Brianna Nofil

He's a pretty standard, ordinary rural sheriff.

He's got a big mustache and a big hat and he's got a long career in law enforcement.

But I think that his incentives are incredibly clear.

Sheriffs in most of the country at this point in history operated on something called a fee system.

So they didn't get an annual salary.

Your salary as sheriff would have depended on how many sort of sheriff related tasks you did.

You get a payment for like how many summonses you send.

But sort of the number, the backbone of your income was how many people you held in the local jail.

So your salary was directly dependent on that.

So once he finds that he can start detaining immigrants, right, at the behest of the federal government, this is a pretty spectacular new income source for the sheriff.

Yeah, personally, right.

It's not even money going into the local economy at this point.

It is money the sheriff is personally pocketing.

So some reports say he makes like $20,000 in three years, which is a lot of money for a sheriff.

The average detention in northern New York, it hovers around three months.

It's way longer than migrants were detained on average.

And when you think about the conditions that they were in, these are not spaces designed for long-term detentions.

They are not spaces that were ever designed to hold immigrants.

And he says, when I talked to the sheriff, the sheriff didn't seem disturbed at all by the number of Chinese migrants coming through Malone.

In fact, he seems delighted.