The number of individuals booked into the Wasatch County Jail who were directly transferred into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tripled in 2025, according to public records obtained from the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office. The documents date back to 2020 and show the annual total number of bookings into the jail, the number of those individuals ICE placed detainers on and the number of those individuals actually transferred into federal custody.  A detainer is a request by ICE that a federal, state or local law enforcement agency hold an undocumented immigrant for 48 hours beyond the time they would normally be released so ICE can take them into custody. All arrests made by Wasatch County law enforcement — the Sheriff’s Office, Heber City Police Department and Utah Highway Patrol —  are taken to the county jail, except arrests of juveniles, who are sent to Slate Canyon Youth Center in Provo. Occasionally, local, state and federal agencies outside of the county jurisdiction also book arrested individuals into the jail. When a person is booked into the jail, a corrections officer questions them about their name, address, date of birth, employment, medical and mental health history and citizenship status.  Sheriff Jared Rigby said a corrections officer will call ICE if they believe the person they are questioning is not a U.S. citizen and the crime they were arrested for is “serious enough for the community” to get ICE involved. “If we’re just saying someone’s getting booked in because they got arrested for a warrant or because of a traffic violation or those kinds of things, no, we don’t work with ICE on those things,” he said. The Sheriff’s Office declined to provide data about the convictions and charges of all individuals transferred from the jail into ICE custody that would confirm Rigby’s claim. Following the phone call, the federal agency may place a detainer on the undocumented individual. Then it is up to ICE to take the individual into custody. If the individual is taken into ICE custody, the Sheriff’s Office is not privy to where ICE takes the individual or whether they are ultimately deported. If the Salt Lake City warehouse purchased by the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month is ultimately developed into the planned ICE detention facility, individuals taken into ICE custody from the jail may be transferred there. If the detainee is not taken into federal custody after going through legal proceedings for the crime they were charged with, they could be released from jail even if they are undocumented. The number of ICE detainers placed in the jail has more than doubled from year to year since 2022, with 15 that year, 31 in 2023, 66 in 2024 and 140 in 2025. Before then, there were 24 in 2020 and two in 2021. The number of those individuals transferred into ICE custody has varied: 20 in 2020, two in 2021 and 2022, 10 in 2023, 36 in 2024 and 107 in 2025. The tripling in the number of individuals transferred from the jail into ICE custody between 2024 and 2025 occurred even though the number of individuals booked into the jail in 2025, 1,088, had decreased from the prior year’s 1,477. 2025 was also the year of President Trump’s second inauguration and subsequent escalation of immigration enforcement by, among other actions, expanding ICE funding and recruitment and enacting the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to imprison undocumented immigrants without trial. A table compiling the total number of individuals booked into Wasatch County Jail, the number of those individuals who had ICE detainers placed on them and those who were transferred into ICE custody annually from 2020 to 2025. The table also breaks down the information by law enforcement agency, with the other agencies category representing individuals booked into the jail by law enforcement agencies outside of Wasatch County’s jurisdiction. Credit: Park Record Why did ICE transfers from Wasatch County Jail increase in 2025? Rigby attributed last year’s tripling of individuals transferred from the Wasatch County Jail into ICE custody to the federal government. “This is not the jail that’s all of a sudden deciding to take this action or to enforce it. They always make the call to ICE. It’s just whether ICE is going to actually show up to pick them up,” Rigby said. Leo Lucey, a public information officer with the Sheriff’s Office, similarly attributed the increase in ICE enforcement to the current president. “When drugs are a national priority, you see a big uptick in those cases. When guns are the priority, you see a big uptick in those cases. Same with human trafficking or immigration or crimes against children,” he said. The Sheriff’s Office’s budding relationship with ICE may have also contributed to the spike in transfers from the jail in 2025. The Sheriff’s Office entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE on Aug. 4, 2025, which allows state and local law enforcement to perform specified immigration officer functions under the federal agency’s direction and oversight. Rigby said he and several other representatives from the executive board of the Utah Sheriffs’ Association met with leaders from ICE in Washington, D.C., in May 2025. Rigby said that before the visit, many of the sheriff’s offices in Utah were working to communicate with ICE’s Salt Lake City Field Office, but that communication was not reciprocated. He said that resulted in situations throughout the state in which police officers and ICE agents were unaware of each other’s presence. “Blue-on-blue risks are dangerous for the public, as well as all law enforcement involved, so agencies are expected to communicate with each other about their operations,” Rigby said. “In addition, sheriffs are elected by the people. It’s a constitutional office, and we are responsible for ensuring individuals’ constitutional rights are protected. For those reasons, we insist on being notified when federal law enforcement are in our counties.” The May 2025 meeting in Washington, D.C., resulted in closer communication and collaboration between local law enforcement agencies and ICE through 287(g) agreements.  