The Uinta County sheriff decided to raise deputy pay by holding ICE detainees. The arrangement is raising questions.

Uinta County Sheriff Andy Kopp wanted to give his deputies a raise. 

Officers at his municipal counterpart, the Evanston Police Department, earned more per hour. But the Wyoming Legislature’s property tax cuts left the county with less revenue for salary increases.

President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort, however, presented an opportunity. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs places to house detained immigrants that the administration wants removed from the country. The Uinta County jail had space.

And so in June, Kopp went before the Uinta County Commission and proposed capitalizing on the deportation drive by holding ICE detainees for a fee.

By holding around 30 ICE detainees a day, Kopp estimated the county could clear more than $500,000 a year, well above the amount he needed to cover his staff raises.  

“As long as President Trump is in [the White House], we won’t have to worry about anything for 3.5 years,” Kopp said, according to a transcript of the meeting recorded by the Uinta County Herald. 

But there are both fiscal and moral risks in increasing his department’s budget on the premise of a steady stream of detained immigrants, critics of the move said. “Making local government dependent on the federal government’s immigration system seems like a dangerous game to play,” Antonio Serrano, advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties of Wyoming, said. 

Kopp is essentially leveraging Trump’s political agenda at the federal level to mitigate the costs of wide-ranging property tax reductions imposed by the Legislature. 

Adapting to cuts

In Wyoming, lawmakers have sliced into the property tax revenues that fund county and local government. Conservative leaders in the House and Senate pushed through a 25% property tax cut during the 2025 legislative session, and local governments statewide have wrestled since with how to maintain services.

Meanwhile, Kopp told county commissioners the salaries he can offer deputies are hampering his ability to recruit and retain good officers. Those budget woes are exacerbated by the Legislature’s property tax cuts, he told WyoFile. 

“Treat them right, pay them well and train them up,” is Kopp’s goal with salary increases, which include the jail staff guarding ICE detainees, he said.

Since the June meeting, Kopp has given his deputies the raises — which will ultimately increase his annual budget for salaries and wages by about $359,000. So far, ICE holds are coming in at the rate he needs to foot the bill, he said. 

“It’s working out as we thought,” Kopp said. 

He is still waiting on the federal government to accept a rate increase to $120 a day per inmate, but said he expects the feds will approve the raise by next month. There are “no issues with that,” he told WyoFile. 

But some of his other stated beliefs at the June commission meeting — that the jail would hold ICE detainees for no more than 72 hours, and that the people the federal agency would book in would be criminals and public safety threats — aren’t holding up, interviews the Uinta County Herald and WyoFile conducted with immigration attorneys and Kopp show. 

Human rights advocates and immigration attorneys worry that as the Trump administration pressures ICE to arrest and deport large numbers of people — White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said the target was 3,000 daily arrests — due process and civil rights will suffer and the lengths of detentions will increase. 

In Uinta County, Kopp also described detained immigrants arriving in distress. “There are a few who are definitely scared,” he told WyoFile, “They have somewhat of a panic attack. It’s a scary situation.” 

But as a potential revenue source, the immigrant detention business appears to be booming for now. 

From June 1 through Aug. 27, Uinta County has housed 439 inmates for ICE, for $66 a day, according to invoice data WyoFile and the Uinta County Herald obtained through a Wyoming Public Records Act request. Kopp’s billed the federal government just under $96,000 for those holds. If the federal government does raise rates to $120 per day, that dollar figure would nearly double. 

The $66 per-diem fee was set in 2018. It’s an amount that barely covered Kopp’s costs for holding the inmates at the time, he said. Other agencies with arrangements to hold inmates for ICE, like Sweetwater and Natrona counties, are being paid more. Sweetwater County earns $120, a spokesperson there said this week, and Natrona County is paid $95 a day, Kiera Hett, a spokesperson for that sheriff’s office, told WyoFile in July. 

Natrona County has been holding immigrants for ICE on a longer-term basis. More than two dozen detainees in its jail were locked up for six weeks as of Sept. 5. WyoFile profiled one former Casper detainee this month, a Cuban man who grew increasingly desperate as he sat in confinement without a clear avenue to freedom, including through deportation.

Out of public view

Though Uinta County votes reliably conservative, Kopp’s fiscal strategy is generating deep unease among at least some local taxpayers. Kopp is earning money for his department on the backs of policies that separate immigrant families, longtime Evanston resident and local immigration activist Tim Beppler told the Uinta County Herald and WyoFile. 

“When you state that you’re going to engage in those types of activities, and that you’re going to do it for the money, to me that makes it worse,” Beppler said. 

So far, however, the sheriff’s use of his jail to hold immigrant detainees has not spurred widespread opposition. The detentions have been largely happening out of public view. Kopp’s department has not listed people detained for immigration holds on the jail’s publicly available inmate roster since the beginning of August —though the jail continues to hold such detainees. 

