Immigrants In Butler County Faced With "Uncertainty"

By Madeleine LaPlante-Dube

Miami University journalism student

Immigrants in Butler County are experiencing "fear" and "uncertainty" in the wake of the national policy debate over deportation.

Gabriela Mendoza Thibeau, an immigration attorney in West Chester, says many of her clients have come forward since President Trump announced sweeping changes to immigration enforcement in January.

"They [want to] know -- is there anything that they can do to put themselves in a better position in the event that they would be apprehended and deported? [There is] confusion, chaos," she says.

Currently, 103 inmates at the Butler County Jail are being held for ICE.

As they await proceedings after these new immigration sanctions from Washington, many have no idea if they will be able to stay in the country, and others are not aware of their rights or how the process of implementing this new policy is to proceed.

Old Tension; New Context

Tensions surrounding immigration in Butler County are not new.

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones has been aggressive in his efforts to deport and detain undocumented immigrants, although the pace of deportations was slowed by a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s office in 2010, settled out of court the following year.

The Sheriff’s stance, however, remains the same.

In March, Sheriff Jones took to Twitter to call for the government to cease funding for "sanctuary cities" in Ohio. The Sheriff also tweeted that he would be "asking ice [sic] for more help" in response to an arrest and drug bust of the twice-deported Julio Cesar Ledesma-Sanchez in January.

According to media reports, Jones had been sending ICE bills to cover the cost of housing alleged undocumented immigrants in the county jail since 2005.

In 2009, the Sheriff’s Office was given special permission from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use and train ten local law enforcement agents to "identify and process immigration violators and conduct criminal investigations under the direct supervision of ICE in the State of Ohio."

But it’s that identification part that gets law enforcement agencies in muddy water.

Circling And Waiting

"What they do now is they just stop people for taillights out, for headlights out, for wrong turns. And then the next step is to ask them for their driver’s license," says Dr. Shelly Jarret Bromberg, Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Miami University.

Thibeau worries that this new anti-immigrant push from the White House into Butler County will lead to civil and human rights violations. It’s happened before, she says.

"The other concern is the local and state law enforcement acting as federal officers and detaining and deporting people; and not only that, but also profiling," she says.

According to data released by the ICE for deportations from 2006 to 2013, over 175,000 immigrants were removed from the United States. With a team of ten officers, Butler County removed about one in every 175 immigrants brought in by law enforcement agencies in the nation during that time.

Butler County began to make a statistically significant impact on deportation rates around 2008 -- when it entered into the agreement with ICE -- when it deported 307 individuals, according to the data.

After a 10 percent increase the following year, with 339 deportations out of Butler County, the numbers begin to taper off significantly, decreasing by nearly two-thirds between 2009 and 2013. This coincides with the lawsuit, which was filed by Luis Rodriguez, an undocumented worker, in retaliation against a construction site raid in 2007 staged by the Sheriff’s department.

Because of Butler County’s former experience working with ICE, both Bromberg and Thibeau believe that the process of implementing the White House’s tough immigration policies will be expedited here.

"They were given this permission before, and then it was revoked," says Thibeau. "Now that it’s being given back, they’re like sharks, they’re circling and just waiting."

Photo: Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones has been working on law enforcement since 1976. He was first elected Butler Country Sheriff in 2004.