
“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Sheriff Jones. He has worked with other agencies in the county to create a safety net for Latinos. “Many times people who are that desperate to get into the United States and are willing to spend that much effort are among the best,” he said. He spent four years as a missionary in Chile before returning to his Ohio roots. Sunday service in Spanish, which he leads, is the most crowded, he said, with almost 400 people packing the pews each week. The church offers four weekend Masses, and the 1 p.m. while providing a place of worship, support and like-mindedness. “Why would I ask them?” he said. He doesn’t inquire about his parishioners’ legal status in the U.S. “This is a safe place,” he said of his church. Julie Billiart Catholic congregation in Hamilton. "But then people went on with their lives.”Īs menacing as Jones has been to the local Hispanic population, there’s an unusual juxtaposition in the county, evidenced by the open-armed Rev. “It did cause a lot of stress, frustration, especially the first couple of years, in the Hispanic community,” she said. She said that, if anything, he has brought the county’s Hispanic population closer together. He hasn’t frightened anyone off,” said Shelly Bromberg, the chairwoman of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “The number of Hispanics in Butler County has doubled during his time in office. Census Bureau put the county’s Hispanic population at just 4,800 as recently as 2000.ĭespite Jones’ grandstanding, headlines and resources poured into efforts to remove undocumented residents from the county, one Jones critic thinks his crusade has largely fallen flat. People have set up organizations in the county to send the opposite message: one of welcoming undocumented immigrants.īutler County’s Hispanic population was at 15,904 and climbing in 2013, according to the Ohio Development Services Agency. Years of Jones’ scrutiny notwithstanding, the Hispanic community in Butler County is growing fast. He has even hired a detective to conduct investigations and spawned headlines with stunts such as sending the government of Mexico a bill for the cost of jailing them.
Butler county sheriff news crack#
Like Arpaio, Jones has vowed to pursue undocumented immigrants in the county and crack down on anyone giving them a job. Many observers consider Jones a Midwestern acolyte of Joe Arpaio, the controversial anti-immigration sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He would probably cause fewer problems for us if he were in Washington.” Like many other Hispanics in Butler County, she did not want to give her name out of fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. When told Jones would likely not be launching a campaign, she snapped her fingers disappointedly. “Is he running for the seat?” a Hispanic customer in Supermercado Garcia asked. A special election to replace Boehner is scheduled for June. Jones recently made national headlines by flirting with the possibility of running for the congressional seat that opened when House Speaker John Boehner retired. But they represent very different slices of life in this corner of the state, not far from Cincinnati and Dayton, because the sheriff’s office is where Richard “Rick” Jones runs the county law enforcement apparatus with an almost single-minded zeal to root out undocumented residents - who are often Hispanic - and the employers that hire them. The two buildings can be caught in the same line of sight.

We’re trying to do things here to make life better for everybody than it was the day before.HAMILTON, Ohio - A block from the sprawling, fortresslike Butler County sheriff’s office in Hamilton is Supermercado Garcia, a Mexican grocery store selling spices and tortillas that provide a taste of home to area residents from south of the border. “They could’ve put the money somewhere else, but they elected to go down the road with the sheriff’s office. “I would like to thank each of the commissioners for seeing the need in our sheriff’s office,” Bond said.
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The crew also held a ribbon-cutting outside the courthouse to celebrate the completion of multiple renovations inside the building, including an elevator and handicap-accessible bathrooms. Peavy added moving the sheriff’s office into the new building opens up space in the courthouse. The sheriff (Danny Bond) has been very patient with us on this.” We started it around the time COVID hit, and you know what happened – we couldn’t get any material, and the material we could get skyrocketed in price … Galahad did a good job for us. “We’re proud of this building,” said Butler County Commissioner Joey Peavy.