Kopp told WyoFile that previous ICE detainees posted to the roster resulted from technical errors, he said. 

Kopp understands his plan will draw criticism, he said. 

“We could definitely be viewed as an arm of their goals,” Kopp said of ICE. “I 100% get that. And I 100% know that it’s a hot topic and not everybody is happy about it. But it’s a way to increase our revenue during a budget shortfall. The opportunity arose … we’re going to take advantage of it.” 

He declined, at least for now, a pitch by ICE officials to enroll his department in a program pursued by a growing number of Wyoming law enforcement agencies that would allow deputies to play a more direct role in detaining undocumented immigrants arrested on suspicion of local crimes. Uinta County, like other southwestern Wyoming communities, has a significant, if still minority, community of Latino immigrants. 

“I want my guys on patrol to concentrate on the citizens of Uinta County,” Kopp said.

But critics like Beppler say Kopp has already allowed the proverbial camel to nose under the tent. “There’s going to be a great deal of pressure to engage more with ICE,” Beppler said. “He’s going to find it difficult to not continue down that road at this point.” 

An old but well-trod debate

During the first Trump administration, Uinta County played host to a fierce debate over immigration detention. Beginning in 2017, private prison companies’ proposals to build a large immigration jail outside Evanston drove years of debate that divided the town and the state. Two prison companies ultimately abandoned the idea of building in the town.

Evanston residents who campaigned against those previous proposals “didn’t want that community to be associated with something that heinous and gross,” Serrano said. “And I think they will probably fight back against [Kopp’s use of his jail for immigrant detention]. Because it’s still gross.” 

Earlier this year, a new private prison company made inquiries about building an immigration detention center in western Wyoming, WyoFile previously reported. Though that company focused mostly on Kemmerer, it also made inquiries in Uinta County, according to officials there. 

Uinta County Commission Chairman Mark Anderson told WyoFile in March that he didn’t engage with company representatives.

“All the public hearings, all of these promises of jobs and then these companies pulling out,” Anderson said, “it’s just been so inconsistent that the appetite for it is just not there right now.”

However, Anderson and the other commissioners have backed Kopp’s effort to boost revenue by holding ICE detainees. If the income stream dries up, however, Anderson said it would fall to Kopp to manage the shortage. “Every elected official is responsible for balancing their budgets,” he said. “If revenues decline, the sheriff would have to make hard decisions at that point.”

Short stays for criminal offenders?

When the sheriff pitched the idea to the commissioners, he described a system where the jail would serve as a short stopover for immigrants that ICE was moving about the region.

“When I say ‘holds,’ these are all ICE inmates with criminal records that are picked up elsewhere, not Uinta County,” Kopp said during the June 25 special commission meeting. “They’re dropped off here and they go on from here, no more than 72 hours later.”

One commissioner applauded Kopp for raising funds by helping ICE deport criminals. “These illegal criminals, that as far as I’m concerned, should be deported, we’re helping that process,” Commissioner Eric South said at the meeting, “and that’s important also.”

The Uinta County jail is being used to hold people ICE arrests in Utah, not Wyoming, Kopp told WyoFile and the Uinta County Herald. 

But Kopp and South’s depiction of immigration detainees as criminals does not align with the emerging statistical picture of who is being swept up in ICE’s dragnet. Data indicates ICE is increasingly arresting people without criminal convictions, both nationally and from within Wyoming. 

Under federal law, unlawful presence in the country on its own is a civil offense, not a criminal one. (Entering the country improperly is a crime, but overstaying a visa, for example, is a civil offense.) 

Kopp’s ICE arrangement parameters were first detailed in the Herald’s July 9 edition. Eleven days later, a Salt Lake City immigration lawyer, Carlos Trujillo, challenged the sheriff’s description. “That is a lie,” Trujillo told Utah-based media outlet KSL, “because I can recall at least one of my clients that touched that place and had no criminal record whatsoever.”

Kopp pushed back on Trujillo’s allegation in a Sept. 2 interview with a WyoFile reporter. “I’m not a dishonest man,” he said. Instead, he said, as the summer progressed, he realized it was possible that some people ICE was sending him did not have a criminal record, but that it was difficult for his department to be certain. 

For his part, Trujillo subsequently told the Herald that two of his clients had been detained at the Uinta County jail — one for over five days — and neither had any criminal charges or convictions.  

“Not even a traffic citation. Nothing,” Trujillo said. “Clean records. Yet, they were paraded through Wyoming.”  

One of his clients was working through the naturalization process when arrested by ICE agents, Trujillo said.

