8/18/2025 – Just Talk (Bill Martin)
Yes, the Broome County Jail is an official Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility. And who is being held there for ICE? We don’t know for sure, but it has included people from Azerbaijan to China, from Ecuador to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey and Venezuela–among others.
The Sheriff repeatedly tells us that the 287g agreement he recently signed with ICE is only to allow his ICE-trained deputies to serve warrants in the jail. All quite accurate. But thats a diversion. The jail has held scores of persons for ICE this year, presumably under the contract with the U.S. Marshalls Service that has for decades included caging ICE detainees—often seized in the past through raids conducted by ICE alongside joint task forces of the Sheriff, Johnson, and Binghamton police departments (see for example Press and Sun Bulletin January 2011, p.3).
Who is being detained now? We don’t know. What does ICE say? As little as possible.
As reported here previously, the Deportation Data Project among others has been collating information from ICE through multiple Freedom of Information Requests. Their data sets located here reveal that the Broome County Jail is listed on ICE datasets as an ICE “Detention Facility”. The datasets are small and list few persons among the scores or hundreds held in the Broome County Jail at one time or another in recent months. But look at this clip from just one ICE data set, and you can see the Broome County Jail holding ICE detainees, predominantly Black and Brown people, from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas.
The dataset is seriously incomplete. Other datasets on the site which cover ICE detention to detainer to arrests operations have persons from Iran to Russia and Mexico in the Broome County Jail. No one knows what a full accounting might reveal.
These persons are held without due process or legal representation which led a Broome County Legislator to resign from the jail’s advisory group. Our elected officials have nvertheless signed off on all the jail funding with few if any questions–for years.
Can our County Legislators make few inquiries on what is being done in their name, and report back to us on what is going on?
And if any county legislators want to stop acting for ICE (and save the County lots of money), they should act to cancel the contracts that allows the jail to be at the beck and call of Federal authorities and pass the additional costs of housing hundreds of persons.
The next stop? The City of Binghamton and local police departments.
They should stop reporting to ICE, through the surveillance center housed in the Binghamton Police Department, the status of persons spotted on our streets by local surveillance devices and those stopped, interrogated and held on local charges.
Will city and council members and our mayors keep ICE out of our community, our data, our literal biometric faces?
Act yourself:
- Locate and write your Broome County Executive here, and your legislators here, with some sample questions here
- Locate your municipal/city representatives through these links
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