FOI

Iowa Capital Dispatch
February 20, 2026

Muscatine County, which has a contract to hold immigration detainees for the federal government, is refusing to publicly disclose its copy of that contract.

In recent months, Muscatine County’s jail administrator has been named in five lawsuits related to the county’s agreement to jail some of the immigrants who are picked up in Iowa by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Like other Iowa counties, Muscatine County has a contract with ICE to house those individuals in return for payments from the federal government. That contract, and the county’s detention of the immigrants, have been the subject of five civil lawsuits and an alleged ethics complaint concerning former Muscatine County Attorney James Barry, who resigned last year.