OCSD contract to house ICE detainees, federal prisoners is now 9 months in

The Ozark County Sheriff’s Department is now nine months into its contract with the Department of Homeland Security to house and transport federal detainees for ICE and prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service. Today, Sheriff Cass Martin says the operation is running smoothly, but it wasn’t always that way. When the program launched in late February, Martin and his small team were suddenly thrust into unfamiliar territory, racing to hire and train an influx of new staff, juggle complicated transportation schedules and fine-tune procedures, all while trying to keep the program financially afloat from month to month.

“We were kind of going into a situation where we didn’t really have all the answers to what was going on,” the sheriff said, referring to their initial weeks after signing the contract with DHS. “It was a kind of a learn-as-you-go situation with the feds. They came in, they did their inspection, and they said we needed certain areas revamped, mostly our policies and making sure there were security measures in place for inmates and employees. All four of us in the room have put our heads together over these last several months and have molded the program to where it is today.”

Those “four in the room” are the sheriff, Jail Commander Dajana Watkins, Administrator Curtis Ledbetter and Evidence Custodian/Office Assistant Rob Simpson. Together, they’ve been the driving force behind implementing and managing the federal housing and transport contract, which allows the Ozark County Jail to house detainees for both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshals Service and transport for ICE - a move that has launched the sheriff’s department from the budget crisis it was in just a few years ago to what is expected to be a place of pretty sound financial security in coming years. 

In those initial weeks, Rob put in countless hours reading, reworking and realigning the Ozark County Jail’s policies with the national detention standards required for housing federal prisoners. After the standards were in good shape and the DHS signed off on the jail as an adequate and safe place for detainees and prisoners, the OCSD launched the program at full speed. They hit the ground running the last week of February, but they say it often felt like sprinting with a blindfold on in the early days. 

A bumpy start

The sheriff said the biggest early hurdle they faced was getting enough staff hired, trained and available to handle the ICE transports on a schedule that shifted constantly. “They would call at any hour of the night and say, ‘We need you to be in Kansas City at 8 o’clock in the morning,’ and it’d be 12 o’clock in the morning then. So we’d have to scramble and figure out how to make that happen. We’ve had to learn to adapt to be where we are needed at the times we are needed,” Martin said.

The financial balance of the program was also difficult in the early days, Curtis said, because OCSD was expected to have and maintain a fully-trained transport staff on standby at all times, even though the revenue stream from the contract wasn’t steady yet. “It was really expensive to get everything up and running. We had to hire and train so much staff in the beginning, and they weren’t giving us enough [funding] for housing [detainees] to offset that,” he explained. “So the commissioners stepped in big time to help us bridge that gap in the beginning.”

The “bridge” came in the form of two fund transfers from the county’s general revenue fund into the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department fund, giving the department enough cushion to make payroll and manage the ongoing payments tied to the increased expenses until federal payments became more reliable. 

“In the first few months after we reached full staffing, the program’s revenue hadn’t caught up yet because we didn’t have enough detainees coming in to cover payroll, equipment and training costs. During that startup phase, the county commission provided $188,000 to make sure the jail could meet staffing and training requirements while the program grew to a sustainable level,” Curtis said. 

Still, with only one federal employee writing and disbursing checks for all ICE jail contracts in a multi-state area, sometimes the checks arrive late. It was that delay that led to the second transfer from the general revenue fund, he said. 

“When we expected the program to begin covering its expenses on its own, the scheduled ICE payment arrived after payroll was due. The commission provided an additional $105,000 so those expenses could be paid on time.” 

The next week, the $105,000 federal payment arrived, replenishing the fund. Altogether, the Ozark County Commission provided $293,000 to support the startup of the ICE housing program, ensuring the facility could meet federal requirements and bring long-term revenue into the county. 

Curtis says the sheriff’s office is continuing to build a bigger buffer in its funds, so that if the federal payments are received late, it doesn’t cause a problem for the local jail making payroll and paying for its needed expenses.

