Dirtied toilet paper on the ceiling. Repackaged medications. Lack of potable water.

These were just some of the concerns raised shortly before Immigration and U.S Customs Enforcement (ICE) ended a contract with the Nye County Detention Center in Pahrump in November 2024. The contract, in place since 2019, allowed the detention center to house ICE inmates alongside the county’s other inmates. 

At the time of closure, 60 individuals were detained on behalf of ICE, according to a May 2025 report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Before the contract was terminated, it was the second largest of Nevada’s three main ICE detention centers, which includes the Henderson Detention Center and the large privately owned Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump. 

The termination, which has not been previously reported in the media, follows years of concerns from progressive groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada (ACLU) and the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, that the Nye County Detention Center was mistreating prisoners, denying them proper medical treatment and committing civil rights violations. Twenty-five allegations of mistreatment from detainees in the facility were filed with the Department of Homeland Security in 2023 alone.  

But the issues at Nye County were likely exacerbated by years of mounting funding concerns, including what some local officials said was a lack of sufficient assistance from ICE to cover the costs incurred by detainees. In one of the most Republican counties in the state, disillusionment with ICE was on full display last fall. 

“I don’t think it's to anyone’s advantage except ICE,” former Republican Commissioner Donna Cox said about the contract during a county meeting. “It's not doing the people and taxpayers in Nye County anything except taking advantage of us.” 

Nye County Sheriff Joseph McGill told The Nevada Independent that the county had reached a “financial impasse” with the facility’s longtime medical provider Serenity Health in October 2024. A renewed contract between Nye County and Serenity Health through November 2024 to the end of 2025 was expected to cost the county about $2.2 million — an increase of more than $360,000 from the prior contract. 

Meanwhile, ICE was paying the county about $2 million. Although the commissioners approved the medical contract, it was ultimately not renewed.

“Since we had no medical provider, ICE terminated us,” McGill told the Indy via email.  

Shortly after the contract fell through, a local hospital, Desert View, stepped in to provide emergency medical services. On Nov. 5, ICE removed all detainees from the detention facility within the span of a few hours, McGill said in a November commissioners meeting. 

As of June 2025, there was one ICE detainee at the Nye County Detention Center in Pahrump, according to ICE data. 

Serenity Mental Health and the DHS Office of Inspector General did not immediately return requests for comment. 

What are the concerns? 

The brunt of issues raised by DHS were concerns of medical mistreatment.

During an unannounced inspection of the facility in the summer of 2024, ICE officials found that Nye County medical staff failed to provide necessary follow-up care for abnormal vital signs and that medical staff did not provide detainees’ health records or medication to other facilities when transferring them.

Helen Bae, a comptroller for Nye County, said during a November county commission meeting that the facility was facing rising medical care and food costs, but that the county “needed to keep costs low.”

ICE has standards for care that are higher than what some local jails have. However, because the ICE contract was in place, medical personnel from Serenity Health, who are on site at all times, were providing the same services to the non-ICE inmates as they did to the ICE inmates.

In addition to the facility failing to meet medical standards, ICE officials found during their inspection that phones in detainees’ housing units were not set up to make outgoing calls, potentially preventing them from seeking legal assistance or contacting consular officials.

It’s not the first time the Nye County Detention Center has come under fire for its immigration detention practices. In 2023, a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups filed a federal civil rights complaint against the facility, as well as the other ICE detention facility in Nye County, the Southern Nevada Detention Center, alleging retaliatory transfers against immigrants who complained about conditions and medical negligence. 

In a 2023 open letter, immigrant advocacy groups called the mistreatment of ICE detainees in Nye County part of a pattern of “ongoing negligence and retaliation.” 

‘Are we subsidizing ICE?’

Since the Nye County Detention Center entered an agreement with ICE in 2019, the program had placed a gradual yet noticeable dent in the budget of the county, which had general fund expenditures of about $60 million a year. 

From 2020 to 2024, the cost of housing detainees for the county, jumped from approximately $6 million per year to nearly $8 million. Meanwhile, the revenue from the ICE contract remained at a steady $2 million or so per year. In 2019, the year the contract was put in place, the cost of housing detainees was about $4 million. 

Although Bae said that the county had succeeded in negotiating an increased bed rate in August 2024 to help cover rising costs — that rose from $93 per detainee per day to $128 —  ICE kept delaying the implementation of the contract. To help cover funding gaps, the county had to pull more than $4 million from its general fund per year. 

So, when given the chance to renew the contract this past November (if the county took action to correct the deficiencies found in the inspection,) the all-Republican board of commissioners voted unanimously against it. 

“Is ICE subsidizing us or are we subsidizing ICE?” Bae asked during a November commissioners meeting. 

Bae said the county didn’t have much insight into federal funding for the ICE program, saying that the extent they know about funding is “whatever they send us month-to-month.” ICE, she further contended, was only willing to pay for the direct costs of housing detainees, bypassing indirect costs such as janitorial maintenance or IT services. This posed complications for the detention center, which has a “shared population” and can accommodate 225 inmates, including as many as 75 ICE detainees.

Commissioners, including Cox and Debra Strickland, also raised concerns about the funding for the agreement with ICE. Many of these concerns were echoed by local residents, who questioned the benefit of such a program during the public comment period.

Cox called the agreement a “red herring” and said that she was worried it could pose a problem in the future if the county’s prison population grows.

“We might be stuck figuring out what to do with our own prisoners if we got a jail full of ICE prisoners,” she said.