Last May, during an Alamance County Board of Commissioners meeting, longtime Sheriff Terry Johnson said that the people his office holds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement “are some of the best inmates we have.”
“They don’t cause you no problems,” the Republican said.
For years, the Alamance County Detention Center in Graham had been holding ICE detainees in return for millions of dollars from the federal government, one of the only jails in the state to do so. And Johnson was happy to do it. He had a long history of what his critics call anti-immigrant sentiment; he once was accused of referring to Latinos as “taco eaters,” and in 2019, he said “criminal illegal immigrants” were “actually raping our citizens in many, many ways.”
But he also said at the May meeting that he wanted to renegotiate the county’s contract with ICE. Inflation had increased the cost of holding detainees, and like many facilities in North Carolina, the detention center was short-staffed. President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign was straining Alamance County’s resources, Johnson said. He wanted ICE to pay more for detainees and to fund repairs to another county facility, he told the commission.
Then in November, just as U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents were about to descend on North Carolina for an aggressive immigration enforcement operation, Johnson ended his agreement with ICE. His jail was already overcrowded, he recently told The Assembly. And he thought his jail population would swell under a new state law making it more difficult to release people awaiting trial if they are charged with violent crimes.
“We have people sleeping on the floor, and I can see that is a great liability for my officers and for the inmates,” Johnson said. “I had to cancel it.”
Johnson said he’s a strong Trump supporter, and he’d like to work with ICE again. But his decision to stop shows how the president’s deportation push is colliding with Republicans’ broader tough-on-crime agenda amid tight budgets.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to a request for comment.
‘A Ton of Work’
Johnson has long expressed views similar to Trump’s about illegal immigration. In 2007, the same year the jail began holding immigrant detainees, Alamance was one of the state’s first counties to join ICE’s 287(g) program, a different initiative that allows sheriff’s deputies to enforce federal immigration laws.
In 2012, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Johnson, alleging that he had made a series of derogatory remarks about Latinos. DOJ also said Latino drivers in Alamance County were up to 10 times more likely to be pulled over than similarly situated non-Latino drivers. (The lawsuit was dismissed, and Johnson agreed to adopt a “bias-free policing policy.”) In the Trump administration, immigration officials have argued for using factors like a person’s apparent ethnicity or accent as a reason to stop them, which the Supreme Court okayed last year.
“Terry Johnson is someone who wants Stephen Miller’s vision of an America where all immigrants are too afraid to go to school or work,” said Andrew Willis Garcés, a senior strategist at the immigrant rights group Siembra NC, referring to the White House official considered the architect of the Trump administration’s most draconian immigration policies.
Johnson disagreed with that interpretation, telling The Assembly that he’s “the furthest thing you can see from a racist.” But he said he feels “compelled” to help ICE enforce immigration laws, “especially with criminal elements—the drug traffickers, the child molesters, and the murderers, and the cartel people, and the gang members.”
“And they need help because, you know, some areas of the United States and stuff will not work with ICE,” he said.
Before Trump took office in January 2025, Johnson said the county jail would typically hold ICE detainees for several months at a time.
According to the county’s contract, ICE paid the sheriff’s office $135 a day for each detainee, with a “guaranteed minimum” payment for 40 people each day, even if the detention center actually held fewer than that.
From the fall of 2023 until Johnson pulled out of the agreement, the jail’s average daily ICE detainee population was typically more than 20 people, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, which is housed at Syracuse University and collects data from government agencies. During the spring and summer of 2021, Alamance County held as few as four ICE detainees.
In fiscal year 2022, holding ICE detainees brought in $2.3 million in revenue for the detention center, according to county budget documents, and around $1.2 million in each of the two years after. That money, which amounted to between 8% and 20% of the detention center’s entire annual expenditures, covered the salaries of 21 detention staff during those years, budget documents show.
But once Trump returned to office, ICE started sending many more detainees to Alamance County for much shorter stints.
