For five years the county rented jail beds to the federal government. Its own comptroller asked whether the deal was worth it. Nobody answered until the money was gone.
Comptroller Helen Bae put it to the commissioners plainly.
"Is ICE subsidizing us, or are we subsidizing ICE?"
It is an answerable question. The county's own filings, payroll records and budget figures are enough to estimate it. The answer is that Nye County lost somewhere between $580,000 and $880,000 a year on the arrangement, roughly $2.8 million to $4.3 million over the life of the contract.
That is money taken out of a general fund that has since fallen to $170,702.
The deal
In 2019 Nye County signed an agreement ICE to hold federal immigration detainees in the county jail. No middleman, no private contractor. County employees on the county payroll, guarding federal detainees in a county facility.
ICE paid a daily rate per detainee, $93 to start, rising to $128 by August 2024. Payments began in 2020 and ran $2.2 million to $2.5 million a year. The jail averaged 64 detainees, staying an average of 37 days.
The agreement expired June 1, 2024 and was kept alive by temporary extensions. On November 15, 2024 the commission voted 5 to 0 to discontinue it. ICE terminated three days later, and roughly sixty detainees were removed within hours.
What it actually cost
Three ways of counting, all built from county numbers.
Count what the jail cost before and after. Detainee housing ran about $4 million in 2019, the last year before the contract. By 2024 it was $8 million. Inflation over that stretch was about 23 percent, which would have carried the 2019 jail to roughly $4.9 million on its own. That leaves about $3.1 million a year the county was spending that inflation does not explain.
Against $2.2 to $2.5 million in revenue, the county was down $580,000 to $880,000 every year.
Count by beds. The jail holds between 185 and 225 people, so 64 detainees is 28 to 35 percent of it. Allocate the $8 million budget by that share and ICE's portion runs $2.28 million to $2.77 million. That method lands between a small gain and a $568,000 loss, depending on which capacity figure you use.
It is also the most generous method available, because it assumes a federal detainee costs the same as a local inmate; it does not. Federal detention standards require medical screening, attorney access, consular notification and grievance procedures that county inmates never get, which is exactly what federal inspectors found the county failing to provide.
Count the guards alone. Nye County tagged twenty positions in its 2023 payroll with the notation (ICE). They earned $1,014,940 in wages, or about $1.71 million fully loaded using the benefit rate from the county's own filings.
On guards alone, ICE paid its way with room to spare. That is the strongest thing anyone can say for this contract, and it should be said. It also excludes every other cost of running a jail.
The number that ends the argument
The county's proposed jail medical services contract came to about $2.2 million a year.
One line item. At or above everything ICE paid for everything.
Before a single guard, meal, utility bill, uniform, transport run or maintenance call, the county was already even with its federal revenue on medical care alone.
What is not an estimate
Everything above involves some judgment about how to allocate shared costs. These figures involve none.
Nye County's fiscal 2021 filing shows a Jail Fund of $6,438,519, of which $3,813,736 was an operating transfer in from the general fund. Local property taxpayers covered more than half the jail. The federal government covered about a third.
Jail costs doubled between 2019 and 2024. ICE revenue stayed flat.
The people who saw the ledger reached their own verdict. The commission voted 5 to 0 to end it.
Former Commissioner Donna Cox: "I don't think it's to anybody's advantage, except ICE."
Sheriff Joe McGill said the agreement had not been as "financially beneficiary to the county like they thought it would be," and afterward: "I don't think that the county has the need or desire to get back in with ICE."
Nobody who ran the numbers wanted the deal back.
Why it failed
The contract did not collapse because of politics. It collapsed because the county could not meet the standard it had agreed to.
A federal inspection in the summer of 2024 found medical staff failing to follow up on abnormal vital signs, health records and medications not transferring with detainees, housing unit telephones that could not make outgoing calls, dirtied toilet paper on ceilings, repackaged medications, and a lack of potable water.
A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General inspection published in May 2025 found the jail still failing on medical care, grievance handling and detainee communication. Its finding on the phones is worth reading twice: detainees could not call ICE, free legal service providers, consular officials, or the Inspector General itself.
The county lost its medical provider. McGill's summary: "Since we had no medical provider, ICE terminated us."
The county took on a federal standard of care it was not resourced to deliver, and was paid less than it cost to try.
The bill did not leave with the detainees
This is the part that is still costing money.
Between 2021 and 2023, as the detainee population grew, Nye County converted its jail staff from civilian technicians into sworn deputies and sergeants, and more than doubled the headcount from 19 people to 49. The top salary inside the jail went from $55,205 in 2019 to $149,936 in 2025.
ICE left in November 2024. The jail workforce fell from 49 to 43.
The county built a detention operation around a federal contract that never covered its cost, permanently upgraded that operation into a more expensive one, lost the contract, and kept nearly all of it. Eighteen months later it cut its own jail funding transfer by $1.5 million and closed the fiscal year with $170,702 in the bank.
Three questions, one sentence each
To Comptroller Zena Teich, (775) 751-6390: What were total ICE receipts, by fiscal year, for the life of the contract? And what did the (ICE) tag mean in the county payroll system: funded by ICE revenue, assigned to the ICE housing unit, or simply hired during that period?
To the commissioners: Did the county ever calculate the net cost of this contract before extending it, and if so, what did that calculation show?
And to anyone: the agreement itself is a federal record, obtainable from ICE. It contains the real per diem schedule, any guaranteed minimum, the bed cap and the termination terms. Nobody in Nye County has ever published it.
Revenue figures, per diem rates, jail cost totals and the termination sequence are from Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada Independent and Pahrump Valley Times reporting. Payroll figures are from Nye County records published by TransparentNevada. The Jail Fund transfer is from the county's fiscal 2021 filing with the Nevada Department of Taxation. Benefit load is derived from the county's quarterly reports under Section 17.5 of the Nye County Sales and Use Tax Act of 2007. Inspection findings are from DHS Office of Inspector General report OIG-25-22, May 2025, and ICE Office of Detention Oversight. Inflation adjustment uses approximately 23 percent cumulative CPI growth, 2019 to 2024. All three costing methods and their inputs are shown above so readers can check the arithmetic.
