against the wall while a corrections officer unlocks the door to the booking area. Down the hall, two other men sit on a metal table and wait for a virtual immigration court hearing.
The Boone County jail performed well in recent ICE inspections, but court records and federal investigators have found people are held there for long stays under conditions that violate civil liberties. Immigration lawyers told KyCIR courts will start to question the necessity of confinement starting around six months. Jail records from Feb. 3 show 79 people have been detained by ICE for more than 45 days, 20 for more than six months and three more than a year.
How it works
People typically end up in the Boone County jail on immigration violations after first being charged with a criminal offense. The jail has contracted with ICE since 2005.
Kentucky falls under ICE’s Chicago-area enforcement region, but Illinois banned jails from holding people for the immigration agency in 2021, so people arrested there end up detained in neighboring states including Kentucky.
Franklin County, Campbell County and Louisville cooperate with ICE on a limited basis, which means they will notify the agency of a detainee without legal status, but won’t hold anyone for ICE.
Louisville Metro Detention Center spokesperson Jason Logsdon said in an email that the jail’s immigration policy was available through an open records request. KyCIR requested those records, but has yet to receive responsive documents.
Oldham County jailer Jeff Tindall told KyCIR that ICE will sometimes ask his jail to pick up individuals from the Louisville jail and hold them for up to 72 hours before transporting them to Boone County.
People taken to Boone County either wait to be deported, a process that has quickened since Trump expanded ICE’s ability to deport people without going through immigration court.
Or people held at Boone County will wait for their immigration cases to proceed, a process that can take much longer. At the end of fiscal year 2024, immigration courts faced a backlog of 3.6 million cases, according to Congressional researchers.
Under federal immigration law people with certain criminal convictions must be detained, without the right to a bond hearing, while their immigration cases play out. Under Trump, ICE has been given orders to prioritize arresting violent criminals, but it’s not clear how that order is being carried out in practice. The Laken Riley Act, signed into law by Trump late last month, directs ICE to detain and deport people charged with certain crimes, even if they are not yet convicted. NBC News found nearly half of the 1,179 people arrested on Jan. 27 did not have a criminal record.
Captain Oscar Jeffries, a deputy jailer in Boone County, said most - if not all - ICE detainees at the jail were previously serving time in another jail or state prison.
Jeffries and Maydak said they don’t know much about ICE detainees brought to the jail beyond their name, birthday, country of origin and inmate classification. They also said they don’t know much about the particulars of immigration enforcement.
“We don't know all the details on the way ICE operates,” Maydak said. “We just house who they tell us needs to be housed.”
Jeremy Bacon, the ICE assistant field office director overseeing operations in Kentucky, told state lawmakers this past November that his office primarily detains people who are first held in local jails. As for major raids, Bacon said his office was “limited man-power-wise, and I don't see that changing anytime soon." Bacon told lawmakers there were 27 ICE officers serving Kentucky and Southern Indiana.
In a phone call with KyCIR, Bacon said he was unauthorized to speak on the record about enforcement actions, but did say manpower was still an issue. ICE's public affairs office has not responded to multiple requests for an interview or answered emailed questions.
Standards and Inspections
Full time ICE detention centers like Boone County must comply with five different sets of standards that Jeffries said are much more stringent than standards for other jails. Jeffries said those standards, which apply to everyone held at the jail, include more recreation time, faster access to medical evaluations, and clean sets of underwear and socks.
Jeffries said the jail is subject to frequent inspections: ICE agents visit weekly, an ICE supervisor comes once a month, the ICE Office of Detention Oversight comes twice a year and stays for three days each time.
Inspectors from the Office of Detention Oversight found three deficiencies during their most recent visit to the Boone County jail in Nov. 2024; all involved timely access to medical care that Maydak said have been rectified.
The jail is also inspected by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. State inspectors found two overcrowded jail cells in their Nov. 2024 visit. A previous inspection in January of that year found overcrowding in four dorms and three cells.
But those inspections tell only part of the story, according to Mary Georgevich, a staff attorney with the Chicago-based National Immigration Justice Center who works with clients at the Boone County jail.
