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News Story

Muscatine County now says ‘federal law’ bars disclosure of contract with ICE

County has been sued repeatedly for holding ICE detainees

Muscatine County’s top prosecutor says federal law prohibits her from publicly releasing the county jail’s agreement to detain people picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Like other Iowa counties, Muscatine County has a contract with the federal government to house 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.

That contract, and Muscatine County’s detention of the immigrants, have been the subject of at least five civil lawsuits and an alleged ethics complaint concerning former Muscatine County Attorney, James Barry, who resigned last year.

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In January, the Iowa Capital Dispatch filed a formal, written Open Records Law request with both Muscatine County Sheriff Quinn Riess and Jail Administrator Matt McCleary, requesting a copy of the county jail’s contract to house ICE detainees. Neither Riess or McCleary responded to the request or to subsequent letters and phone calls on the matter.

On Feb. 4, the Capital Dispatch made a similar request of Muscatine County Attorney Korie Talkington. On Feb. 19, Talkington responded by stating that she had turned over the request to ICE for that agency to handle through the federal Freedom of Information Act. Any future communication on the issue, she said, would come from ICE and not from the county.

After the Capital Dispatch objected, noting that it was not seeking access to federal records held by ICE but to county records subject to Iowa’s Open Records Law, Talkington replied with a letter in which she stated, “I am not able to provide a copy of the contract with ICE/DHS. Release is a violation of federal law.”

When asked what federal law she was referring to, and who at ICE had advised her on the issue, Talkington gave the Capital Dispatch the name of one of the three ICE employees she said she’d consulted with, and did not cite the federal law she said prohibits disclosure.

The ICE employee Talkington identified, Shayla Wray, said Monday she writes the jail contracts for ICE, and said she was not aware Muscatine County had already asserted that federal law bars public disclosure of its contract with ICE. “I don’t know,” Wray said, “I don’t think that’s the case.”

Asked why ICE doesn’t want the county to release its own copy of the contract, Wray said, “We just have our FOIA team look at everything and make sure nothing needs to be redacted or anything like that – just the traditional process – and then we would release that, unless Muscatine is concerned about releasing anything, which it didn’t sound like they were. So, we have no issues with releasing anything. We just have to follow the FOIA process.”

ICE response to FOIA requests challenged

Over the past year, ICE’s FOIA office has repeatedly come under fire for its handling of public-records requests:

— Detainee information: Last week, an ABC affiliate in North Carolina reported that it was still waiting for ICE’s FOIA office to respond to a request filed three months ago. The news station is seeking access to details on some of the people detained by ICE.

*— Expansion plans: *In October 2025, the American Civil Liberties Unions of Virginia and North Carolina sued ICE over an alleged failure to respond to an August 2025 FOIA request for records regarding the agency’s potential plans to expand immigration detention in Virginia.

— Video footage: Last month, the Center for Investigative Reporting sued both ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, alleging they violated statutory deadlines and had yet to informed CIR of the scope of material they intended to either produce or withhold in response to a FOIA request for video footage of ICE actions in Los Angeles and Chicago.

*— Grievances sought: *Last year, the Los Angeles Daily News reported sending ICE a FOIA request for all grievances filed by detainees at one California facility and, after eight months, receiving nothing in response.

— ‘Least transparent’: Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of the nonprofit American Oversight, told the Columbia Journalism Review last fall that ICE had an “abysmal” track record with regard to transparency. Of the 137 requests the organization had filed with ICE and Customs and Border Protection by September 2025, there had been a substantive response to just one, she said, and that response took almost seven months. “ICE and CBP remain among the slowest and least transparent agencies we deal with,” Chukwu told CJR.

— Medicaid enrollees: Last year, the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed three separate lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in part over FOIA responses to records requests related to Secretary Kristi Noem’s claim that she wanted to prosecute CNN and to a July 14 agreement giving ICE access to the personal data of the nation’s 78 million Medicaid enrollees.

Contract was also sought by attorney

Under the Freedom of Information Act, federal agencies must determine within 20 business days whether to fulfill or deny a FOIA request and must then “immediately notify” the requester of that decision. However, agencies are allowed to extend that deadline due to what they consider “unusual circumstances.”

While some agencies take months, or even years, to respond to FOIA requests, Wray said ICE has plenty of experience handling FOIA requests in a timely and efficient manner.

“ICE has gotten very good at it,” she said. “I’ve never been with an agency that intentionally withheld anything.”

After speaking to Wray, the Iowa Capital Dispatch renewed its request for access to Muscatine County’s copy of its contract with ICE, as well as the county’s response to a request for that same contract, allegedly made last year by attorney Emily Rebelskey of Iowa City.

Last summer, Rebelskey filed court papers involving a client, an ICE detainee who had been held in the Muscatine County Jail, in which she raised the question of whether the county was financially incentivized to hold immigration detainees as long as possible given the payments the county collects from ICE for each detention.

“I filed a public records request to see the contract, and I was not given that document,” Rebelskey told an Iowa judge at the time.

Talkington has yet to address the Capital Dispatch’s Feb. 20 request for Muscatine County’s response to Rebelskey’s public-records demand.

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