Orange County lawmakers scrutinize jail’s ICE detainee treatment after audits cleared units

Orange County lawmakers pressed county officials Wednesday over conditions inside the Goshen jail’s ICE detainee units, after officials said onsite audits found no problems even as allegations of mistreatment and poor conditions continued to circulate.

The issue came before the Orange County Legislature’s Public Safety and Emergency Services Committee, where County Legislator Genesis Ramos said after touring the facility twice that the central concern may not be the physical state of the unit but how detainees are treated and what is said to them inside it. The complaint sharpened a familiar local fault line: county officials pointing to compliance, and lawmakers and advocates asking what detainees experience day to day inside a jail that holds federal immigration detainees.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office pushed back on the criticism. Chief Meredith McGovern said detainees who leave the jail are transferred by the federal government to other facilities, and argued that keeping people in Goshen keeps families closer to home and makes visitation more realistic than sending detainees as far away as Louisiana or Kentucky. Jail officials also told legislators that the entire facility is audited three to four times a year and that those audits have been satisfactory. They said any allegation of mistreatment or poor conditions is fully investigated.

The debate is not limited to whether the units pass inspection. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement still lists Orange County Jail as an active detention facility and sets facility-specific rules for visits, letters and detainee contact. County records show the jail has housed ICE detainees since 2008. In minutes from Sept. 22, 2022, county officials recorded 64 ICE detainees at the facility that day and $4,606,842 in boarder revenue to date. In March 2023, county records showed an average daily population of 346 and $646,736 in corrections revenue for that month.

The finances have long shadowed the politics. In 2018 reporting, Orange County budgeted $8.5 million in ICE revenue for 2019, while ICE paid $133.90 per detainee per day under a 12-year contract that began in 2008. The jail’s roof-repair capital project was listed at $6,314,631 in 2022, with another $1.5 million requested, for a total of $7,814,631.

Pressure rose again after New York Lawyers for the Public Interest published Denied Care, Denied Dignity: Systemic Medical Failures in Immigration Detention at Orange County Jail on Oct. 9, 2025, saying it reviewed detainee medical records and found widespread medical failures and systemic neglect. Advocates rallied in Goshen on April 12, 2026, calling for an end to ICE detainees being held at the jail, while county officials said the arrangement would soon become a moot issue. For Orange County leaders, the unresolved question is not just whether the jail passes audits, but who is responsible for the treatment of federal detainees inside a local facility that still sits at the center of a costly and politically charged agreement.