A group of mothers demonstrates outside the Greene County jail in Springfield, Missouri, calling for Sheriff Jim Arnott to cancel his contract with ICE. Photo by Isaac Protiva
Author’s note: If local immigrants are picked up by ICE in the Urbana-Champaign area, they will likely be cycled through at least one of three major detention centers in Missouri. I spoke with activists doing solidarity work in Missouri jails and reported on them in an article that was co-published by Truthout and The Appeal on December 6 and 7, respectively. This version has been edited for length and style; you can read the original version online.
Local Communities Resist ICE by Reaching Inside Jails and Building Networks of Support
For more than 200 days, Fernando Herrera-Cruz has been sitting in a county jail in central Missouri on immigration charges. The conditions in the jail are “very bad,” Herrera-Cruz told Truthout, with the help of a translator. “There are some guards who are very racist towards immigrants.”
Herrera-Cruz, who is 25 years old, left Mexico to come to the United States to work with his brother for a roofing business in St. Louis. He was travelling in rural Missouri for a job when the trailer on his truck got a flat tire. Herrera-Cruz says a passerby stopped, began harassing him, and called the police. When local sheriff’s deputies arrived, instead of helping with the flat tire, they arrested Herrera-Cruz.
According to a Department of Justice press release, Herrera-Cruz was picked up on March 18, 2025, and charged with illegal reentry. He was arrested in Camden County, Missouri, best known for the Lake of the Ozarks, a scenic stretch of waterways surrounded by mountains.
Central Missouri is politically conservative territory in a deep-red state. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won Missouri with 58 percent of the vote. The state governor and local officials have eagerly collaborated with federal immigration agents to carry out the new administration’s mass deportation plans.
The Show Me Your Papers State
Phelps County jail, where Herrera-Cruz is reportedly being held, is 100 miles southwest of St. Louis. In January, 2025, the county completed a jail expansion project that doubled its capacity to 400 beds. As Trump has shifted the US deportation machine into high gear, the Phelps County jail has served as a holding facility, keeping between 50 to 70 immigrants on any given day.
An expanding detention network is being built out across the Midwest. Since Illinois banned immigrant detention, ICE sends people to county jails in nearby states. In a red state like Missouri, many of the sheriffs are Republicans and support Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
Three counties in central Missouri have opened their jail doors to ICE for immigrants arrested in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and elsewhere across the Midwest. Along with Phelps County, jails in Greene County and Ste. Genevieve County are holding people for ICE. Together, these county jails are detaining hundreds of immigrants.
Doing Something on the Ground
Jails exist in part to hide people away from society. But in central Missouri, a growing number of community organizations are sprouting up to make sure immigrants in local jails aren’t forgotten.
The Phelps County jail is located in Rolla, a small college town with a population of around 20,000 that is home to the Missouri University of Science and Technology. A group of local residents calling themselves Abide in Love formed to provide support for immigrants in the jail. They began monitoring the jail population through the sheriff’s online database, and recruited and trained pen pals to communicate with immigrants in the jail through a text messaging system. They pay for phone calls so immigrants at the jail can talk to their families. They provide hygiene packages. They also help connect families with attorneys.
“When this group formed,” said Lucy Behrendt, current president of Abide in Love, “it’s like, okay, something that I can do, besides just post stuff on Facebook, go to protests or whatever, something I can actually do, on the ground.”
A Form of Protest
Abide in Love chapters are spreading across Missouri to other county jails holding immigrants for ICE. An Abide in Love group was started an hour south of St. Louis in Ste. Genevieve County, along the Mississippi River bordering Illinois. After finding out about immigrants in their county jail and talking to the group in Rolla, community members launched Abide in Love Ste. Genevieve.
“What Abide in Love Ste. Genevieve is doing by helping those detained and offering support,” said board member Susie Johnson, “that’s a form of protest. And we know we are making a positive difference based on the thank-you messages we receive almost daily.”
The city of Ste. Genevieve has a population of 5,000 people, but over the years the sheriff has expanded the jail to hold 500 people, an unusually large jail for a community this size. According to a contract with US Marshals obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request, 400 of the beds can be used for federal detainees, at a per diem rate of $103 per person. As is often the case, a long-standing contract with the US Marshals Service is used to hold ICE detainees. The Abide in Love chapter in Ste. Genevieve says there are around 150 immigrants currently being held there.
Truck Driver from Afghanistan Set Free
In Springfield, Missouri, the third largest city in the state, community organizers are developing solidarity networks and a chapter of Abide in Love is up and running. Others have founded the Southern Missouri Immigration Alliance (SMIA) which is more vocal in pressuring Sheriff Jim Arnott to stop holding immigrants at the county jail in Greene County, located in Springfield.
In November, the Southern Missouri Immigration Alliance put a spotlight on the case of Mohammad Ali Dadfar, who was being detained at the Greene County jail. They called on Sheriff Arnott and Greene County Commissioners to release Dadfar, an asylum seeker who served in the army in Afghanistan and was forced to flee the county with his family after the Taliban took over.
Dadfar is a long-haul truck driver who lives in Colorado, but was arrested driving through Indiana when he stopped at the Chesterton weigh station on Interstate 94. He was one of more than 140 truck drivers rounded up in “Operation Midway Blitz” as part of a crackdown on immigrant drivers with commercial driver’s licenses.
Dadfar was taken to a holding facility in Chicago for two days, then transferred to the Greene County jail. There, SMIA members got in contact with Dadfar, who asked that they reach out to Marissa Seuc-Hester, a friend through a local church in Boulder County, Colorado.
“We met Ali’s family when they arrived in Colorado,” Seuc-Hester told Truthout. “We were matched up with them to provide community connection and allyship as they built their new life here.” Her church ministry helps to resettle new immigrants by assisting with paperwork, building resumes, and registering children for school.
For a couple of days Dadfar’s family did not know of his whereabouts. With help from SMIA members, Seuc-Hester figured out the jail’s messaging app to communicate with him.
Public pressure recently helped to free Dadfar, who was released by a court order on December 1, 2025. US District Judge M. Douglas Harpool, in the Western District of Missouri, ruled that his right to due process had been violated. He had spent nearly two months in the Greene County jail.
“We are so relieved that Ali was released,” said Seuc-Hester. “We know so many others are still detained, and we hope the awareness we raised will lead to many more people being rightfully freed.”
Brian Dolinar has reported on criminal justice issues in Champaign-Urbana for almost 20 years.