Jails usually have advanced notice of ICE inspections, Georgevich said, and inspectors may not speak any other language than English, so some detained people are unable to air their complaints.
“The inspections versus people's actual lived experiences can really be very different,” Georgevich said.
The National Immigration Justice Center asked the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to investigate the Boone County Jail in 2021 after two ICE detainees reported unsafe conditions at the jail.
The men alleged the jail failed to address health risks posed by COVID-19, did not provide enough recreation time or adequate medical care and subjected detainees to racist behavior by other inmates.
“We only have one toilet and it is in the open. There is no privacy. There is also only one shower. The shower also does not have a curtain,” wrote one man from El Salvador who said his daughter was an American citizen living in Kentucky. “I should be released from jail, so I can work and be with my family in Kentucky and provide for them. When I am free, I will attend all court hearings and comply with all conditions of my release.”
“I sometimes feel depressed and like giving up on everything,” wrote an East African man whose criminal charges were dismissed, but was still facing deportation by ICE and held at the Boone County jail for 21 months.
The civil rights office opened an investigation and, in 2023, made 34 recommendations to ICE to improve oversight and conditions at the Boone County jail, according to a summary of the findings. The summary said investigators found the jail’s use of force policy did not meet national standards, only provided medical request forms in English and did not have adequate mental health staffing. ICE agreed with and made improvements to address 18 of those recommendations, partially agreed with three more and disagreed with the rest.
Maydak said the jail takes complaints seriously, and works to address issues that are reported. He said questions about this specific investigation would have to be answered by ICE, which has not responded to multiple requests.
‘I want to be there for them’
According to court records, the average stay in an ICE detention center lasts about 90 days, but jailer Maydak said the average stay in Boone County was closer to 45 days.
Immigration proceedings are extremely complicated and fall under the purview of multiple agencies, Georgevich said, so some people can end up detained for much longer.
A federal judge decided this past June that one man’s year-long detention in Boone County violated the U.S. Constitution.
The man, referred to in court documents as MTB, was a legal resident of the U.S. but was facing deportation back to his home country of Mexico after being convicted on drug trafficking charges in 2017. His 144-month sentence was shortened to 96 months, served at a Missouri state prison, because he cooperated with a Drug Enforcement Agency investigation into the Sinaloa Cartel. He applied for a stay of deportation because he feared the cartel would kill him if he was sent back to Mexico, and he was detained at the Boone County jail while the courts handled his application and subsequent appeals.
His appeals dragged on, said Georgevich, who worked on the case, in part because immigration offenses are a civil, rather than criminal matter, which means people facing deportation are not entitled to the same due process rights as those charged with a criminal offense.
They are not entitled to legal representation, for example. And some federal courts have ruled that people facing deportation are not entitled to a bond hearing that could result in them being released from jail while their immigration case plays out. A federal judge determined that MTB’s continued detention was unconstitutional and ordered he appear before a bond hearing after spending more than a year in Boone County.
Georgevich did not have permission from the man to discuss the resolution of the case and immigration proceedings are private, so the result of that hearing is unclear.
Georgevich said cases like MTB’s show how complicated the immigration system is, and how devastating long stays in an ICE detention center can be for detained people and their families.
“We've seen this attempt to strip rights away from people because they're not citizens of the United States, but the people who get detained at the Boone County Jail are just as big a part of the fabric of their communities as any U.S. citizen would be,” Georgevich said. “They have mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children who love and care about them, and the fact of taking them out of that community and housing them in these detention centers, even for 90 days or the years that we see some people detained, that effect cannot be overstated.”
MTB’s petition in federal court said he was the father of six children who are American citizens living in California. He said he was not getting treatment for medical conditions including high blood pressure, sudden dizziness and chronic pain. Jail doctors recommended he see a specialist for loss of muscle mass in his right hand, but ICE denied the request. Maydak said ICE will reject jail recommendations for outside medical treatment if the agency believes the treatment isn’t necessary.
“I want to go back to working as an auto-mechanic, which is what I did for most of my adult life when I owned my own shop,” MTB wrote. “I have also caused a lot of hardship on my kids and I want to be there for them and make up for my mistakes.”
