Leyla Navarrete left Nicaragua in summertime. During a month of hard travel, she caught a bus, crossed a river in a little boat made of tires and rode in a truck that typically ferried farm animals.
She made it to Honduras, then Mexico, and finally to the U.S. border, where federal officials quickly released her on conditional parole in September 2022. She moved to Indiana, applied for asylum, and got a work permit and a job. By summer 2025, she and her husband were expecting a child.
On Aug. 7, 2025 she had an in-person check-in scheduled with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"The day before I was very nervous. We believe in God, me and my husband, so we prayed. And I appreciated the whole day," she said, speaking through an interpreter to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
The morning of the appointment, she slept in later than usual, getting up around 8 a.m. She skipped breakfast, and started the two-and-a-half hour drive from her home in Garrett to the ICE office in Indianapolis, where she had a noon appointment.
"I felt no fear, no anxiety, nothing was going through my mind. I only felt a great trust in God that gave me an inexplicable peace," she said.
In Indianapolis, ICE arrested her soon after she walked into the office and sent her to a jail in Kentucky.
Navarrete is one of 9,335 people ICE locked up in Kentucky between Oct. 2022 and early March 2026 – more than 60% of them since President Donald Trump took office last year, according to data ICE provided in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project.
Nearly half of those people, like Navarrete, were shuttled to Kentucky jails from 37 other states, like Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona and New York. The rest were arrested by ICE in the commonwealth, according to a KyCIR and Kentucky Public Radio review of the data.
The data helps illustrate the role Kentucky — where just about 5% of people are immigrants — plays in Trump's deportation machine. Federal officials use several county jails in mostly rural areas far removed from the national immigration debate as de facto holding pens for people swept up by ICE agents across the country. Immigrants from around the world that await their cases to play out in court are often bounced between detention facilities before they're released or, more commonly, deported, the data show.
This practice has divided some communities, but incarcerating people for ICE can generate millions of dollars in revenue for county budgets and local officials across Kentucky show no signs of stopping.
The federal government pays a dozen jails in Kentucky up to $100 a day to hold someone for ICE, with reimbursement for transporting people held by ICE and for guarding detainees admitted to hospitals.
In Oldham County, for instance, records KyCIR obtained show the jail invoiced ICE for about $3.7 million since Trump regained office. The jail held nearly 1,800 people for ICE between Oct. 2022 and early March 2026, according to the data.
Jailer Jeff Tindall said in a March 2025 public meeting that he expected to get "a lot busier" — so much so he got approval to spend nearly a quarter million dollars to buy a new van and bus to transport inmates.
The jail expanded its partnership with ICE in early 2025. Almost immediately, community pushback followed.
Local civil rights groups have protested in county meetings and outside the jail to demand officials stop holding people for ICE.
But the officials are focused on the money and want to incarcerate even more detainees to make it, said Alex LeBlanc, executive director of Kentucky Citizens for Democracy, a group leading the push against Oldham County's partnership with ICE.
"They're thinking of this like a business," he said. "They're thinking of these people's lives and their livelihood and their families and their pain as an opportunity to make money."
Oldham County Judge-Executive David Voegele appears unmoved and uninterested in ending the deal. He said local officials are following the rules and if people want something different they should vote for it.
"Let's be honest about it: The federal government in the past let in millions of undocumented people. There are certainly many good people that may have come, but they did not come through the proper channels, and it's created a problem of significance," he said at a March 2026 meeting.
"It's a bigger issue than can be solved by Oldham County Fiscal Court."
'A jail in Kentucky'
At the Indianapolis office where ICE arrested her in August 2025, Navarrete said officials took her purse and her fingerprints. A man handed her documents that she refused to sign.
In shock, she called her husband. She told him she'd been arrested but everything would be fine.
"It was more like a dream," she said.
Through it all, she thought to herself, "What did I do wrong?"
In a room with two other women, one fretted about getting her daughter with heart problems to needed appointments.
Navarrete tried to address the concern with a guard.
"And the officer just said, 'Figure it out.' And later I realized that he means something like 'Fix it yourself'," she said.
Officers handcuffed the women, put chains around their waists and loaded them into a van. Navarrete said she wasn't shackled because she was pregnant.
"We didn't know where we were going, but then we arrived a bit late to a jail in Kentucky," she said.