The sheriff and his administrative team said the contract has become increasingly profitable after a difficult start. Now, the program is largely self-sustaining and expected to produce revenue in the coming months. 

“We hope to get at least three months' buffer in our account and then pay the county back the money they transferred in,” Curtis said. 

With additional funding allocated to ICE under the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the OCSD also hopes additional staff will be hired to help cut ICE contract checks on a more timely basis to the jails, which will also help the cash flow issue. 

Shuttling 500 detainees a month

The OCSD’s role in the program has evolved over the last nine months. “At first we were just doing overnight transports,” Curtis said. “We’d pick them up in Springfield, keep them overnight at the jail and drop them off in Little Rock the next day. Now, instead of that, we’re housing more permanent detainees and doing single-day runs. But every month, we’re still putting on upwards of 18,000 miles [on the three transport vehicles],” Curtis said, referring to the two large vans and Ford Explorer that have been added to the sheriff’s fleet. 

The contract pays the sheriff’s department $110 per detainee/inmate for every 24 hours they are housed at the Ozark County Jail and reimburses mileage for transportation runs at $1.10 per mile. Transport officers log between 18,000 and 26,000 miles each month, mostly shuttling detainees between regional jails, ICE offices and airports. They estimate the cost the OCSD has incurred averages around 50 cents a mile for the transports, leaving them with 60 cents in revenue.

The runs can be anywhere within a 5-hour radius of Gainesville. The furthest run that OCSD has handled has been to Oklahoma. They’ve been to some interesting facilities. “The craziest one is probably Leavenworth. It was a federal prison before, and now they’ve reopened it and are using it for ICE. No one is happy when they go there,” Martin said. 

Dajana, who worked directly under former Jail Commander Todd Beaver when the program first started and stepped into the management role upon his departure, said the department now mostly picks up detainees at a facility and delivers them to another facility or to the airport, where they are either flown to another housing location or flown on the first of a series of flights to their country of origin. 

“When you do a run like that, you drive right onto the tarmac at the Springfield airport. You pretty much pull up to the plane. They’ve got teams there verifying names and organizing property by [detainees’] countries. It’s all very secure and pretty wild to see,” the sheriff said. 

Dajana says that detainees are generally grouped onto planes by geographic location. “It makes more logistical sense for them to put people from all South American countries together, for instance. You likely wouldn’t see someone from China and Brazil on the same plane,” she said. “But some are going straight to Texas or some other [ICE] facility.”

Dajana said OCSD transport crews sometimes spend hours driving detainees between the same two locations. “We might spend a whole day shuttling from the Greene County Jail to the Springfield Airport, just going back and forth between the two for them,” she said. 

On average, the OCSD is shuttling close to 500 ICE detainees every month, she said. 

More recently, the sheriff’s department has leaned on the U.S. Marshals Service as a backup when ICE numbers fluctuate. “They piggyback off the ICE contract,” Rob said. “So, same policies, procedures and rates.”

While many of the ICE detainees are housed overnight or for the short-term, most inmates held for the U.S. Marshals office are on longer-term stays. Although some ICE detainees are in jail for longer periods of time, too.

Dajana says the detainees are treated with respect when they are in the Ozark County Jail. She speaks Spanish, which has helped her communicate with a large portion of those who have come through the doors, as many of them speak Spanish as their native language. “But we do have others who don’t. One guy spoke Cantonese. So we’ve used translation services in those instances and that gets us through enough to communicate with one another,” she said.

She said staff are also there to help when they can. “We have a deportation officer who comes here once a week and talks with the ICE detainees about any questions they might have on their deportation status... when they’ll be leaving or any other information they can give him about their case. We hold some who aren’t headed for deportation. Some of them are appealing; they just have to prove their case. And, we try to help them with that when we can. Not every ICE detainee who comes into the jail is deported,” she explained. 

