If Caroline County Takes Money for Immigrant Detention, Does it Also Take Moral Responsibility?
Columnist Eric Bonds on the county's 2017 agreement with ICE to use the old Peumansend Regional Jail to house immigrants awaiting asylum or deportation.
By Eric Bonds
COLUMNIST
What do you do with an old jail that nobody needs?
Caroline County faced this dilemma a decade ago. The Peumansend Creek Jail near the town of Bowling Green started operating in 1999, serving a public safety mission to house local inmates and overflow prisoners from other jails stretching from Northern Virginia to Richmond. But by 2017, the jail was shut down. Regional partners no longer needed the overflow space for their inmates and withdrew from the jail authority agreement. Caroline County, where the jail is located, was left as the only member.
But 2017 was also a year in which the first Trump Administration was working to increase the number of immigrant apprehensions and deportations. In this context, the County signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use the facility to jail unauthorized immigrants while they awaited asylum proceedings and potential deportation orders.
Under this arrangement, Caroline County is not just renting the jail space to ICE. It is using the jail authority to staff the facility and run it to ICE’s specifications. In exchange, ICE covers the jail authority’s costs, along with an additional $7 per detainee per day. In effect, Caroline County became a jail contractor for ICE.
While $7 per detained immigrant per day does not sound like a lot, when you’re talking about a 336 bed facility that runs 365 days a year, it adds up to some real money. Caroline County is guaranteed at least $500,000 each year, based on a minimum of 220 unauthorized immigrants being jailed per day. But if the detention facility runs closer to capacity, county revenue increases.
In its budget for the 2026 fiscal year, Caroline County plans to transfer more than half a million dollars from its detention fund, paid by ICE, into the County’s general fund to help cover operating expenses. In the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, almost $1.2 million was transferred from the detention fund into the county’s capital project fund, which helps pay for the upkeep and improvement of public infrastructure. In those same years, an additional $250,000 was transferred into the fund for school capital improvements. Even after these transfers, the detention fund is expected to carry a balance of almost one million dollars into the next fiscal year.
While the Peumansend Creek Regional Jail Authority is the legal entity that operates the detention facility, it is a bit of a shell. Caroline County and the small town of Port Royal, which is also located in Caroline, are the only members of the jail authority. Importantly, the intergovernmental service agreement for funding and operating the Caroline Detention Facility is between ICE and Caroline County, not the jail authority.
Given the County’s involvement with ICE and the financial benefits it gains, what moral responsibility does Caroline have to ensure that the detention facility is operated in an ethical way?
For one, since November the jail has been operating above capacity according to reports of ICE detention data at TRAC Immigration. Overcrowded jails create safety, health, and well-being risks for the people detained there. Caroline County should ensure that the number of people held at its detention center is reduced to safe levels.
In October, the Advance ran a story about a juvenile being detained in the jail on behalf of ICE. The Caroline Detention Facility was not built to incarcerate children, and Caroline County should clearly communicate with ICE that the facility will only house adults.
A 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights named the Caroline Detention Facility as having an especially large number of detainees held in solitary confinement, despite its relatively small size for an immigrant detention center in the United States. Solitary confinement can cause suffering and trauma. Individuals with a history of mental illness are more likely to end up in solitary, but the experience of prolonged solitary confinement can degrade anyone’s mental health. Caroline County should take steps to phase out the use of long-term solitary confinement at its jail in line with legislation that is now being considered for state prisons.
Finally, the Caroline Detention Facility was built to jail people accused or found guilty of serious crimes. But the great majority of immigrants locked up today in the facility have no criminal record. They are people like Mirna Benitez, whose story was covered earlier this year by the Advance. She is a mother and was a hard-working school custodian. By all accounts she was an upstanding and beloved member of her Stafford community, but found herself being treated like a criminal in harsh prison conditions in another Virginia public jail that contracts with ICE. Caroline County may want to insist to ICE that its detention facility should only be used to serve the public safety mission for which it was built, in this case strictly limited to jailing individuals accused or found guilty of serious crimes.
Caroline County made a deal with ICE during the first Trump Administration, and it has received some financial rewards. But the ethics of that deal look different now in the second Trump Administration. The County is entangled with a controversial federal agency that is credibly accused of serious human rights violations. Members of the public and elected officials should wrestle with what this means.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
