Greg Hale didn’t understand why border patrol officers from Maine were showing up at the prison he oversees in St. Albans town. He was used to federal immigration authorities bringing detainees in from Vermont’s northern border. But this signaled a shift.

The superintendent of Northwest State Correctional Facility, Hale had previously informed his contacts at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that Vermont didn’t want to become the feds’ hub in the Northeast.

“Apparently they are disregarding that,” he noted in a memo to his higher-ups at the Vermont Department of Corrections in early March.

The emails reveal mounting frustration within Vermont’s corrections system as ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have increasingly relied on the state’s prisons to warehouse detained immigrants. New demands, arrivals at all hours and a rare disease are just some of the challenges Vermont’s prisons have faced while working with federal immigration authorities.

Internal communications since the start of President Donald Trump’s second administration, obtained through a public records request, offer a window into how the Vermont Department of Corrections has cooperated with — and pushed back against — federal immigration police as the number of detentions increased. Leaders have navigated the growing strain on the state’s prison system while also encountering the unique health and language difficulties posed by housing immigrant detainees.

Nationwide, ICE is detaining about 59,000 people, a possible record. Deportations have also ramped up, according to the New York Times, while border apprehensions have fallen.

Regionally, in addition to Vermont’s prisons, the federal government uses facilities in New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts to hold immigrants, many of whom have not been charged with crimes.

Vermont’s memorandum of understanding with U.S. immigration authorities gives them access to the state’s six prisons in exchange for $180 per-detained person, per-day. That deal expires in August.

This year, the Legislature passed a law removing a provision in state statute that allowed collaboration between local and state law enforcement and federal immigration authorities during declared states of emergency.

In Vermont, the St. Albans prison serves as ICE’s primary jail for male detainees, and Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington holds female immigration detainees. The average number of immigrants detained for federal officials in Vermont’s prisons fluctuates, hovering in the teens to the 20s on any given day.

Federal officials have also shuffled detainees from other states into and out of Vermont, and used commercial flights out of the Burlington airport to facilitate deportations.

Those jailed in Vermont’s prisons include people with established lives in the state, like farmworkers. Vermont’s prisons have also held people from other New England states, like a Russian scientist working at Harvard University.

VTDigger’s reporting previously revealed the challenges facing jailed immigrants. Several people in prison reported that ICE detainees were struggling to access phone calls, lawyers and medical attention, often due to a lack of translation services. The department of corrections has invested increased resources to address language access concerns, documents show.

Following the high-profile arrests of Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mohsen Mahdawi and Tufts University grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, Vermont’s work with ICE drew increased scrutiny.

The Vermont Department of Corrections declined interview requests for this story, instead answering questions over email. Asked about workers’ complaints with the feds, Haley Sommer, a department spokesperson, wrote “DOC is committed to maintaining a collaborative working relationship with our federal partners.”

‘Not a fan of ICE’

As federal authorities increased their use of Vermont’s prisons, leadership at the St. Albans prison grew frustrated, records indicate.

ICE agents’ demands stacked up. They requested detainees’ medical information, which they said was “required for the flights,” in addition to bagged meals and clothing. Sometimes, they arrived in the middle of the night.

In late February, St. Albans’ assistant superintendent informed his higher-up that during a recent interaction with ICE, agents were “very very lax in their security procedures around their keys and they were rude when confronted about it.”

“Let’s get a report and then we can yell at them,” Hale, the superintendent, responded.

The next month, ICE transferred 19 people out of the prison at 4 a.m, requesting medical summaries, two meals, and closed-toed shoes for each. The day after, federal agents brought in 16 new detainees, according to communications records.

“Mostly I am concerned about the traffic, my booking is not built for 31 ICE movements in 24 hours, this is on top of normal movements,” Hale wrote to his corrections colleagues. “Booking is swamped and we are going to miss something critical.”

He made his exasperation clear to department leadership.

“I continue to push back on them, but they are technically operating within the agreement I think, it is just overwhelming us,” he wrote of ICE. “This break-neck pace with them is going to be the cause of bigger issues.”

Hale attached security camera photos of the crowded areas, though the department declined to provide them in the records request, citing security concerns.

“What a mess and by all accounts not a safe situation for our staff to be in,” Al Cormier, DOC’s chief of operations, responded to Hale.

The superintendent was taken by surprise when the news arrived in March that border patrol agents from Maine were bringing detainees to St. Albans. One of his colleagues questioned ICE on the decision, writing, “It was my understanding that we don’t accept individuals that cross the border from other states … Is this a new practice that we have started?”

Elsewhere, Hale noted ICE provides little information to state staff — and he was skeptical of the information the feds do provide.

“It’s unusual for them to share much of anything honestly and what is shared I don’t trust,” he wrote.

