The Phelps County Jail has transferred out its detainees from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That action comes about 10 days after the Archdiocese of St. Louis filed suit against a different rural Missouri jail, accusing it of violating the religious rights of Catholic detainees who cannot take communion from visiting priests. Abide in Love Rolla, a grassroots nonprofit that provides support to ICE detainees and their families, tells SLM that on October 15, people in ICE custody in the Rolla jail were removed.
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The organization says that despite media reports in August of last year that the Rolla jail would no longer take new ICE detainees, that didn’t actually happen. (Sheriff Mike Kirn had said the $85/day federal reimbursement didn’t cover the county’s costs.) Since then, the facility has consistently housed 30–50 ICE detainees until the removal in mid-October.
The Archdiocese’s federal suit against the Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center was filed on October 5. It said that priests were only permitted to interact with detainees by phone across a glass partition, preventing them from distributing communion wafers or hearing confession. Calls to detainees are monitored by jail staff, which interferes with the Roman Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. The suit says that’s a violation of detainees’ First Amendment rights.
Among other things, the suit sought an injunction holding that the government could not pay any federal funds for housing ICE detainees in a detention facility “unless that facility allows substantially the same religious accommodations requested above.”
A source tells SLM that the Phelps County Jail had an even more stringent policy and that detainees could only speak to people via iPad. That could have put the jail in the crosshairs of a lawsuit of its own or any injunction entered in the Ste. Genevieve County case. (The Phelps County sheriff did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
The Abide in Love Rolla spokesperson says that according to their tracking, eight men went from Rolla to the jail in Greene County. Six went to a facility in Kansas, including a father and daughter who split up. Ten went to locations unknown to Abide in Love Rolla.
Reached for comment, ICE said it would not “disclose or discuss law enforcement operations “for operational security and the safety of our officers.”
The statement continued, “ICE makes custody determinations daily, on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. law, and various factors to ensure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States. Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination—home.” It continued by listing the options it gives to people who self-deport.
