ICE Increasingly Relies on Vermont Prisons for Immigration Detention 

Vermont’s state prisons are part of a growing constellation of federal, state and county facilities in New England used to house people detained by federal immigration authorities. That role appears to be ramping up two months into the second term of President Donald Trump, who has made pursuing undocumented immigrants a central focus of his administration.

Yet, detainees placed in those prisons by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, struggle to call their families and have been exposed to physical violence, according to advocates, incarcerated people and public records obtained by VTDigger. Those issues are compounded by the limited resources available to assist non-English speakers. 

The Vermont Department of Corrections, for its part, said the state is able to provide better care for people held by immigration authorities than they would receive in federal detention centers. According to Isaac Dayno, the department’s director of policy and strategic initiatives, immigration detainees present unique challenges, and the department is working to address language access issues through new policies. 

“They’re brought into our system, and we have very little information about them,” Dayno said, describing immigrants detained by the federal government. “Essentially, we have their name and that’s it.”

While advocates agree that Vermont prisons are described by detainees as a less harsh environment than some other New England facilities, they also say the language barrier creates problems with access to medical care and telephones. In at least one instance, a detainee has recently faced worse than that.  

This March, an immigration detainee in Vermont was assaulted by someone else held in the prison, internal Vermont Department of Corrections communications reveal.

In a recent high-profile incident, Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist working at Harvard University, was detained by ICE, the Guardian reported. Petrova, who friends said had her visa revoked, was held at Vermont’s women’s prison in South Burlington for a week, according to the state’s offender locator database. She was later transferred to a facility in Louisiana, the Guardian said. 

ICE did not respond to requests for comment. 

Even though, in most cases, immigrants facing deportation in Vermont’s jails are not facing criminal charges, they wind up lodged alongside individuals charged with or convicted of crimes, sometimes in units meant for managing misbehavior. 

Vermont’s prison population hovers around 1,450. At any given time, people held for immigration-related reasons make up anywhere from less than 1 percent to about 2 percent of the total population.

Men are typically held at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, and women are held at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. Between February and mid-March, the number of people held at the two prisons for federal immigration authorities, calculated as a rolling average, reached a two-year high of about 20 people. 

These higher numbers may be due to the new administration, but experts say it’s too soon to know for sure. 

Trump has called for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and even the removal of people in the U.S. on green cards, who are legal permanent residents. Through executive order, the president has curbed humanitarian parole and sought to end birthright citizenship, which has so far not survived court challenges. 

In turn, state lawmakers focused on federal immigration enforcement in Vermont following the November election. State senators drafted and backed a bill, S.44 that would restrict the ability of local law enforcement to collaborate with federal immigration authorities if Trump declares a state of emergency at the northern border. 

In the House, Rep. Troy Headrick, I-Burlington, proposed a bill to ban the use of Vermont’s prisons for immigration detainees, though that legislation has stalled. 

In the midst of those legislative discussions, detainees appear to be spending longer than in years past held in the state’s facilities, according to state officials. 

Gov. Phil Scott, for his part, suggested that the scale and scope of federal detentions would need to change significantly for him to reconsider the state’s collaboration with ICE.

“We haven’t seen anything rise dramatically,” he said at his regular press conference on April 2. “I think there are fewer people coming across the border at this point in time. Seems like … some of the issues are starting to be tamped down. So, I don’t know that this is going to escalate further.”

ICE Detention footprint

For years, Vermont prison leaders have worked with federal authorities to lodge people detained for immigration-related issues. Until recently, that agreement arose out of a partnership with the U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees people charged with crimes in Vermont’s federal courts. 

But last August, Vermont updated its memorandum of understanding with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The short document allows federal immigration authorities to use all of the state’s six prisons for detentions, and asserts the state must provide the same medical care for people incarcerated by the federal government as by the state government. The agreement does not specify how long detainees can be held in state prisons but does allow prison superintendents to “refuse admittance due to capacity.” 

Vermont receives $180 per night per person held, according to the document, and the contract is in effect for one year. That fee is less than the actual cost to hold someone, according to corrections leadership. The per diem is $50 more than the state receives for lodging people for the U.S. Marshals Service, according to the most recent contract shared with VTDigger. The funds are deposited into Vermont’s General Fund, rather than routing directly to the Department of Correction. 

But Vermont is just one piece of an expanding network of facilities in New England, according to Leah Hastings, a staff attorney focused on immigration detention for Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. 

Across the region, ICE has expanded its detention footprint. Immigration authorities are newly working with a federal prison in Berlin, New Hampshire, to house detainees, Hastings said. Also, Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Maine, is holding people detained for ICE for longer stints in recent months, according to Hastings 

That expansion worries Hastings, who suggested the changes mark a new phase in immigration authorities’ operations in the Northeast. “The foothold that ICE detention has been able to make in New England over the last year” is “insidious,” she said. 