ICE might bring several dozen detainees to the county jail on a Tuesday afternoon, Johnson told The Assembly, only to remove them early the next morning to send them to other detention facilities. Even though detainees were there for less than 24 hours, detention staff had to process their property and perform required medical assessments, Johnson said, which is time-consuming. Local officials had started describing the county as an “Uber and hotel” for ICE detainees.
“That put a ton of work on our people,” Johnson said.
Then in August, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine, was fatally stabbed on Charlotte’s light rail. The brutal killing triggered a political backlash and prompted the General Assembly to pass House Bill 307, tightening the conditions for pretrial release. North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein signed “Iryna’s Law” in October.
Legal experts predicted that changes in the law, such as eliminating unsecured bonds and written promises to appear in court for people charged with more violent offenses, would cause jail populations across the state to soar.
“I think that’s the natural consequence of this law,” said Brittany Bromell, an assistant professor of public law and government at the UNC School of Government. “Because that law is going to essentially capture a whole lot of people that might not have been subject to custody before.”
The law did not include additional funding for jails, and North Carolina is the only state in the country that didn’t pass a budget last year.
“The law, in my opinion, is a good law,” Johnson said. “I just wish we would have had more time to prepare.”
Johnson cited Iryna’s Law in his November letter to ICE, informing the agency that Alamance County would no longer hold immigrant detainees under the old contract. (State law requires the jail to temporarily hold people for whom ICE has issued a detainer request.) He wrote that the law’s provisions would “materially affect our ability to manage classification, housing, and supervision of detainees in our facility and will require us to prioritize bed space and resources for local and state inmates in order to remain in compliance with state law and court directives.”
ICE did not respond to Johnson publicly. The News & Observer and NC Local reported that after CBP launched Operation Charlotte’s Web the same month, some detainees were held at the New Hanover County Detention Center, which ICE can use because it has an agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service. Others were held at Department of Homeland Security field offices or sent to detention facilities in Georgia.
Negotiations Continue
Before ending his contract with ICE, Johnson said, he tried to negotiate a deal that would have had ICE help cover his staff’s salaries and fund repairs for an old state prison unit the sheriff’s office previously used to house local inmates.
Repairs to the facility, Johnson told The Assembly, would cost approximately $300,000, a large sum for the county but relatively small for a federal agency wanting to ramp up its detention and deportation efforts. ICE has considered three other facilities in North Carolina to hold detainees, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The New York Times later reported that ICE plans to purchase a Concord warehouse for a 1500-bed detention center.
“Alamance County is growing. And you know, we’re going to be inundated with tons of inmates,” Johnson said. “Right now, we can’t afford to hold what we got, hardly.”
Johnson said ICE has asked him to rejoin the program and hold up to 70 detainees at a time. He said U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, a Republican representing Alamance County, told him he had “checked in” with ICE to see if they can “afford to redo that building.” A spokesman for Hudson did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Garcés told The Assembly in December that thousands of Latinos in the community “avoid calling 911 because they’re worried about sheriff deputies responding to the call, which is an ongoing public health and public safety crisis in Alamance County that is very underreported.”
The county has an estimated population of more than 183,000 people, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, a nearly 7% increase from 2020. More than 16% are Hispanic or Latino, a share of the population that has steadily grown since 2009.
Johnson acknowledged the fear among the county’s immigrant community. But he hasn’t stoked that fear, he said, nor does he think there should be much concern over ICE, which he said only targets people with criminal records or who have been previously deported. (Analysis of arrest data shows that most immigrants arrested by ICE don’t have criminal convictions.)
“I know a lot of [the] Latino population here in Alamance County, and a lot of them are not concerned, simply because they do not have a criminal record and they are decent citizens here in our county,” he said.
“And I’ll be honest with you, if I lived in Mexico, Venezuela, whatever, I’d be wanting to come to America too,” he said. “It’s the greatest country in the world.”
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