Another Wasatch Front immigration attorney, Jared Lawrence, said he had a client held in the Evanston jail who had been in the court process for legal citizenship since 2022. Lawrence’s client had not committed any crimes outside of his illegal entry into the country, the attorney said. They were working to rectify the immigration offense in court. 

All of the attorneys WyoFile and the Uinta County Herald interviewed declined to name their clients, saying they did not have authorization to do so and worried about retaliation from ICE. 

One of Utah attorney Nicholle Pitt White’s asylum-seeking clients is a Colombian national married to an American citizen who is expecting their first child in mid-September. ICE transferred the man to Evanston for two days after he was arrested for unpaid speeding tickets, Pitt White told the Uinta County Herald. The man was then transferred to detention in Texas. 

Kopp’s understanding of who ICE would bring to his facility shifted as the summer progressed.  

On July 21, Kopp told the Herald that “we get all information on all individuals’ criminal information before we accept them.” But on Sept. 2, he told a WyoFile reporter that at some point during the summer, he’d noticed ICE detainees arriving at his facility with the letters “NC” on their intake paperwork. Jail deputies learned that “NC” indicates “no charges,” Kopp said.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t been charged with a crime before,” the sheriff said, “most of them that we’re seeing are indeed charged with a criminal offense.”

But, he conceded, “I still don’t have a good answer on the NC part.”

Kopp has lent his jail to a system that is increasingly treating people who have sometimes only committed the civil offense of overstaying visas in the same fashion that it deals with criminals, immigration attorneys said. 

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Uinta County jail is a jail for criminals,” Trujillo said. “That in and of itself should give pause to anyone that thinks it’s a good idea to have non-criminals there. It’s inhumane and it goes against our American principles.”

Beppler, the local activist, worried about a form of mission creep. “He will not be able to avoid holding people who do not have criminal charges because it’s part of the ICE system at this point,” he said. “My fear is you begin at a small level and it creeps and grows larger.”

Kopp’s prediction that ICE would only keep people in his jail for 72 hours has also not entirely held up. The agency has at times placed people there for stretches of five to seven days, with the longest stay according to Kopp being a detainee who spent 14 days in Evanston. Another inmate spent 10 days. But unlike the inmates held in Natrona County for weeks on end, Kopp said his jail is not serving as an overflow facility for ICE detention centers in Utah. ICE brings people through Evanston as they transport them east or west, Kopp said. 

The majority of inmates ICE is bringing in, he said, are gone within the 72-hour threshold he first described. But because the Uinta County jail’s public, online roster no longer includes ICE detainees, it’s difficult for the public to assess who is in the jail and for how long.  

Public rosters and detainees

Over the course of the summer, Herald journalists noted what appeared to be a disappearance of ICE detainees from the jail’s online, public roster. 

Throughout June and July, the jail’s public roster showed a number of immigration holds in the facility. A Herald reporter and editor noticed immigration holds were listed often, and in some cases, names were repeated on the roster for days. 

At the beginning of August, immigration holds stopped appearing in the online roster. The Herald journalists continued to monitor the roster throughout the month and never saw another immigration hold. But during that month, Kopp said the jail held as many as 150 immigrants for ICE. 

When WyoFile asked about the apparent change to his roster, Kopp said there had been no policy shift regarding which inmates his department listed publicly. Instead, he said the previous listing of people in custody on immigration holds was a mistake due to technical glitches with his department’s system for publishing the jail roster.

“Most jails have policies in place where they don’t log people who might be in transport for various reasons,” Kopp said. “It’s a policy and practice that if we have inmates in transport, we historically, since I’ve been there, don’t tend to put them on the jail roster.”

Other sheriff departments in the state publicly list immigration holds, including in neighboring Sweetwater County and in Natrona County. (The Natrona County sheriff does not maintain a roster on his website, but sends news outlets a roster that some publish most days, and which includes ICE holds.) Officials with both agencies told WyoFile they publish ICE detainees in the public roster, largely regardless of how long they stay in those two jails.  

Wyoming law protects only narrow categories of offenders, like juveniles, from public disclosure — the names of the vast majority of people jailed in the state are public record. Sheriffs can set their own policies about what information to publicize online, Kopp said. When elected, he weighed whether to publish an inmate roster at all, given the stigma a jail stint can bring to residents of small communities like those in southwest Wyoming, he said.

On the other hand, withholding the names of immigrant detainees but publishing other inmates gives the public an inaccurate picture of who is passing through the jail in any given week, Chris Wages, a Buffalo attorney who does public records law work on behalf of the Wyoming Press Association, said in an interview. 

“The number and nature and identity of inmates traces directly back to fiscal responsibility,” he said. “As a private citizen, if my sheriff’s department was all of a sudden doubling their income, increasing their budget, I’d want to know why, under what circumstances, what the source of the revenue is, who’s making decisions, where the resources are being put, and how it affects my local population.”