El Paso Sheriff’s Office allocated $2 million toward immigration detainers in the opening four months of the year.

Records released to Texas Border Examiner on May 7 under the Texas Public Information Act identify at least 208 people booked into the El Paso County Jail under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers between January 1 and April 30, 2026. On April 30, 67 of them were still inside. In 181 of the 208 cases (87 percent), ICE placed a detainer on the same calendar day the inmate was booked. In 206 of the 208 cases (99 percent), the detainer landed within three days. Two cases took longer than three days. None took longer than thirty. "Pursuant to applicable law and policy, the Sheriff's Office honors all ICE detainers," the County Attorney's Office wrote in the cover letter releasing the records. The letter also said that "Sheriff's Office personnel have indicated that the Sheriff's Office does not maintain statistics regarding instances in which ICE does not take custody of an inmate following the issuance of a detainer."

The records

Texas Border Examiner filed a Public Information Act request with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in April for booking and detainer statistics from January 1 through April 16, 2026. The county released four monthly reports the Sheriff's Office files with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards on Form ID-1, "Inmates with Immigration Detainer." The county also released four report files listing every inmate held under an ICE detainer at the end of each of those months, with date of booking, date the detainer was placed, and date of transfer or release. The County Attorney's Office released one additional report in redacted form: a list of 264 bookings between January 1 and April 16 in which ICE was the arresting agency, with all names redacted. The county is asking the Texas Attorney General to decide whether the names can stay redacted. An opinion from the attorney general usually takes about 45 business days.

The bill

The four monthly reports list 18,910 prisoner-days for inmates with ICE detainers across January, February, March, and April. The Sheriff's Office reported a per-day cost of $101 in January and February and $134 in March and April. Multiplied through, the four-month cost reaches $2,194,997. Form ID-1 instructs the sheriff to calculate the daily rate by dividing the jail budget by capacity and dividing again by 365.

The end-of-month exodus

Each month ended with the count near a peak and started near a low. On January 31, 210 inmates were held with ICE detainers. On February 1, the number was 153. The jail roster fell again from 192 on February 28 to 134 on March 1, and from 208 on March 31 to 127 on April 1. Three transitions across one calendar day each removed 196 people from the jail. In between, the count climbed back up. March added 74 people across the month and ended at 208, the second-highest single-day reading of 2026. The peak for the year was 210 on January 31. The low was 126 on April 4. The released data does not explain why the count drops sharply at the start of each month. The pattern is consistent with batch transfers around month boundaries, but the records the county released do not document when individual inmates left or where they went.

Who is still in the jail

On April 30, 67 of the 208 people booked in 2026 were still in the El Paso County Jail. The longest stay in this group reached 118 days, covering most of the four-month window. The median was 52 days under an ICE detainer.

What the Sheriff Office did not release

The County Attorney's Office wrote in the cover letter that "Sheriff's Office personnel have indicated that the Sheriff's Office does not maintain statistics regarding instances in which ICE does not take custody of an inmate following the issuance of a detainer." Under federal regulation 8 C.F.R. § 287.7, an ICE detainer asks a jail to hold a person for up to 48 hours, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, after the person would otherwise be released. If ICE does not arrive in that window, the regulation says the jail should release the inmate. The County Attorney's Office redacted the names from a separate report described in the cover letter as "a redacted report listing bookings in which ICE was identified as the arresting agency for the period from January 1, 2026, through April 16, 2026." The cover letter said that report contains 264 bookings. Because the names are redacted, the released records do not show how many of those 264 bookings overlap with the 208 inmates in the detainer cohort.

You can find the methodology and a detailed analysis of the data in Data section. The illustration for the article was prepared by @cute_сhaika