It was the Grayson County Detention Center in Leitchfield.
She said jail staff took her photo and gave her a drug test. They asked if she had trouble living with people and if she was attracted to women. They handed her a green and white uniform and a wristband with an ID number.
Guards led her to a room filled with about 15 women. She'd end up stuck there until late November.
Federal data show ICE housed more than 1,800 people in the Grayson County Detention Center between Oct. 2022 and early March 2026.
As ICE arrests surged nationally under Trump, so did the need for jail space. The demand has led to many people being shifted from one facility to the next — oftentimes spending just a day in one lock-up before landing at another, the data show. The issue is exacerbated by a push from federal prosecutors and some judges to keep more people arrested by ICE detained without a bond hearing — a tactic that led to lawsuits in Kentucky and across the country.
During the back half of President Joe Biden's term, data show four Kentucky jails held people for ICE — in Boone, Grayson, Fayette and Oldham counties. After Trump took office in Jan. 2025, the number of jails holding people for ICE expanded to include Bourbon, Campbell, Christian, Daviess, Hopkins, Kenton, Laurel and Woodford counties.
Immigration attorneys and advocates told KyCIR that jailing people far from home separates them from support networks and makes it harder to fight their legal cases.
Navarrete's attorney, Gwendolyn Starda, said being detained makes it difficult for people to gather documents and evidence. She said ICE sometimes moves people between detention centers to "forum shop," meaning to put them in a jurisdiction where the judge is pro-ICE, or to frustrate their attempt to petition a federal court for freedom.
"In Leyla's [Navarrete's] case I had to seek a special admission to the Kentucky court for habeas because I'm licensed in Ohio," she said via email.
For other immigrants, she said, "This delays their case or forces them to seek another attorney that they didn't originally choose."
Across the U.S., jails aren't just where ICE sends immigrants once they're arrested. They're also a place where ICE takes people into custody for the first time.
Data show that a majority of immigrants who wound up detained in Kentucky were already incarcerated in a prison or jail, and then ICE came.
At least 28% of the arrests qualified as so-called street arrests, meaning they occurred in a community.
Less than half the people held by ICE in Kentucky during Trump's second presidential administration, as of early March, had been convicted of a crime. Under Biden, more than 60% of the people ICE detained had a prior conviction, the data show.
ICE maintains its detention of immigrants is "non-punitive." The agency says online: "ICE uses its limited detention resources to detain aliens to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States."
An unnamed ICE spokesperson disputes the accuracy of the Deportation Data Project's information, even though ICE itself provided the data. They also said in an email, "ICE has higher detention standards than most US prisons that hold actual US citizens."
People born in more than 100 different countries wound up behind bars in Kentucky. Around 70% of the people held in Kentucky by ICE, under both Biden and Trump, have been Hispanic, many born in Mexico or Guatemala.
Most of the immigrants jailed in Kentucky have been men.
Of the women ICE sent to Kentucky jails, a majority wound up at the Grayson County Detention Center, which has a dedicated female facility, the data show.
It's there where Navarrete said other incarcerated women celebrated her pregnancy with a baby shower. She said the women gifted her a shirt from the jail commissary dyed pink with drink powder mix. Navarrete said one officer, a woman, let her wear the shirt during her shift even though it wasn't allowed.
It was a rare moment of joy in the jail, she said.
But mostly her time in jail was difficult, she said. She struggled sharing space with more than a dozen other women — a couple who tried to "rule the place," she said. Navarrete said the showers were scalding hot and the cell was too cold. She had to pay a fee to call her husband. And she constantly feared for her pregnancy.
She had gestational diabetes and worried about the low-quality meals. But moreso, she'd heard a rumor in jail that "the government would take my baby," she said.
After a week in jail, she said officers took her to a nearby doctor. She felt like a criminal because two officers were there guarding her.
"At that appointment I started crying and crying because it was my first baby and I wanted the dad to be there, my husband," she said. "The doctor then touched my shoulder and said that everything would be fine, and I felt that there were still some humane people, good people."
Grayson County Jailer Jason Woosley did not respond to KyCIR's requests for comment.
Money to be made
For some Kentucky jails, holding people for ICE is an economic windfall.
