25-05-2025
The first rule of ICE Club? Don't talk about ICE Club. And treat all migrants as criminals.
A bird sits on a security fence at the Chase County Detention Facility in 2021. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Jails are hard places made necessary by people like Ernest Hoefgen.
Few are likely to remember Hoefgen now, but back in September 1943 the 31-year-old escaped from the city jail at Cottonwood Falls. He'd been picked up for assault, according to newspaper accounts, and was using an alias. In reality, Hoefgen was an escapee from the Texas state prison at Huntsville, where he had been serving a life sentence for murder.
Stick with me, because this is not a story about a murder that took place eight decades ago, but about due process in America in 2025. I've been thinking a lot lately about the Constitutional guarantee of due process, which means everyone should have access to fair and adequate legal proceedings when the government threatens to deprive us of life, liberty or property. This is regardless of what Kristi Noem, director of Homeland Security, may say it and habeas corpus are.
Our thinking about courts and jails and their role in American society has been shaped by Hoefgen and other criminals like him. The reason 'In Cold Blood' stays with us, apart from Truman Capote's writing, is that it's a story of a farm family in western Kansas who were murdered in a sensational way. It leaves us asking, why?
Movies, books and television also tend to blur our thinking about who is a criminal and who is not. If you're in jail — or a detention center, as they're likely called now — you must be a criminal, right? Well, no. There are plenty of people being processed in our jails right now who have committed no crime but who have violated relatively minor civil codes, comparable to getting a ticket from the city for the height of your grass. But unlike policing lawn care, there's a gold rush related to immigration enforcement. There's a billion-dollar detention industry hungry to fill beds with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees, and civil liberties are being eroded in the process.
ICE doesn't like to talk about how much it pays facilities, or to have any of its contractors talk about how much they make per day for each detainee. Apparently, the first rule of ICE club is don't talk about ICE club.
But let's talk first about how jails are supposed to function.
In 1938, Hoefgen killed carpenter George Richet with a hatchet from Richet's own toolbox. Hoefgen and a teenage girlfriend, Sylvia Phipps, were hitchhiking near Wichita Falls when the carpenter gave them a lift, according to the Associated Press. Hoefgen later told investigators he didn't know why he killed Richet, who still had $8 in cash when his body was found by railway workers. The case remained unsolved for two years.
Both Hoefgen and Phipps were later picked up on forgery charges at Scottsbluff, Nebraska, found guilty, and sentenced to prison. In 1940, Phipps told the matron at the women's reformatory she wanted to talk to investigators because she had witnessed the killing of Richet in Texas. When questioned, Hoefgen confessed.
We know all this about Hoefgen because of due process. The evidence against him was carefully detailed in court filings, he had advice from lawyers, and his court proceedings were open to the public and the press.
Hoefgen was sent to Huntsville to serve his life sentence, but he escaped — twice. After the second escape, he ran back to his home state of Kansas, where he married a local girl named Pauline and got into trouble at Cottonwood Falls. After escaping from the city jail, he stole another car and picked up a hitchhiker, 18-year-old Kansas State University student Bruce Smoll. When Smoll became suspicious, according to a United Press story, Hoefgen shot him to death. Rabbit hunters found the body a month later in a cornfield near Peabody, about 40 miles southwest of Cottonwood Falls.
Based on a hunch from Smoll's father that Hoefgen may have been involved in his son's death, and tips from Pauline's parents, investigators found Hoefgen living in Denver and returned him to Marion County, where he was charged with Smoll's murder.
Hoefgen's story is full of odd details that, if you put them in a movie, would shatter the audience's suspension of disbelief. When he and Phipps were in the county jail at Gering, Nebraska, awaiting trial on the forgery charges, they allegedly hatched a ridiculous jailbreak plot by hiding notes to one another in bananas and tomatoes. My interest in Hoefgen is because his last murderous jail escape began in Cottonwood Falls.
The Chase County Detention Center at Cottonwood Falls has received attention lately as being the last and largest ICE-contracted jail facility in Kansas. The 148-bed facility was built to turn a profit for this central Kansas county of 2,500, and it has been mostly full since the mass deportations began under the Trump administration. Back in 2021 and again earlier this month, I wrote about my discomfort with a picturesque Kansas county profiting from the misery of ICE detentions. Four years ago, the rate paid per day of inmate detention was $62.
Curious about how much Chase County is now receiving to house detainees, I filed a Kansas Open Records Act request for the facility contract. I was told to take a hike.
'Due to being a federal contracted agency,' Sheriff Jacob Welsh wrote in an email, 'there are contract restrictions which I am not allowed to disclose any information about the contract.'
Requests, he said, were to be sent directly to ICE.
Welsh did not respond to a request to cite the KORA exemption he felt applied in the situation or to provide the language in the federal contract that forbade him from discussing the contract.
I did contact ICE for the contract but received an automated out-of-office reply from spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe. The email said she would respond when she returned 'Monday, May 21.' As of Friday, I had not received a response from O'Keefe or any other ICE representative.
Max Kautsch, a First Amendment lawyer at Lawrence, told me that Welsh's responses showed a lack of concern for open records and state law.
'The sheriff's response violates the Kansas Open Records Act,' Kautsch said, 'because he does not 'cite the specific provision of law' authorizing denial of the request,' which he must do under Kansas law.
There are legitimate exemptions to KORA that allow the use of federal law to deny requests, such as how public universities can deny some requests for student information under Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
'If the sheriff insists on denying the request based on guidance he's received from the federal government, he must come clear to the public and cite that authority, as KORA requires,' Kautsch said. 'He also would need to explain why he is unable to produce even a redacted version of the requested records.'
