Deportation of Kenyan Priest Working as Texas Prison Guard Highlights TDCJ’s Dependence on Immigrant Staff
by Matt Clarke
The Rev. James Eliud Ngahu Mwangi, an Episcopal priest, was working as a prison guard in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) until federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) declared him a deportable alien and detained him as he returned home from work on October 25, 2025. After Mwangi was detained, he was held at an immigration detention facility in Conroe, Texas. By December 2025, the former guard had had enough of being on the other side of incarceration and self-deported to his native Kenya.
Mwangi used a business visa that did not come with employment eligibility to enter the United States. When that visa expired, he applied for asylum and was granted permission to work. That is when TDCJ employed him, making him one of around 1,600 foreign nationals who work for the agency (as of June 2025), most of whom work as guards. That is about 5% of the overall TDCJ staff and about 8% of the guard force.
The Mwangi deportation highlights TDCJ’s increasing dependence on foreign nationals to mitigate its chronic severe understaffing. “They are really operating on skeletal crews in many of the facilities. So, they’re using many strategies to try to increase the workforce,” according to Michele Deitch, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. “And about 15 years ago, they started liberally recruiting people from abroad to come and work here.”
And come they did, from 15 different countries. The majority of TDCJ’s foreign workers (1,120) come from Nigeria in West Africa. The neighboring country of Cameroon accounts for another 204, while 93 come from Mexico. Kenya, Mwangi’s home country, accounts for only 20 TDCJ foreign employees.
The large number of foreign workers from West Africa does not surprise Deitch.
“It’s not a coincidence,” she said. “I mean, there was actual recruitment going on to do that. These are jobs that the agency has trouble filling for all sorts of reasons.”
Some of the reasons are readily apparent, such as the lack of air conditioning in most of TDCJ’s prisons. The high heat of a Texas summer stresses both prisoners and staff.
“The pay sucks and working conditions suck,” according to Paul Wright, a former Washington state prisoner who is now the executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the publisher of PLN. He noted that prisons often do not differentiate between how they treat prisoners and how the treat staff.
“It’s a pretty crappy working environment all the way around,” said Wright.
At terminal interviews, TDCJ staff identify maltreatment by senior staff, a cliquish work environment that greatly favors the “in crowd” at the expense of others, and poor pay as the top reasons for leaving the agency.
Starting TDCJ guard pay is $25.97 per hour at maximum security prisons and $26.21 in other prisons. It increases after six months to $26.50 and $27.25, respectively. This reflects a 40% wage increase enacted in 2021. This increase did mitigate the low pay issue somewhat but TDCJ has done little to address the abusive work environment at most of its prisons.
Whether a federal court will order TDCJ to air condition most or all of its prisons is currently being litigated. See: Tiede v. Collier, 796 F.Supp.3d 275 (W.D. Tex. 2025). It already settled a similar lawsuit that focused on a single prison that is now air conditioned. See: Cole v. Collier, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112095 (S.D. Tex.). If TDCJ does air condition all of its prisons, guard turnover will likely drop, making it unnecessary to recruit foreign workers for prison jobs.
Source: The Houston Chronicle
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Related legal cases
Tiede v. Collier
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 796 F.Supp.3d 275 (W.D. Tex. 2025) |
| Level | District Court |
Cole v. Collier
| Year | 2017 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112095 (S.D. Tex.) |
| Level | District Court |