WASHINGTON — Jilmar Ramos-Gomez had been out of ICE custody four months.
A Marine. A combat veteran. A U.S. citizen born in Michigan, held three days for possible deportation before federal authorities figured out what his passport already said. Kent County changed its jail policy in January 2019 to make sure it didn’t happen again: no more holds for ICE without a warrant signed by a judge.
That May, a state senator from Potterville named Tom Barrett moved to make counties pay for exactly that kind of decision.
Barrett, now the freshman Republican congressman from Michigan’s 7th District, chaired the Michigan Senate’s corrections budget subcommittee in 2019. Under his gavel, the panel advanced budget language withholding jail reimbursement funding from any county that limited communication or cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Democrats objected. So did the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Barrett defended it as routine.
“I think this is good to require, good to maintain, and I think it should be expected of all of our law enforcement that they work in a cooperative and collaborative fashion,” Barrett told The Detroit News. “And this boilerplate just ensures that cooperation is encouraged.”
The money at stake was not abstract. It reimbursed counties for housing felons in local jails instead of shipping them to state prison. Kent County was drawing about $1.1 million a year. Wayne County, about $1.5 million. Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz warned the language could reach cases “completely unrelated to the immigration issue,” and that people who could have served time near home would end up in prison instead.
The penalty had a name in plain English: cut the jails, or hold people for ICE.
The county he now represents
The 2019 reporting listed the Michigan counties running policies that would have triggered the penalty. Kent. Wayne. Kalamazoo. Washtenaw. And Ingham.
Ingham County is Lansing and East Lansing. It is the population center of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District — the seat Barrett has held since January 2025.
Ingham’s sheriff’s office announced in 2017 that it would no longer hold people past their original booking period on federal immigration detainers, saying administrative ICE warrants lack proper judicial authority and calling immigration a civil matter between the individual and the federal government. Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth framed it as a jail-management and legal call, and said ICE could simply come pick people up on release day. WKARWILX
That is the policy Barrett’s boilerplate was written to punish. Two years later, he ran for Congress in the district that jail serves.
The freshman with the checkbook
The vote Barrett cast this June was the same argument with four more zeros.
He voted for the Secure America Act, which passed the House 214-212 and funds ICE and Customs and Border Protection through 2028 — $38 billion for ICE, $26 billion for Border Patrol, and $5 billion in DHS contingency money. In a statement, Barrett said “the historic progress we made to secure the southern border was jeopardized” by a refusal to fund the agencies.
Michigan advocates saw the bill differently. More agents means more families missing a breadwinner and more employers watching workers disappear into detention — a second family separation crisis, one Lansing-area advocate told WLNS.
The race
Barrett flipped MI-7 in 2024, 50.3 percent to Curtis Hertel’s 46.6 percent. Cook Political Report rates the seat competitive and describes a far more hostile environment for him this cycle. His opponent is William Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement co-founder who won the August Democratic primary over more moderate candidates.
Immigration enforcement is already inside the race — including inside a high school. In February, a Barrett campaign staffer filed a public records request seeking emails from an East Lansing High School teacher connected to a January student walkout over ICE, along with correspondence between the school’s political action club and Lawrence.
Barrett’s office has worked to soften his profile on immigration this year. The record from Lansing is harder to soften. He called it boilerplate. Boilerplate is the language nobody is supposed to read.
This story sat in a 2019 Detroit News clip for seven years while everyone covering MI-7 walked past it. Migrant Insider found it because this is the only beat we work. Become a paid subscriber and we'll keep reading the boilerplate nobody else does — then send this to one voter in Lansing.
Why are these ppl so terrible and proud to be so?
vote blue! Michigan Jews