The OCSD has maintained a good relationship with the contractors through the process, Dajana says. “I’ve heard nothing but good things from ICE about our team. They’ve told us Ozark County has a great reputation because of the lengths these guys go to make it work.”

Finding money for deputy raises and hires

The sheriff’s office expects to see additional revenue once the additional half-cent law enforcement sales tax begins showing up in monthly distributions, which is projected to double the county’s sales-tax-generated funds to around $100,000 a month. Paired with the jail contract and extra funds from the use tax, which was passed in April 2024, the department is in a much more comfortable place than it has been in several years. 

Martin said the housing and transportation contract has allowed the department to offer very good pay and training for jail and dispatch staff. The attractive salaries have caught the eye of good help, the sheriff says, with many of the employees hired on from Ozark County but others from Mountain Home, Arkansas, West Plains, Ava and even as far as Taney County. 

The sheriff’s department and jail staff have more than doubled since it took on the housing and transportation contract. “We were at 17 employees total late last year,” Rob said, referring to the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department as a whole. “Now we’re up to 36, counting some part-time workers. The jail staff alone has doubled.”

As additional funds are received, the sheriff says the department is focusing on giving its current deputies a much-needed and deserved raise. Eventually, in the next year or two, the department would also like to expand its law enforcement staff. Currently, the department has six full-time deputies. They hope to bring in enough revenue to add up to three more deputies in the coming years. 

“It’s been kind of the norm here in Ozark County to hire a new officer, train them up and then lose them to a nearby department that pays better,” the sheriff said. “We have a really good group of deputies right now, and they’ve stuck with us even though they could have left and made more money somewhere else.” 

He says that dedication is appreciated, and he is pleased that the department can now direct more funds to deputy salaries and equipment. “Our guys work their tails off. They definitely stepped up [this year] to where we can focus on the administrative parts of this [contract]. They’ve handled a lot of the other things that are going on,” Martin said. “At first, this was about trying to get them raises and better equipment. I think we can finally start doing that.”

Expanded jail capacity

Dajana said the jail’s capacity has expanded as well. They now have room for about 31 inmates or detainees after adding additional pods and bunks this year. 

“We have expanded some of our beds and built some bunks. We have three bunks right now, so that’s six total bed spaces added,” she said. “If we fill up too much, we can open the cell door, and it becomes a communal pod. We can hold more, but we try to keep it two less than full capacity. We’re planning on putting a couple more pods in, probably four more beds at least.”

Most of those beds are typically filled with ICE detainees or U.S. Marshals prisoners under the contract. As a result, the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department pays a lower fee to Douglas or Wright counties to house its own inmates when there are no open beds. The sheriff said this arrangement also helps those counties, which have also faced slim budgets and do not have similar federal contracts, to bring in extra revenue.

Early planning, getting a foot in the door

The Ozark County Jail remains one of only three facilities in Missouri that have successfully obtained and maintained contracts to house federal detainees and inmates. The other two are in St. Genevieve and Greene counties, both of which operate much larger jails in more urban areas. While several sheriffs’ offices have tried to secure similar contracts to improve their financial standing, the federal agency has not been eager to expand its partnerships.

Sheriff Cass Martin says the key to securing Ozark County’s contract was getting their foot in the door early. Although the agreement was only signed this year, Martin and his staff have been working toward it since 2022, when a budget crisis forced the immediate layoff of seven employees and left the department operating with a skeleton crew.

After the layoffs, the sheriff and Curtis began brainstorming ways to bring in revenue that could serve the department for years to come. “We were trying to come up with some type of scenario that would benefit the sheriff’s office in the long run, even after we’re gone... something the sheriff’s office can lean on so that it will never have to go through what it did in 2022,” the sheriff told the Times.

Martin, who had previously worked as a federal contractor providing security at federal buildings in Springfield, including the ICE office, already knew that DHS sometimes contracted with county jails to house federal inmates. He thought it might be a viable option for Ozark County. “I got in contact with some of the people I worked with years ago, and they said this was something that we could do. So, we slowly kind of put things together...” he said.