At the center of the network is the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, a detention center notorious for its poor conditions. Hastings was part of a team that documented 25 years of violations at the Plymouth facility used by ICE, culminating in a 91-page report last fall. 

“Plymouth is essentially functioning like a giant holding cell for everyone who’s picked up in the area,” she said. More and more, people are shepherded out of that facility quickly, according to Hastings, transported as far away as Louisiana and Texas to other detention centers. 

According to Hastings, people generally wind up at Plymouth one of two ways: they have an interaction with the criminal legal system, or they’re picked up while crossing the U.S. border.

And if they’re detained while crossing the northern border with Canada, Hastings said they most often arrived from Vermont. 

Brett Stokes, the director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Justice Reform Clinic, where he focuses on immigration law, is one of the few attorneys in Vermont representing undocumented clients.

Many people Stokes has worked with wind up moved from Vermont by ICE to Plymouth County Correctional Facility. While his clients report the conditions are “much better” in Vermont than Plymouth, the Spanish-language resources aren’t. Relatively few incarcerated people and prison staff speak Spanish or languages other than English, Stokes said, making life behind bars in Vermont challenging.

Through his work, he’s supported only a handful of people detained by immigration authorities in Vermont and held in the state’s prisons. His clients have typically had previous interactions with organizations in Vermont like Migrant Justice, which advocates for migrant workers in the state. Stokes is able to reach his clients using the attorney phone lines. While those conversations generally revolve around immigration proceedings, he also helps provide information about the disorienting process of detention. 

“Without fail, legal things aside, the main thing I get asked about is, ‘how do I make phone calls?’” Stokes said. Often, he helps communicate with people’s families, keeping lines of communication open through the confusion of incarceration. 

‘Treated like they’re criminals’

VTDigger surveyed half a dozen incarcerated people held at Northwest State and Chittenden Regional—the two primary facilities used by the Department of Corrections to hold federal detainees—and all reported that immigrants struggle to use the prison phones.

Isaac Jacobs is being held at the St. Albans prison. He said the majority of immigration detainees aren’t able to access prison phones and struggle to receive medical care. “The things that the average human being would get no matter where they were,” Jacobs said. 

Guards direct people to read official posters in various languages describing some relevant legal information, according to Jacobs. While most detainees speak Spanish, he also recalled hearing languages such as Italian and Arabic. Even though these men arrive for immigration-related matters rather than criminal charges, “most of them are treated like they’re criminals,” he said. 

Jacobs attributed some of the substandard treatment he says immigration detainees receive to the political persuasion of staff—“big time, you know, Trump supporters.” 

Department of Corrections leadership said everyone lodged in the state’s prisons is treated in accordance with the department’s policies and mission, vision and values statements.

But Jacobs also said that some prison staff are “fed up” because they haven’t received clear instructions about how to treat those held for immigration reasons. 

“They want to help, but they don’t know how they can help,” Jacobs said. 

Dayno, the corrections director, also said Spanish is the most common language spoken by the people held as immigration detainees, though he too noted that many less common languages are spoken as well.

All of Vermont’s six prisons lack wi-fi, which Dayno said can make it hard for staff to access interpretation services. The state is currently seeking funding in next year’s budget to build out prison internet infrastructure.

In the meantime, a Department of Corrections staff member focused on language access has sought to improve analog resources, according to Dayno.

“She’s working on trying to provide more training guidance for staff: manuals, binders with pictures, more graphics for folks who maybe don’t even speak Spanish,” he said.

Separate from language concerns, lodging people facing civil offenses with those charged with or sentenced for crimes can present safety issues.

In heavily redacted messages, corrections department staff described an “assault” on an “ICE detainer” that required medical attention. The names of both the alleged perpetrator and victim were blacked out in the documents. According to the communications, the assault occurred in “fox,” an adaptable unit sometimes used to house women charged with disciplinary violations. 

Vermont Department of Corrections officials said policy prevented them from commenting on the incident. Dayno said fox, or foxtrot, is a flexible unit sometimes used for “behavioral management.” The space allows for more resources and freedom than booking, another venue commonly used for housing federal immigration detainees.

The documents provide some details regarding the incident and mention only the one assault on March 11. An email written by a prison health care contractor discussed an assault that took place the same day, possibly the same event. Though the message does not explicitly reference ICE, the health care worker wrote that the perpetrator of the assault indicated “that her goal was to break this person’s teeth.” 

The increase in federal detainees—coupled with a simultaneous rise in state detainees—indicate Vermont’s prisons are becoming more crowded, limiting the ability of staff to find designated space for people held on immigration offenses. But Vermont’s collaboration with federal partners shows no sign of waning, with the same authorities expanding their work across New England.

Dayno, the corrections official, said what is different now is not the partnership itself or its scope. 

“What’s shifted is the attention on the subject and federal policy,” he said. “It’s still really early in the Trump administration and we’re evaluating it as we go.”