Around the same time Hale was raising concern about the feds’ increased presence, his counterpart at the South Burlington prison, Superintendent Theresa Messier, also noted an uptick. In an email to the department’s health equity program director, she asked for additional support for the women’s prison’s work with detained immigrants.

“I think it would be a good idea for you to come to talk with staff regarding ICE detainees. There has been an increase with them recently and there have been issues,” Messier wrote.

But though corrections staff expressed annoyance at ICE’s strain on the system, the working relationship appeared solid from the feds’ perspective.

After an inspection of the women’s prison this spring, ICE’s detention oversight branch reported they were “highly impressed with all of the operations” and identified no deficiencies.

In April, Nick Deml, the corrections department’s commissioner, convened a meeting with the South Burlington and St. Albans superintendents to discuss their experience working with the feds.

In an email to many of the department’s central office staff on the day of the scheduled meeting, Hale offered his thoughts on the state’s continued cooperation with immigration authorities. While he described himself as “not a fan of ICE,” he didn’t think ending the state’s contract would impact the feds’ operations, and he feared financial retaliation from the Trump administration.

“That said, I do think working toward restructuring the contract to better reflect the amount of work, time, and other resources it takes to house their detainees not to mention meeting our own operational (requirements), would be worthwhile if that is a supported direction at some point,” he wrote to department leadership.

Inroads for a deadly disease

With detainees arriving at Vermont’s prisons after leaving countries around the world, staff communication shows the emergence of a unique health challenge: tuberculosis.

In late April, an infection control coordinator with the department’s health services contractor, Wellpath, outlined concern about detained immigrants carrying and spreading the dangerous disease — a bacterial illness most often impacting the lungs that is rare in the United States. While treatable, tuberculosis kills more than a million people per year worldwide.

Later, Travis Denton, DOC’s facilities division director, summarized the issue as described by Wellpath. Procedures at the time allowed ICE detainees to enter the general population before the results of their tuberculosis tests came back, he wrote.

“Recent incidents have involved patients who were later confirmed TB-positive after already entering GP, posing serious exposure risks,” Denton told colleagues in a memo.

Last year, there were more than 10,000 tuberculosis cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because immigration detainees may have arrived in the U.S. from countries where tuberculosis is more prevalent, some of those cases are found in prisons.

Last fall in Louisiana, an ICE detainee tested positive for a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, but it’s unclear how prevalent the disease is across all facilities. According to a 2004 memo written by an ICE official, there were between 100-150 tuberculosis cases a year in detainees at that time. Academic studies have shown immigrants detained in the U.S. are far more likely to have the disease than the country’s population as a whole.

Language barriers and unreliable self reporting made it challenging to identify people’s tuberculosis history, Denton wrote, and the disease’s symptoms overlap with drug detox and Covid-19 — health concerns staff are more accustomed to.

The medical contractor proposed a system to account for the concerns. Detainees would receive a tuberculosis test during intake and spend the first two to three days in restrictive housing or another separated space until the test results arrived. Anyone who tested positive would receive a chest X-ray and potentially be moved to the hospital.

“I want to just flag that the distance between this proposal, and successful implementation, is not quick or short,” Denton wrote in the memo.

He described the proposal as a big undertaking reminiscent of procedural changes during the Covid-19 pandemic. “It is further complicated by the focus on ICE detainees, which is a chaotic process that we have very little control over, and must be handled strategically due to the high-profile nature of topic,” he wrote.

Later, as Denton informed the department’s leadership of the proposal, his skepticism grew. “While the intent behind Wellpath’s proposed protocol is understandable, it doesn’t appear to fully account for the significant operational impact it would create,” he wrote, questioning whether there was any input from the prison’s security staff.

Hale, the St. Albans prison leader, echoed Denton’s concerns, saying Northwest lacked the cell space for such a procedure: “I get the concern but I don’t see how this will work.”

Asked this week whether the department had ultimately decided to change procedures, Sommer, the spokesperson, wrote that Wellpath had “enhanced patient monitoring practices.”

“Since the implementation of the new policy, there have not been any active confirmed TB cases,” she told VTDigger.

While ICE will likely continue to work with Vermont’s prisons, what that work looks like could change.

Gov. Phil Scott holds sole authority in the state to partner with federal immigration authorities. Asked in June about whether the state would renew or alter the existing agreement, Amanda Wheeler, a spokesperson for Scott, signaled the deal would continue in some form.

“The Governor has been clear that he believes there should be a state contract with ICE because canceling or allowing the contract to expire won’t stop detainments, it will simply mean detainees will be sent someplace else,” she wrote. “We’re not going to get out ahead of contract negotiations, but we are reviewing the (contract) and considering changes.”

Vermont’s current agreement with federal authorities expires on Aug. 21.