Three New Hampshire Jails Held the U.S. Marshals’ Prisoners in 2025. Who Checks the Service?

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Marshals Service owns no jail. It rents county cells by the day, deputizes local police, and has had no confirmed marshal in New Hampshire since August 2025.

Correction, November 14, 2026. What was wrong: the related-coverage note in this report first said the DEA and the FBI are both listed as partners on the New Hampshire Joint Fugitive Task Force. What is right: the Marshals Service’s roster lists the DEA and the ATF; it does not list the FBI. What changed: the note now says so and links GSR’s ATF profile. No other part of the report was affected.

On an average day in April 2025, about 241 people in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service were locked up in New Hampshire. Roughly 114 were in the Strafford County jail in Dover, 79 in the Merrimack County jail in Boscawen, and 48 in the Cheshire County jail in Keene. None of those buildings belongs to the Marshals. The agency’s own budget papers put it flatly: “The USMS does not own or operate any detention facilities.”

The jail counts come from Marshals Service records that the Prison Policy Initiative, a research group, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and published facility by facility. They describe the least visible job of the oldest federal law enforcement agency in the state. This report, the fourth in a GSR series on law enforcement, sets out what the Marshals Service may do, how big it is, what it does here, and who checks it.

The short version: the Marshals are the federal courts’ police force, the government’s fugitive hunters, and a jailer that rents every bed it uses. In New Hampshire the district has been led by an acting marshal since August 2025, and much of its street work is done by local officers sworn in as federal deputies.

Related coverage. GSR’s profiles of the DEA and the ATF cover two of the federal agencies the Marshals list as partners on their New Hampshire fugitive task force. GSR’s profile of the FBI covers the bureau’s work in the state, and its profile of ICE covers a third listed partner. The people these agencies arrest on federal charges are the Marshals’ prisoners while their cases are in court.

Where it came from

The office is as old as the federal courts. The Marshals Service’s history records that George Washington signed the commissions of the first thirteen marshals on September 26, 1789, under the Judiciary Act of that year. New Hampshire’s went to John Parker, a Portsmouth native who had been sheriff of Rockingham County since 1771. At 56 he was the oldest man Washington commissioned as a marshal. He died in 1791.

For most of the next two centuries a marshal was one presidential appointee per court district, not an agency. The Justice Department’s organization manual dates the United States Marshals Service to a department order of May 12, 1969, and says it was permanently established as a bureau on November 18, 1988.

How big it is now

There are 94 districts, each with a marshal appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a four-year term under 28 U.S.C. § 561. Director Gadyaces S. Serralta was sworn in on August 1, 2025.

The agency runs on two main accounts. The fiscal 2027 request for salaries and expenses is $2.18 billion, up $478 million from the $1.702 billion base Congress enacted for fiscal 2026. It would pay for 6,383 positions, 4,574 of them deputy marshals, against 5,385 positions and 3,892 deputies now. The largest single increase, $152 million and 533 positions, is labeled immigration enforcement.

The second account is bigger than the first. Federal Prisoner Detention, the money that pays other people’s jails to hold the Marshals’ prisoners, was funded at $2.236 billion in fiscal 2026. The request for fiscal 2027 is $2.996 billion. Add the two and the service is asking for about $5.2 billion.

What a deputy can do

The sheriff clause in section 564 is the old part. The newer authority is the one that puts local police under a federal badge. A Justice Department regulation lets the director specially deputize selected state and local officers. A 2000 law, now at 34 U.S.C. § 41503, told the Attorney General to set up permanent fugitive task forces of federal, state, and local officers, directed and coordinated by the Marshals.

The result is a federal agency that works many state cases. The service’s fugitive fact sheet counts 44,790 state and local fugitives arrested or cleared in fiscal 2025, against 28,533 federal ones.

The half nobody films

People held on federal charges are the Marshals’ responsibility while their cases move through court. The service’s prisoner fact sheet for fiscal 2025 counts 116,855 prisoners received and an average of 55,533 in custody on any day. About 41,000 of them were in state and local jails under 956 agreements. Roughly 8,000 were in Bureau of Prisons facilities and 6,700 in privately run ones. The average cost was $121.46 per prisoner per day, and medical care ran $184.1 million.

The budget justification counts fiscal 2025 a little differently, at 55,884 a day and 125,625 received. Both documents are the agency’s, and GSR could not reconcile them. What matters more is the direction. The budget projects 247,792 detainees received in fiscal 2027, nearly double, and ties the increase to immigration prosecutions. Serralta told Senate appropriators in May 2026 that 45.6 percent of the prisoners the service received in fiscal 2025 had been arrested by Homeland Security agencies.

The rest of the hidden half is protection and property. The judicial security fact sheet counts about 2,700 federal judges under protection and 807 threats investigated in fiscal 2025. The Marshals also hold what the government seizes: $8.2 billion in assets at the end of fiscal 2025, by the forfeiture fact sheet.

