Todd Entrekin got rich while people in his care went hungry — but the US sheriff insists he has done nothing wrong.

For years Mr Entrekin, the sheriff of the Etowah County Detention Centre jail in Alabama, used federal money set aside for feeding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) inmates as his personal piggy bank.

He was able to do it thanks to a “Depression-era loophole” in Alabama law, which “allows sheriffs to keep half of all leftover funds meant for feeding inmates, with the other half going to the county’s general fund”, AL.com revealed.

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In March 2018, Mr Entrekin owned up to taking $US$750,000 ($A1,064,512) over three years by taking advantage of that loophole.

However, an extensive investigation by AL.com revealed he had actually taken more than double that already staggering sum, meaning Mr Entrekin took more than $US1.5 ($A2.12) million.

The publication claims that Mr Entrekin served inmates “spoiled, expired, and donated food” which allowed him to line his pockets with the federal funds.

In a 2018 AL.com interview, Mr Entrekin and other sheriffs defended the practice.

“The law says it’s a personal account and that’s the way I’ve always done it and that’s the way the law reads and that’s the way I do business,” Mr Entrekin said.

“That’s the way the law’s written.”

But inmates have spoken out about conditions inside the prison.

“We used to eat what we got: porridge in the morning, bread, jam, one or two more items [each day]. The food that we got was not enough,” Indian citizen Sanju Rajput told AL.com.

Jessica Vosburgh, executive director of the Adelante Alabama Worker Center advocacy group,

told the New York Post the situation was concerning.

“I think, based on this information, [the federal government] unequivocally needs to terminate its contract with Etowah County,” she said.

“This is not a reputable, law-abiding partner for the federal government.”

And law professor and former chief of the public corruption and government fraud section at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia Randall Eliason told AL.com even if the loophole was above board legally, it was still problematic.

“There’s pretty much no way that the federal government is OK with this,” he told the publication.

Mr Entrekin started to gain notoriety last February, when 20-year-old landscaper Matt Qualls claimed he had been paid to mow the sheriff’s lawn with cheques stamped with the words “Sheriff Todd Entrekin Food Provision Account”.

“I saw that in the corner of the checks it said Food Provision, and a couple people I knew came through the jail, and they say they got meat maybe once a month and every other day it was just beans and vegetables,” Mr Qualls told AL.com.

“I put two and two together and realised that that money could have gone toward some meat or something.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast in August 2018, ex-prisoner Miguel Williamson slammed the jail, claiming he nearly died when staff ignored his worsening urinary tract infection in 2014.

“That place in Alabama, oh my God. That’s the worst place, that’s the worst place ever,” he said, claiming he still suffered health problems today four years on as a result of the untreated infection.

Pro-immigrant supporters have also launched the Shut Down Etowah campaign as the result of an alleged “long pattern of uncorrected civil rights violations”.

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