Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Missouri, held just five people in ICE custody as of Monday morning. The jail has housed hundreds of ICE detainees cumulatively over the past year and a half. One of those five was booked early Sunday morning, and all five were facing various criminal charges in addition to their immigration holds.
The sharp decline follows a mid-October transfer operation that emptied out most of the jail's ICE population, according to St. Louis Public Radio. Lucy Behrendt, cofounder of Abide in Love, a group that has tracked the movement of ICE detainees between Missouri jails for more than a year, said ICE moved 34 detainees out of Phelps County Jail on Oct. 14. Of those, 18 were transferred to Greene County Jail and six were sent to a federal detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas, which is operated by CoreCivic, according to Abide in Love's records.
The locations of the remaining 10 detainees moved out of Rolla that day are unknown, the station reports. Four of those unaccounted-for detainees had removal orders documented in Abide in Love's records — a detail that matters because ICE's online detainee locator excludes people with removal orders, making it harder for advocates and lawyers to track where they've gone amid broader changes to that tool.
A Year and a Half of Housing Hundreds for ICE
Since it began the arrangement in March 2025, the jail had held more than 350 people for ICE by late August, according to Phelps County Focus. The jail was holding 70 people for ICE when the outlet published its Aug. 25, 2025, report. The jail consistently housed 30 to 50 ICE detainees in the stretch leading up to this month's removal, per Abide in Love's tracking cited by St. Louis Magazine.
The arrangement has been anything but steady. Phelps County jail leaders told the county commission in 2025 that they would stop accepting new federal detainees effective Sept. 1, citing costs that outstripped the $85-per-night federal reimbursement. Jail officials said at the time that the reimbursement did not cover their actual expenses, and Sheriff Mike Kirn noted that while ICE was bringing in roughly $170,000 a month in revenue, the county was spending about $13,000 a month just transporting detainees. “It's not paying for itself,” officials said at the time, per the same Phelps County Focus report.
That pause lasted roughly two months. St. Louis Public Radio reported the jail resumed accepting ICE detainees in late October 2025, taking in more than 20 people on ICE holds in a single week after the reversal. More than 350 people detained by ICE had spent time at the jail over the course of that year, the station noted.
Why the Detainees Disappeared From Rolla
ICE has offered little explanation for the mid-October transfers. A spokesperson declined to disclose or discuss the operation, citing operational security and officer safety, and said only that ICE makes custody determinations daily, on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with U.S. law — weighing various factors to ensure detainees' presence for immigration proceedings or eventual removal from the country, per St. Louis Magazine. The agency would not say whether any specific court injunctions affected operations at Phelps County Jail specifically.
The timing coincides with a broader legal shakeup. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Oct. 21 restricting certain ICE election-related field operations in nine states, including Missouri, tied to an investigation and publicity campaign into unsubstantiated voter-fraud claims; that injunction remains in effect through Election Day. Separately, the Archdiocese of St. Louis sued ICE in October, alleging officials at the Ste. Genevieve County jail denied Catholic detainees' religious rights, and multiple federal cases have alleged ICE deprived detainees of due-process rights across Missouri. The Department of Homeland Security has said it is working to deport individuals in ICE custody despite what it calls a historic number of injunctions.
A Pattern Seen Statewide
Phelps County is one of three Missouri jails — alongside Ste. Genevieve and Greene counties — with federal contracts to house ICE detainees, and all three had been taking in increasing numbers of people in recent months, according to the Columbia Missourian. Greene County Jail offers a telling comparison: it held 407 ICE detainees on July 15, about a third of its 1,242-inmate capacity, and reported 383 federal inmates on July 1 compared with 287 on June 13, according to the Springfield Daily Citizen. Unlike Phelps County's $85-per-night rate, Greene County receives $100 per day for each federal inmate it houses, after its sheriff's office agreed in February 2025 to detain up to 300 people per day on ICE's behalf.
What happens next for Phelps County Jail's ICE arrangement remains unclear. Sheriff Mike Kirn, who oversees the jail, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, St. Louis Public Radio reported. The Phelps County Courthouse sits in Rolla, where the jail had quietly become one of the state's busiest hubs in the federal immigration detention system.
