An illegal immigrant from Mauritania who claimed to be homosexual on his asylum application was arrested by ICE after landing a taxpayer-funded job as a corrections officer at an Indiana county jail, and then marrying the local sheriff's stepdaughter.
Salah Dine Habib, 28, entered the United States illegally near Lukeville, Arizona, in March 2023 and was released into the country under the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security said. He filed for asylum claiming he was gay, a claim DHS now says it believes was fraudulent, given that Habib married a woman in September 2025.
The case lays bare a chain of failures: a porous border, a credulous asylum system, a local hiring process that waved through an illegal immigrant into a law enforcement role, and a family connection to the very sheriff who employed him. It is the kind of story that reads like parody but isn't.
DHS told the Daily Mail that Habib crossed the southern border near Lukeville, Arizona, in March 2023. He was caught and released into the interior, one of countless encounters during the Biden-era border surge that ended with migrants walking free on American soil.
Habib's asylum application rested on a specific claim: that he was homosexual. In Mauritania, his home country in West Africa, homosexuality is a criminal offense punishable by death by stoning. On paper, the claim carried weight. In practice, DHS now says it was a lie.
Sometime after his release, Habib made his way to Portland, Indiana, a small Jay County seat of roughly 6,000 people, and secured a position as a non-armed correctional officer at the county jail. Jay County Sheriff Larry Ray Newton Jr. confirmed to WIBC that Habib served in that role. The sheriff said Habib started working at the department before marrying into his family.
That marriage came in September 2025, when Habib wed Chelsea Habib, Newton's stepdaughter. Photos and videos shared on social media from the ceremony showed the sheriff posing with his family and giving a speech to wedding guests.
When the hiring came under scrutiny, Newton pointed to Habib's paperwork. The sheriff said Habib's driver's license and Social Security card had cleared the recruitment process. He also claimed the Jay County Auditor's Office bore responsibility for processing and vetting legal paperwork for staff.
The auditor's office pushed back.
"Departments are responsible for completing any reference checks, background checks, drug tests, etc before submitting new employees to the office."
The auditor's office added that Habib had cleared the federal background screening process with his I-9 immigration document. The Washington Times reported that Habib also passed an E-Verify employment authorization check, a system designed to confirm work eligibility but not immigration status.
ICE itself drew the distinction sharply:
"To be clear: Work authorization does NOT give someone legal status to be in our country."
That gap, between work authorization and lawful presence, is exactly the seam Habib appears to have exploited. A pending asylum application can generate temporary work permits. It does not make someone legal. And it certainly should not open the door to a corrections officer badge at a county jail.
DHS laid out its fraud case in blunt terms. In a statement, the department said Habib's pending asylum application "is believed to be fraudulent, as he applied based on homosexuality in 2023 but married a woman in 2025." Fox News reported the same DHS language, confirming the department's position that the marriage directly contradicted the basis of the asylum claim.
Habib was arrested on May 21. DHS said he will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. He is currently held at the Clay County Jail detention facility in Brazil, Indiana, where he is fighting deportation.
DHS did not mince words about the broader implications:
"Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin ICE is restoring law and order. Illegal aliens have no place in our communities, especially in positions of law enforcement."
Newton, for his part, claimed local officials were unaware of Habib's immigration status. The Daily Mail contacted both the sheriff's office and Chelsea Habib for comment.
The Habib case is a compact illustration of how multiple layers of the immigration system can fail simultaneously, and how those failures compound.
Start at the border. Habib crossed illegally and was released. That release, under Biden-era processing, placed him in the American interior with a pending asylum claim and, eventually, work authorization documents. The asylum system's massive backlog meant his case sat unresolved for years, years during which he obtained a driver's license, a Social Security card, and a government job guarding inmates.
Then consider the hiring. Newton's sheriff's department brought on an illegal immigrant as a corrections officer. The auditor's office says it was the department's job to vet new hires. The sheriff says the paperwork checked out. Both point fingers at each other while a man who entered the country illegally ended up with keys to jail cells.
And the asylum claim itself. Persecution-based asylum categories, including claims rooted in sexual orientation, exist for legitimate reasons. But they also create an obvious incentive for fraud when the system lacks the resources or willingness to verify claims before granting release and work permits. Habib allegedly told the government he was gay, collected the benefits of a pending application, and then married a woman two years later in a public ceremony attended by the local sheriff.
The E-Verify system, often cited as the frontline defense against unauthorized employment, cleared Habib. Work authorization flowed from his pending asylum case. The system worked exactly as designed, and still produced an illegal immigrant working as a jail guard in rural Indiana.
Several questions hang over this case. What specific vetting did the Jay County Sheriff's Department conduct beyond checking Habib's driver's license and Social Security card? Did anyone in the department inquire about his immigration status before handing him a corrections officer role? How long did Habib work at the jail before his arrest? And what agency or court is handling his removal proceedings?
Newton's dual role, as the sheriff who hired Habib and the stepfather-in-law who attended his wedding, raises its own set of accountability questions. Even if Newton genuinely did not know Habib's status, the appearance of a sheriff employing his stepdaughter's husband in a law enforcement capacity deserves scrutiny regardless of immigration issues.
The Jay County Auditor's Office made clear it views the responsibility as resting with the hiring department. Newton pointed the other way. Somewhere in that gap, an illegal immigrant got a badge.
Cases like Habib's do not happen because one person slipped through one crack. They happen because the entire structure, border processing, asylum adjudication, work authorization, employment verification, and local hiring, operates on assumptions that fall apart the moment someone games the system with even modest effort.
Habib allegedly told one lie on an asylum form. That single claim set off a cascade: release from custody, work papers, a driver's license, a Social Security card, a government paycheck, and a position inside a county jail. Every checkpoint he passed was technically functioning. None of them caught the problem.
When the asylum system takes years to resolve claims, when work authorization flows automatically from a pending application, and when local agencies treat federal paperwork as proof of legitimacy, the result is predictable. The system doesn't need to be broken by force. It just needs to be played.
Taxpayers in Jay County paid Salah Dine Habib to guard their jail. The least they deserved was a system that could tell the difference between a legitimate asylum seeker and a man who allegedly invented a story to stay in the country. They didn't get one.