El Paso's reported cost to hold inmates for ICE reached $2.76 million through May, with a third of the roster carrying detainers placed before 2026

Sheriff Oscar Ugarte signed a one-page report for the State of Texas on June 1, 2026, putting the cost of holding inmates with immigration detainers in the El Paso County Jail at $569,768 for May. Records the county released on June 25 show that 58 of the 157 inmates with an ICE detainer on May 31 had carried that detainer since before this year, and that 22 had been in the jail more than a year, one of them for 1,088 days. The May filing brings El Paso's reported cost of housing detainer inmates to $2,764,765 for January through May, at a flat $134 per inmate per day. The figure for January through April, $2,194,997, matches to the dollar the total the county reported in an earlier release that this publication examined in May, reproduced here from a separate set of monthly filings.

Under 8 C.F.R. § 287.7, an ICE detainer asks a jail to hold a person for up to 48 hours, not counting weekends and holidays, past the point at which the jail would otherwise release them, so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can take custody. It carries no charge of its own, so for a person held on local charges it has no effect until that release point arrives, and it can stay on a file for as long as the underlying case keeps the person in the jail. The county's inmate list records the longest-held inmate as booked into the jail on June 8, 2023, given an ICE detainer the same day, with no transfer or release entered against the line 1,088 days later. Twenty-one others had been held more than a year as of May 31. The list gives a booking date, a detainer date, and a release date for each person, but not the charge holding them, so it does not show why any single case has run as long as it has.

At each month-end from March through May, between 37 and 51 percent of the inmates on the detainer roster had received their detainers before 2026: 90 of 204 on March 31, 68 of 133 on April 30, and 58 of 157 on May 31. The 48-hour window passed long ago for those inmates, and the sheriff's daily count, which sets the monthly cost, includes each of them every day they remain.

The records price every detainer day but do not track what becomes of the detainers. In the June 25 letter releasing them, the El Paso County Attorney's office wrote 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 monthly forms carry a dollar figure for every day of detainer custody, and nothing in the release shows how often a detainer ended in an ICE pickup. The daily detainer count ran at its lowest of the year in April, between 126 and 139 across the month, after a peak of 210 on January 31 and 208 on March 31. A separate report lists 92 bookings between April 17 and June 11 in which ICE was the arresting agency, each a federal transit hold carrying an immigration charge and no bond, and by date of confinement all 92 fall between May 16 and June 11, with none in the first four weeks of that window. The county's earlier release had recorded 264 such bookings between January 1 and April 16. The sheriff's daily form recorded 154 people under a detainer on May 31, and the detailed inmate list recorded 157, a difference the records do not explain. The cost figures rest on the daily form, which sets the per-day rate by dividing the jail budget by its capacity and then by 365. The June 25 letter described the enclosed detainer reports as covering April, May, and June, but the forms run March through May, and the June report, due July 5, is not in the release. The figures here cover January through May 2026, and they say nothing about whether any detainer ended in a transfer, a release, or a removal.