When the effort began, President Joe Biden was in office, and the federal government was scaling back its contracts with county jails for ICE detainees. Around the same time, Illinois passed a law preventing its county jails from housing federal prisoners, reducing available beds for ICE by between 30,000 and 40,000. That shift created an opening for jails in nearby states like Missouri, provided funding ever resumed.

Although the political climate under Biden made the outlook uncertain, Cass and Curtis believed the effort could ultimately benefit Ozark County, so they kept pushing forward. County commissioners were included in discussions between ICE and the sheriff’s department as early as 2022 and 2023. “They’ve been 100 percent behind this from the beginning, which has been really nice,” Curtis said.

A large part of the decision to extend a contract to a specific jail focused on the condition of the building and whether it met federal guidelines required by the government to house the detainees. Thanks to ARPA funds received after covid, the county was able to designate several hundred thousand dollars to make facility improvements at the jail.

The planning moved sharply toward reality after Donald Trump won the presidency in the Nov. 6, 2024, General Election. Trump had pledged to pursue aggressive immigration enforcement, and ICE anticipated that contract funding would increase significantly under his administration.

On election night, as returns indicated that Trump was the projected winner, Martin and Curtis realized the contract they had worked toward might finally be accepted in 2025. “Curtis and I were actually on our way back from Springfield, and we got a call at 6:30 or 7 o’clock that night from the main guy from the Chicago field office, wanting to talk numbers with us… asking us to resubmit the numbers that we’d previously sent,” Martin said.

“We had to pull off on the side of the road so we didn’t lose the call,” Curtis said.

“Then, everything kind of hinged on Trump. We knew that they would have to wait until he was inaugurated. So, that meant that we’d have to wait until after the 21st of January... And on the 22nd, they were here to do the inspection.”

When asked if they worried they may lose the contract if the political climate shifted or when another president is elected into office, the sheriff says that’s not a concern. 

“Greene County had this contract going before the current administration took office, and St. Gen. has had it for 20 years,” the sheriff said. “I think if we were going in and trying to get a contract, then yes, it would affect that. But I think we’ll have the contract now as long as we want it, and I think we can be as busy as we want to be with it.”

At this point, it’s looking like that may be for the foreseeable future. “I think we’ll continue it,” Curtis said. “There were times when we were asking ourselves if all of this was worth it - worth the headache. But it does employ a lot of extra people and brings in funding we wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Preventing another financial crisis

While the increased immigration enforcement and deportation practices under President Donald Trump have been the subject of national controversy, the sheriff says the community’s response to the jail’s contract to house detainees and federal prisoners has been largely neutral.

“Most people are just surprised it’s happening,” Cass said. “One woman called and said she’d heard a rumor around town that we had ICE detainees here in the jail and said to tell her it wasn’t true. I told her we did and it wasn’t any big secret – that a big front-page story ran in the newspaper when we first signed the contract,” he said, referring to an article that ran in the March 5 edition of the Times (See ‘Ozark County Jail signs contract to house federal ICE detainees’ at ozarkcountytimes.com). “We’re not trying to hide anything. We’ve been transparent about this since the beginning.”

Now that most of the logistical and day-to-day details are ironed out, the sheriff says the program has been a steady positive for the jail. “It’s been smooth. We haven’t had any major incidents or medical issues. Everything’s gone very well.”

He acknowledges that the five-year contract has been a major undertaking, but he still believes it’s the right move for one of Missouri’s smallest counties. With staffing stabilized, procedures in place and revenue on the rise, Cass says the department is finally able to plan ahead instead of scrambling to keep up. The contract may have taken shape during a financial crisis, he said, but he believes it will help prevent the next one. “It’s been a lot of work,” he said, “but it’s also been a really big opportunity for us.”