Welsh's response raises concerns about open government.
'These circumstances suggest, at a minimum, that the sheriff is indifferent to open records laws, attention to detail, or both,' Kautsch said. 'That conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the inmate information portal on the sheriff's website says access to records held by the Chase County Jail is purportedly governed by the 'Kentucky Open Records Act.' Their office is in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. If the sheriff's office can't be bothered to properly identity its own state law on its own website, perhaps it is to be expected that it wouldn't know how to respond to a KORA request, either.'
Why Kentucky?
I don't know. Perhaps the template for the inmate portal was borrowed from the Muhlenberg County Detention Center.
To get a better understanding of what ICE detainees at Chase County and elsewhere go through, I contacted Kansas City, Missouri, immigration attorney Michael Sharma-Crawford.
For years, Sharma-Crawford told me, Chase County was the only immigration detention facility for most of Kansas and Missouri. There are now more counties being contracted, he said, especially in Missouri. In Kansas, for-profit CoreCivic is attempting to repurpose a shuttered prison in Leavenworth for ICE detention, but it has faced legal challenges and has not yet opened.
The issue with the current wave of detainments, Sharma-Crawford said, is the speed at which deportations are being carried out and the difficulty in tracking cases through the system. Migrants are typically given a handful of documents upon their arrest containing the specifics against them. Without access to those papers, it's difficult for an immigration attorney to evaluate a case, he said, or to track a migrant's case online. In many instances, he said, jails meant to house criminal detainees are unprepared to deal with civil immigration cases.
He commended Chase County on being willing to fax immigration documents to attorneys, while allowing the detainees to keep the originals, and to facilitate attorney-client phone calls.
'I'd take 12 Chase Counties compared to other facilities,' Sharma-Crawford said.
Access to legal counsel is an important Sixth Amendment right, he said, and this is especially important when deportation may now occur three weeks or less from the time of arrest.
'If you're from Mexico, you have to move quickly,' he advised. 'If you don't know what your status is, you should talk to an immigration attorney.'
He also suggested having important documents, like birth certificates, at the ready, and being prepared to seek a second legal opinion when necessary.
Sharma-Crawford said the immigration system was broken and that things were building to a chaotic crescendo. The administration's goal, he said, is to artificially clog the system and then claim it is impractical to give every detainee a hearing. But as late Justice Antonin Scalia said, due process applies to everyone.
It's something average Americans should take to heart, no matter where they were born. It's something that is being lost among the current rhetoric about crime and immigration. The vast majority of ICE detainees, he said, are held on civil charges.
'I don't defend people against criminal charges,' Sharma-Crawford said.
If we don't protect the due process rights of migrants now, he said, we might be denying due process for everyday civil infractions tomorrow, such as allowing your grass to grow too high.
'At some point, this leads to abbreviated trials' and other erosions of due process, he said.
The prospect of CoreCivic opening a thousand-bed facility at Leavenworth terrifies him. The previous prison operated by CoreCivic in Leavenworth was described as a 'hell hole' of abuse and mismanagement. The city of Leavenworth sued to stop the facility from being reopened as an ICE detention facility, but on Thursday a federal judge dismissed the case.
While Chase County did not provide answers to my questions about how lucrative its ICE contract was, a 2024 report by the American Immigration Council provides some clues. It estimated the average daily rate for detention to be $237 per person, with single adults spending an average of 55 days in detention. The rate for Chase County, of course, might differ. But with nobody willing to talk, who knows?
Communities such as Cottonwood Falls and Leavenworth must weigh the price of monetizing ICE detainment in the age of Trump against the fundamental American values of fairness and compassion. Leavenworth wouldn't directly share in the per-day rate as Chase County does, but there is the lure of jobs and economic development. It is a devil's bargain, a Faustian pact, the civic equivalent of 30 pieces of silver.
Back in 1943, Hoefgen pleaded guilty in Marion County District Court to the murder of K-State student Smoll. He was sentenced to death.
Hoefgen was hanged shortly after 1 a.m. Friday, March 10, 1944, on a newly constructed gallows in a warehouse at the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing. His last meal had been fried chicken. He declined requests to speak to reporters and showed little emotion as he was led up the 13 fated steps, an eyewitness from the Associated Press reported. Hoefgen was the first person to be executed by Kansas since 1870.
The death penalty is currently legal in Kansas, but it hasn't been used since 1965. The most notorious murderers executed at the Lansing gallows were 'In Cold Blood' killers Dick Hickok and Perry Smith.
While it's easy to see the story of Hoefgen as that of a criminal who got what he deserved, it's also a saga of Constitutional due process. He was repeatedly brought before the courts in the downward spiral of his life, afforded lawyers, treated humanely and even given fruit while in custody. Whether you agree with capital punishment or not, there was no abbreviation of justice.
County jails were typically places where criminal defendants were sent to await their trials or where those convicted of misdemeanor crimes served sentences of a year or less. They were not places for defendants in civil cases. Criminal cases can result in punishment that includes jail time, while civil cases typically involve settling disputes.
The migrants now being rushed through the deportation pipeline deserve the full protection of due process. If we deny them legal representation and access to courts by accelerating their cases through a broken system, we are betraying core American values. We risk turning justice into an unthinking machine run by idealogues and fueled by the monetization of detainment.
It is either due process for all, or due process for none.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