Rigby’s decision to enter into a 287(g) agreement was not influenced by the May 2025 meeting. He had signed his end of the agreement two months prior. Statewide, there are currently 10 sheriff’s offices, plus the Riverton Police Department and the Utah Department of Corrections, that have such agreements with ICE. The Summit County Sheriff’s Office and the Park City and Heber City police departments have not signed on. Agreements with ICE in the Tooele, Utah, Washington and Weber County sheriff’s offices and the Riverton Police Department use the task force model, which gives local and state law enforcement the most power to enforce federal law out of all the models. Under the task force model, state and local law enforcement officers can perform the functions of an ICE officer during regular police duties. The task force model was revived by Trump in January 2025 after it had been discontinued in 2012 following a 2011 Department of Justice investigation that found a pattern of civil rights abuses and racial profiling at an Arizona sheriff’s office using the model. The Sheriff’s Office has a warrant service officer model, the model that gives local law enforcement the least authority to enforce federal law.  The agreement allows corrections officers at the Wasatch County Jail to serve and execute warrants of arrest for immigration violations on individuals booked into the jail at the time of their scheduled release. It also allows them to serve warrants of removal, meaning transfer into ICE custody, at that time. If the individual is not transferred into ICE custody within 48 hours of their scheduled release, they must be released from the jail. Rigby said received an email from ICE in the past month asking if he is interested in training corrections officers to issue ICE detainers themselves. Rigby was under the impression that this would fall under the warrant service officer model, but sample 287(g) agreements from ICE show that this function would escalate the Sheriff’s Office’s agreement to the jail enforcement model. The jail enforcement model would also allow corrections officers to interrogate individuals booked into the jail about their citizenship status while gathering evidence, including preparing affidavits and taking sworn statements, fingerprints and photographs. The jail enforcement model would require training and testing of all law enforcement personnel authorized to perform those functions. The training and testing would be facilitated and paid for by ICE. The Sheriff’s Office would continue to pay salaries of employees during the training and as they are performing the functions of an immigration officer per the agreement. Rigby said he had not yet made a decision about escalating the agreement. He is still gathering information about how it would affect the Sheriff’s Office and the broader community, “It’s a very important issue, and there are individuals within our community that are concerned about how law enforcement is going to handle this one way or another,” he said. Rigby said the Sheriff’s Office has not considered escalating its ICE agreement to the task force model. Heber City Police Chief Parker Sever said he was not familiar enough with 287(g) contracts to know if entering into one would be a benefit for the Police Department. Either way, undocumented individuals arrested by the Police Department would be sent to the county jail. Ethical concerns Sheriff Rigby and Chief Sever have urged that undocumented individuals should not be afraid to report a crime or interact with local law enforcement despite the presence of ICE agents locally. “If you’re the victim of a crime, do not be scared to report it to the police department. You can come here. We don’t care about your immigration status. What we care about is taking care of you as a victim,” Sever said in January. “There’s no scenario that someone comes to the PD and says, ‘Somebody robbed me,’ and then we arrest them and have them deported.” Aaron Welcher, the director of communications for the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, said local law enforcement agencies with 287(g) agreements “can’t have their cake and eat it, too.” The contracts create distrust between law enforcement and the people they serve, no matter what a sheriff or police chief may say, he argued. “They have chosen to enter into these agreements that really do blur the line between local law enforcement and ICE activities, and that rightfully does make people afraid,” he said. That is especially true in the wake of “horrific ICE interactions that have led to death” in recent months, including but not limited to ICE agents’ fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, he said. Furthermore, 287(g) agreements are “notorious for helping promote racial profiling because law enforcement has an image of what an immigrant looks like or where an immigrant community is,” Welcher said. He said that under a warrant service officer model, racial profiling may take the form of a corrections officer treating an individual booked into the jail differently or asking them certain questions depending on their ethnicity. He did not imply that such conduct was occurring in Wasatch County specifically, but said the agreement created the potential for it to occur. Rigby said that a corrections officer does not call ICE based on the ethnicity of the person they are questioning. Welcher said the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah saw an increase in 287(g) agreements statewide in 2025, which is why the civil rights nonprofit created a webpage tracking the agreements last summer. He said there has been an effort from the federal agency to convince Utah sheriff’s offices to enter into 287(g) agreements. Representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah have fought back by meeting with local law enforcement agencies and discussing what they see as the agreements’ harmful effects. On a broader scale, Welcher said 287(g) agreements could feed into mass surveillance and policing that would affect every American. “We would strongly recommend not entering these agreements and working with local communities for local solutions that really put public safety in the hands of those here in the community, and not by policies from D.C.,” he said. The post ICE transfers from Wasatch County Jail tripled in 2025 appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less