A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer was jailed on Friday on allegations of breaking into a woman’s apartment.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces a charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after his arrest by the sheriff’s office of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, the agency said in a statement.

The sheriff’s office said Bailey entered his ex-girlfriend’s apartment near the community of Covington, a New Orleans suburb on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, without her permission. She was not in the apartment at the time, and the sheriff’s office said investigators booked him with a crime defined as the “intentional entry without authorization into any inhabited dwelling … used … as a home or place of abode by another person”.

Bailey is employed by an ICE office in the Louisiana community of Oakdale, which by car is about three hours to the west of Covington, the St Tammany sheriff’s office said. The agency’s statement noted that he was a resident of Lecompte, which is about a half-hour’s drive to the north-east of Oakdale.