The Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department does not anticipate major changes in how it cooperates with federal immigration authorities even as officials across the country prepare for an expected crackdown on undocumented immigration under the new presidential administration.

Currently, the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department is in regular contact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and has been cooperating with them for some time — including holding inmates so they can be taken into federal custody, said Bartholomew County Sheriff Chris Lane.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often referred to as ICE, is a federal law enforcement department that focuses on, among other things, immigration enforcement.

ICE can place an immigration “hold” or “detainer” on inmates who are deemed removable from the country. This allows jails to hold inmates who would be otherwise eligible for release after 48 hours to give federal immigration authorities time to come pick them up.

“We follow a procedure that … if somebody is booked into the jail and they weren’t born here in the United States, we notify ICE,” Lane said. “Sometimes ICE will respond back and tell us to put a hold on them … and then sometimes they may place a hold and then lift that hold after a certain period of time.”

Last year, the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department contacted ICE a total of 277 times to notify immigration officials that an individual who was not born in the United States had been booked into the Bartholomew County Jail, Lane said.

ICE ended up placing 67 holds on Bartholomew County inmates last year and picked up 44 of them.

As of earlier this week, there were five inmates at the Bartholomew County Jail who had an immigration hold placed on them, Lane said.

Logistical hurdles

The topic of immigration and local law enforcement has been thrust into the spotlight as President Donald Trump’s administration has taken action this week on a number of different fronts on his signature campaign promise of cracking down on illegal immigration, The Associated Press reported.

After declaring a national emergency and describing immigration at the southern border as an invasion, he sent military troops to the border; lifted longtime rules restricting immigration enforcement near schools and churches; indefinitely suspended the refugee program; and halted key Biden-era immigration pathways.

On Friday, the Trump administration also announced that it is expanding a fast-track deportation authority nationwide, allowing immigration officers to deport migrants without appearing before a judge, according to wire reports.

However, carrying out massive deportations will still have significant logistical hurdles — including the number of immigration officers needed to detain undocumented immigrants, a lack of space to house detained immigrants and an unprecedented backlog in immigration courts.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to carry out the mass deportation of “millions and millions” of people in the country illegally, though he never deported more than 350,000 a year in his first term, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Trump’s plan will likely hinge on securing money for detention centers and whether he is able to use the military and local and state law enforcement to help carry out mass deportations. He wants negotiations with state and local governments to deputize police to enforce immigration laws.

ICE did not respond to questions about how many Enforcement and Removal Operations officers are currently in Indiana. However, local officials and state lawmakers told The Republic they believed there were at most a handful of officers statewide.

The Trump administration has not publicly said how many immigration detention beds it needs to achieve its goals, or what the cost will be. However, an estimated 11.7 million people are living in the U.S. illegally, and ICE currently has the budget to detain only about 41,000 people.

Additionally, many county jails in Indiana do not have a lot of extra space to hold undocumented immigrants.

As of earlier this week, there were 222 inmates at the Bartholomew County Jail, Lane said. Anytime there are more than 293 inmates “it causes issues … because we have to keep some (inmates) separate from others.”

A few months ago, there were 280 to 300 inmates at the Bartholomew County Jail, Lane said. An inmate population exceeding 260 and 270 “gets pretty hectic.”

“Who knows what’s going to happen,” Lane said. “…(ICE holds) may rise over the next year. Are there going to be more holds that are placed by ICE now with the changes? Could be.”

Deporting 1 million immigrants per year — nearly triple the number of deportations that Trump’s first administration ever carried out in a year — would take over a decade, require “the building of hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities” and have an estimated total price tag $967.9 billion, assuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5%, according to a recent report by the nonprofit American Immigration Council.

Immigration court backlog

At the same time, there are a record 3 million cases pending in U.S. immigration courts, fueled by record-breaking increases in migrants who seek asylum after being apprehended for crossing the border illegally, according to wire reports.

The figures, which come from government data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, show that the court backlog has grown by more than 1 million over the last fiscal year and it’s now triple what it was in 2019.

Judges, attorneys and migrant advocates worry that is rendering an already strained system unworkable, as it often takes several years to grant asylum-seekers a new life and to deport those with no right to remain in the country, according to wire reports.

The backlog includes migrants who have been in the United States for decades and were apprehended on unrelated charges, but most are new asylum seekers who declare a fear of persecution if they are sent back.

As of the end of August, there were 69,105 pending immigration cases involving Indiana residents — including 993 pending cases involving Bartholomew County residents and 1,434 involving Jackson County residents, according to TRAC.

There are currently around 700 immigration judges in 71 immigration courts across the country, according to the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts. The closest immigration court to Columbus is in Chicago.

The average caseload for an immigration judge is now 5,000 cases, Mimi Tsankov, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told The Associated Press. She cited estimates that doubling the current number of judges to about 1,400 might solve the current backlog by 2032.

In the meantime, local officials say they have been cooperating with ICE and plan to continue to do so.

“We cooperate (with ICE) anyway,” Lane said. “I think there’s this misnomer that jails don’t. …I know we do.”
© 2025 The Republic