Teton County has allowed 103 illegal immigrants to escape in two years, ICE says

Over the past 21 months, the Teton County Sheriff’s Office has allowed 103 illegal immigrants to escape Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), the agency told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.

Immigration Customs and Enforcement on Tuesday contradicted earlier statements from Teton County Sheriff Matt Carr regarding a dispute over whether Carr’s office has scuttled ICE’s operations in recent months.

U.S. House of Representatives Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, made the dispute public by announcing in her Sunday newsletter that the Teton County Sheriff’s Office has not honored ICE’s requests for holds.

One hundred holds sunk

Since February 2023, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) has filed 118 detainer requests with the Teton County Sheriff’s Office, asking the local agency to hold illegal immigrants in jail for up to 48 hours until ICE can apprehend them, according to an email An agency spokesperson sent to Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.

These detainees are often an administrative request from ICE regarding people who were already in jail on suspicion of other crimes, but whom ICE would like to capture before releasing them on bail or other conditions.

Within that time frame, 103 of those detainees disintegrated after the jail let the suspects go before ICE could capture them, the ICE statement said.

“The ERO has released 103 detainees who were transferred to the Teton County Jail (after) not being honored by the Teton County Sheriff’s Office,” the ICE statement said.

Some disagreement here

“Additionally,” the statement continues, “the Teton County Sheriff’s Office does not notify ICE’s operation before releasing non-citizens from custody, limiting (our) ability to take timely action in these cases. ”

The result, the statement indicates, is that illegal immigrants are slipping away before they can be processed by the agency.

At this point Carr replied.

He said Tuesday that his office notifies ICE when a noncitizen has a bond hearing or other possible release date, a statement he repeated during an interview on Monday with Cowboy State Daily.

“We will let them know when the court date is and when release is possible,” Carr said.

Neither Carr’s interview nor ICE’s statements connect the two very different stories.

But John Fabbricatore, formerly ICE’s senior executive director for Colorado and Wyoming, said there are ways a sheriff’s office can notify ICE without actually notifying ICE.

“Often sheriffs get around this by notifying ICE — but they will ICE 15, 20 minutes before thej let (people) out,” Fabbricatore said.

He said he didn’t know if Carr’s office does that, noting he doesn’t know Carr personally or how involved Carr is with his office. But this is a scenario he has seen with sheriffs who don’t want to work with ICE.

“Especially sheriffs who don’t believe in the process but still want to comply will say, ‘Look, we sent ICE a notice!’he said. “AAnd if you look at the notification and the time of release, it will be a very short period of time.”

Speaking against the figure of 103 prisoners sunk, Fabbricatore said this number “knocked me over.”

‘I was like’Aare you kidding?’ That’s a large amount of money, especially for a small sheriff’s department,” he said. ‘For A smaller department, that means there are a large number of possible criminal aliens in that area.

When it fell apart

ICE and the Teton County Sheriff’s Office have not cooperated smoothly since Feb. 22, 2023, the ICE statement said.

That was the date of an official conversation between ICE and Carr.

“During that correspondence, Sheriff Carr informed ICE that the Sheriff’s Office would only detain non-citizens based on a court request accompanied by a judge’s signature,” the statement says, adding that Carr also said the Sheriff’s Office was withdrawing from its intergovernmental services contract with ICE’s operations team.

That agreement allowed ICE to pay to house illegal immigrants in the Teton County Jail for up to 72 hours instead of the standard 48 hours.

Having such an agreement could ease a sheriff’s concern about a lawsuit for holding people too long, Fabbricatore said. That agreement would allow the sheriff to transfer detainees directly from county custody to ICE custody without them having to leave his facility.

I’m not sure what happened there

Carr told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday that he does not remember canceling that agreement.

“I don’t know if that’s a contract that was presented to us, or one that we had that we didn’t renew,” Carr said. “I’m not familiar with that.”

Carr defended his decision to only detain people if ICE gets an order signed by a judge, saying he fears he will be sued for detaining people for too long.

Many other sheriffs in Republican-led states are comfortable holding detainees for up to 48 hours after their release, even with an ICE detainer request that isn’t signed by a judge, Fabbricatore told Cowboy State Daily.

Carr said he doesn’t feel comfortable with that because the American Civil Liberties Union considers Teton County “ripe” for a lawsuit. Teton has not previously been sued over this issue, he clarified.

“(But) we are certainly at risk, the ACLU always keeps a pretty close eye on us,” he said.

That’s because the community itself may look favorably on an ACLU lawsuit against the county over these matters, Carr added.

In your city

ICE’s operations team conducted an operation in Teton County between August 19 and 24, the statement said. The operations team in Denver worked with the U.S. Marshals Violent Offender Task Force to target 12 people with outstanding federal arrest warrants.

Six people were successfully arrested in the operation, while six more are being sought, the statement said.

Carr told Cowboy State Daily on Monday that he had not heard of an operation in Teton County in months.

And yet ICE says its operations team told the Teton County Sheriff’s Office “from the beginning, in accordance with ICE policy,‘that it worked in the Jackson Hole area.

ICE tells local sheriffs on the date of their operation which addresses they visit and which vehicles they use, the statement said.

“They said they notified us; I don’t know anymore,” Carr said. “I remember hearing about it afterwards. The reason I remember that is because it had something to do with the Cheyenne (ICE) office, which is not typical for us. WIn general, we are involved with Casper (officers).”

The only Wyomingite in the house

As for Hageman, the sole representative of the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming, she said ICE’s statements support those she made when she exposed the controversy in her Sunday newsletter.

“Teton County does not respect lawfully issued ICE detainees. Teton County has released criminal illegal aliens despite ICE requesting to detain them under U.S. immigration law,” Hageman wrote. “It is my understanding that every other county in Wyoming is granting requests for ICE detention; the very ones Teton County refuses to recognize.”

In a separate Tuesday interview on Cowboy State Daily by Jake Nichols On the morning radio show, Hageman said Carr seemed to deviate when he was first quoted on the subject Monday.

“Why does Teton County have this problem?” Hageman asked.

She said some illegal immigrants have been arrested on suspicion of drunken driving or sex crimes.

“People in Teton County and the surrounding area should be terribly concerned that (the authorities) release into the community illegal aliens who have a criminal record or who have been arrested for cases that would actually qualify them to at least go through the deportation process,” said Hageman

Clair McFarland can be reached at [email protected].