By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
With ICE running out of places to house detained immigrants, Wood County Sheriff Mark Wasylysyn expects it’s only a matter of time before he is approached about using space at the Wood County Jail for detainees.
Elsewhere in this region, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held an average of 80 detainees a day at the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio since March, when the facility agreed to house detainees.
“I’m kind of surprised they haven’t asked yet,” Wasylyshyn said Monday.
However, a border patrol representative did ask a Wood County deputy if the local jail would be willing to house detainees. But no official request has been made.
Wasylyshyn said he’s not sure how he will respond if ICE requests space.
“I’m torn,” he said.
The sheriff said he would first want to know who ICE would house at the jail.
“I’m not sure I want someone who’s been in this country 25 years,” living peacefully and making a better life for their family, he said.
Wasylyshyn, whose ancestors came to the U.S. from Ukraine in the 1920s and 1948, said his perspective is colored by the fact that his family adhered to the nation’s immigration process when they came to America.
However, he is also aware that the process to legally immigrate to the U.S. has been made nearly impossible for many.
“We have people escaping horrible conditions” in their homelands with abject poverty and ongoing violence, he said.
Wasylyshyn said he is also torn when he considers Wood County taxpayers. The Wood County Jail does lease space out to other counties that don’t have space for their prisoners. If he were to enter a contract with ICE for 25 detainees, the jail could bring in $500,000 a year – which would help pay off the recent jail improvements and expansion.
Also, Wasylyshyn said, he can’t imagine that ICE would be arresting fewer immigrants based on his jail not housing detainees. At least those at the Wood County Jail would be housed in a safe and clean setting – unlike the newly opened “Alligator Alley” facility in Florida, he said.
President Donald Trump has pledged to deport “the worst of the worst.” He frequently speaks about the countless “dangerous criminals” — among them murderers, rapists and child predators — from around the world he says entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration.
But government data around ongoing detentions tells a different story, according to the Associated Press.
There has been an increase of arrests by U.S. ICE since Trump began his second term, with reports of raids across the country. Yet the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes — a stark contrast to the nightmare Trump describes to support his border security agenda.
According to AP, the latest ICE statistics show that as of June 29, there were 57,861 people detained by ICE, 41,495 — 71.7% — of whom had no criminal convictions.
Each detainee is assigned a threat level by ICE on a scale of 1 to 3, with one being the highest. Those without a criminal record are classified as having “no ICE threat level.” As of June 23, the latest data available, 84% of people detained at 201 facilities nationwide were not given a threat level. Another 7% had been graded as a level 1 threat, 4% were level 2 and 5% were level 3, AP has reported.
Research has consistently found that immigrants are not driving violent crime in the U.S. and that they actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, according to AP.
A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, reported that immigrants for 150 years have had lower incarceration rates than those born in the U.S. In fact, the rates have declined since 1960 — and according to the paper, immigrants were 60% less likely to be incarcerated.