The Marshals in New Hampshire

The District of New Hampshire covers all ten counties from a headquarters in Concord, where the federal court sits. It has no Senate-confirmed marshal. William R. Hart Jr., the former Londonderry police chief nominated in 2022, retired on August 30, 2025, and Chief Deputy Katherine R. Burns has been acting marshal since.

The district’s public face is the New Hampshire Joint Fugitive Task Force, formed in the fall of 2002. Its roster is most of the state’s law enforcement: all ten county sheriffs, the State Police, state probation and parole, and 20 local departments from Allenstown to the University of New Hampshire. The federal members listed include the DEA, the ATF, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In July 2026 the district announced the results of a multi-week sex offender operation timed to the twentieth anniversary of the Adam Walsh Act. By its account, investigators targeted more than 400 registered offenders and completed more than 200 compliance checks. Twenty people were arrested for registration violations and 15 on unrelated warrants.

Then there are the jails. The 2025 records show three counties holding Marshals prisoners at daily rates of $100 in Strafford, $105 in Cheshire, and $110 in Merrimack.

At April 2025 headcounts and those rates, the three counties would bill about $25,000 a day, or roughly $9.2 million over a year. That is GSR’s arithmetic from the published rates, not a payment record.

One of the agreements is public. The Marshals have posted agreement 49-99-0104 with the Strafford County jail. The posted copy sets an $83 daily rate, lower than the $100 in the 2025 records, and names ICE and the Bureau of Prisons as other agencies allowed to use it. The Boston Globe reported in March 2026 that the county’s legislative delegation voted 22 to 11 for a resolution asking commissioners to renegotiate the jail’s ICE contract, and that the commissioners, who control the jail, had not yet acted.

Who checks it

The chain starts at the top. The President appoints each marshal and can remove one. The Senate confirms. The Attorney General supervises the director. Federal judges see the work every day. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General audits the rest.

Its recent work has been about money. A September 2025 audit of prisoner medical billing tested 494 claims and questioned costs in 83 of them. It found 64 emergency submissions worth $412,132 that were never entered in the tracking system. In one district, $800,628 of the $861,698 paid for dental care went to a single practice. The auditors made 13 recommendations, and the service agreed with all of them.

An earlier audit goes to the jail agreements themselves. In September 2021 the inspector general reported that the agreements the Marshals sign with local governments for detention space get “significantly less oversight and review” than sole-source contracts, and that the service’s internal audit plan did not cover them.

The harder question is force. A 2021 investigation by the Marshall Project and the USA Today Network counted at least 177 people shot by marshals, task force members, or officers assisting them from January 2015 to September 2020, 124 of whom died. It reported that the service relies mainly on local agencies to investigate those shootings and that no marshal had ever been prosecuted for one. The Marshals’ own first report on the subject, described by the Associated Press in November 2023, counted 147 shooting incidents over three fiscal years. Of the 266 officers involved, fewer than 40 percent were deputy marshals. The rest were task force officers from other agencies.

Cameras came late. The Justice Department announced on October 29, 2020, that local officers on federal task forces would be permitted to use body cameras while serving arrest warrants, during other planned arrests, and while executing search warrants.

The auditor has its own budget problem. As GSR’s FBI profile reported, the fiscal 2027 request cuts the inspector general’s office by 27.8 percent.

What the record does not show

The district page gives no count of deputies or staff in New Hampshire. The fact sheets report arrests for the nation, not the district. The jail figures stop at April 2025. This report did not establish whether the President has sent the Senate a nominee for marshal.

Two questions matter most locally. GSR did not establish which New Hampshire departments’ task force officers wear cameras on Marshals operations, or under what written policy. And it did not locate the current agreements, rates, and invoices for the Merrimack and Cheshire county jails.

Those questions have answers, and the answers are on file. The federal side is a matter for the Freedom of Information Act. The county side, including what a jail has agreed to, what it bills, and what a police department signed when it lent an officer to the task force, is a matter for RSA 91-A, the Right-to-Know Law, which gives every person the same right to ask.

The Marshals Service in New Hampshire is a Concord office with an acting chief, a task force made mostly of other agencies’ officers, and, by the 2025 records, a few hundred prisoners in county cells. Its budget assumes the number of people it receives will nearly double. The counties are paid by the day under agreements the inspector general has said get less scrutiny than a contract. Whether anyone is reading those agreements closely is a fair question. Whether the auditor will have the staff to keep asking is another.

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources listed; see the fact-check table. Fiscal 2027 figures are requests to Congress, not enacted appropriations. The New Hampshire jail figures are from early 2025 and come from agency records published by a research group. Descriptions of operations are the agency’s accounts. GSR did not ask the Marshals Service or the three counties for comment before publication; the audit findings are the inspector general’s. The audio narration is a synthetic voice. Featured photograph: the Warren B. Rudman U.S. Courthouse in Concord, by Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.