KyCIR requested ICE contracts and invoices from the dozen jails that federal data show housed ICE detainees since Trump's Jan. 2025 inauguration. Eight jails provided invoices and nine provided contracts.
The records obtained show jails don't all make the same daily rate for housing ICE detainees. On the high end is the Boone County Jail, which has worked with ICE since 2005 and is paid $100 per day. On the low end is the Hopkins County Jail, at $45 per day.
Jails also get paid for staff time and mileage if they transport detainees for ICE. Invoices show Bourbon, Christian, Daviess and Hopkins county jails billed ICE for transporting inmates thousands of miles per month.
Jailers in Boone, Hopkins and Kenton counties told KyCIR that holding immigrants for ICE helps offset the sizable costs of running their jail.
"I think the biggest misperception is: Yes, we do generate revenue, but we don't make money. We're not a for-profit jail," said Boone County Jailer Jason Maydak. "I try to take the least amount of county taxpayer dollars to run the jail as possible."
Jails may have more beds than they need for local inmates, and both the state and federal governments will pay fees to fill them with their own prisoners.
Maydak said the Boone County Jail typically has 200 to 250 empty beds daily that it can rent out to the U.S. government.
"If they don't have us to use as a facility, they'll find somebody else," he said.
Fees from holding federal inmates make up about half of the jail's roughly $12 million annual budget, Maydak said.
Holding people for ICE also saves jobs, said Hopkins County Jailer Mike Lewis.
In the past, Lewis said the jail contracted mainly with the state government to house their prisoners, which pays a $35 daily rate. But the state has needed to use fewer county jail beds in recent years.
"That's a good thing for the citizens of Kentucky because fewer people are being incarcerated [on] the state taxpayers' dime and fewer people are being convicted of serious crimes, so there's fewer inmates," he said.
But it left him with empty beds. Having fewer inmates reduces some expenses, but fixed costs hold steady.
"One hundred empty beds doesn't mean you can close down a wing … and turn the heat and air off," he said.
Lower population levels at the jail also can lead to staff layoffs, which Lewis said he wants to avoid.
So when ICE asked to work with Hopkins County Jail, Lewis signed on.
"For me, I'm saving county taxpayer dollars and I'm preserving jobs," he said. "Because without these ICE inmates that we're housing now, we'd have 150 beds empty."
'It's very real'
About 70% of the immigrants locked up by ICE in Kentucky detention facilities between Oct. 2022 and early March 2026 ended up getting deported, according to KyCIR's analysis of ICE data provided in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project.
Others were released from lock-up under supervision, on their own recognizance or for other reasons. Getting out on bond didn't happen for most people — only 5% under Trump and 15% under Biden.
Just getting a bond hearing before an immigration judge has become difficult since the Trump administration set a new mandatory detention policy last summer.
Many immigrants, in Kentucky and nationwide, are fighting this by filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court and arguing their due process rights were violated. This month, the U.S. appeals court with jurisdiction over Kentucky rejected Trump's mandatory detention policy — a decision attorneys say will lead to bond hearings for many immigrants jailed by ICE in Kentucky.
Navarrete teared up as she remembered the day she found out she could go home after winning her habeas petition. Her husband called to tell her, and then she ran to tell the other women she was locked up with. They all cried and hugged, "thanking God for the strength and for the blessing."
She said she gave the toothpaste and noodles she'd bought from the jail commissary to the women staying behind.
Walking down the hallway, she saw other women peeking through the windows of their rooms. She said goodbye to them all.
She waited in a locked room for several hours while her husband and a friend from church drove down from northeastern Indiana. They arrived around 2 or 3 a.m.
"And I was very, very hungry, but I was happy," she said. "And I was saying that now I'm going to be able to eat something good."
Back at home, Navarrete and her husband also were able to go see an ultrasound of their baby together for the first time.
Getting out of jail was a relief, she said. But she still has an open immigration case that could end in her deportation. Now, though, she can fight her case from her own home while she works at a factory and cares for her four-month-old baby, Luna.
Her experience in jail still weighs on her.
Before ICE arrested her, Navarrete said she wouldn't believe all the videos and posts she saw on social media about the ICE arrests were real.
"I was thinking that it was maybe AI," she said. "But yeah, it's very real. … And I pray every day for those people because they are mostly good people, like me."
Copyright 2026 LPM News
