In January 2026, during Operation Country Roads, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and state and local law enforcement detained roughly 600 immigrants across West Virginia.

Many of those arrested were held in the state’s already overpopulated jail system, which until this spring was part of a national network of immigrant detention centers.

Within this market, ICE ships detainees around the country, paying hundreds of facilities a per-day rate for housing them. Many of these facilities are in rural communities where federal funding cuts have hollowed out social services, from healthcare to food stamps, leaving them desperate for economic relief.

Federal immigration detention in local facilities hearkens back to earlier eras of expanding American incarceration. As a sociologist of law and punishment, I’ve explored how rural places have long built and expanded prisons to tap into federal funds during times of economic precarity.

The 1876-1908 blueprint

Rural incarceration isn’t new. More than a century before ICE was established, West Virginia was holding out-of-state federal prisoners to collect revenue – a history I reconstructed using the West Virginia Penitentiary’s administrative records.

As modern prisons proliferated across the nation, major cities exported prisoners to state prisons in less populated areas. West Virginia was one of a few states – alongside Maryland and Texas – to receive these excess urban prisoners.

Beginning in 1876 and lasting until around 1908, federal and District of Columbia prisoners sent to West Virginia drove........

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