How do Minnesota’s local jails and prisons interact with ICE detainers compared with other states, and what does the data show?
Executive summary
Minnesota’s state prisons consistently notify and transfer people to ICE and — by recent accounts — complied with all monitored detainer/transfer requests to the Department of Corrections during the period studied, while county jails display a patchwork of responses that produced a lower share of local transfers than in most other states [1] [2] [3]. Aggregate reporting and federal data show about 30 percent of people ICE detained in Minnesota last year were turned over by local jails and prisons — a smaller share than in 39 other states — but county-level compliance ranges from near-zero in big urban counties to full cooperation in some rural jurisdictions [3] [1].
1. State prisons: systematic cooperation, straightforward logistics
Minnesota’s Department of Corrections says it routinely notifies ICE before prisoners’ release dates and coordinates custody transfers, and state data reviewed by reporters shows state prisons complied with all 167 detainer requests in the period examined, a pattern DOC officials emphasize because prison release dates are scheduled in advance and transfers are logistically simpler [2] [4] [5].
2. County jails: a patchwork of policies and practices
By contrast the state’s 76 county jails and several locally run detention centers operate under widely different policies: some counties fully honor detainers while others decline to hold people beyond release, resulting in county jails complying with more than 20 percent of detainer requests overall but with major variance — Hennepin and Ramsey counties complied with less than 10 percent of requests in the dataset cited [6] [1] [7].
3. How Minnesota stacks up to other states
A New York Times analysis of federal data found that about 30 percent of ICE detainees in Minnesota were transferred from local jails and prisons last year, a proportion lower than in 39 other states, meaning that despite headline clashes over cooperation, Minnesota is less likely to be a source of ICE custody via local facilities than most of the country [3].
4. Legal and operational constraints that shape the numbers
State law and court guidance limit jails’ authority to hold someone solely on an ICE detainer — because detainers are administrative requests and not judicial warrants — and the county jail environment complicates transfers due to rapid turnover and short stays; those legal and logistical realities help explain why prisons (with scheduled release dates) show near-complete compliance while many jails do not [7] [5] [6].
5. Disputed claims and data-quality questions
Federal officials have accused Minnesota of releasing dangerous people rather than transferring them to ICE, but state correctional leaders and local reporting say those DHS figures are overstated or misinterpreted: the DOC disputed many named cases as never having been in state custody and called federal counts evidence of data-management failures or political spin, while local investigations found that some detainees highlighted by ICE had not been jailed in Minnesota recently [2] [8] [9].
6. What the data actually shows and the practical bottom line
Available datasets and reporting converge on a clear portrait: Minnesota’s prisons functionally cooperate with ICE on transfers, county responses are inconsistent and often constrained by law and churn, and overall a smaller share of ICE’s Minnesota arrests originate from local custody than is typical nationwide — roughly 30 percent of ICE detentions in the state came via jails and prisons, with county jails complying just over 20 percent of the time in the reviewed period and wide county-by-county variation [4] [1] [3].