In immigrant-rich Greater Cincinnati, as 2025 began, local jails held around 100 people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
By the end of the year – as federal agents ramped up efforts and local jails signed on to help – thousands had been arrested and detained.
The surge started Jan. 20 as Donald Trump began his second term as president and, with it, his plan to rid the United States of what he called “the worst of the worst” criminals among immigrants without legal status. In Ohio and Kentucky, where voters backed Trump, the enforcement represented a campaign promise kept by the new administration.
In the weeks and months that followed, that campaign sent a Cincinnati-area high school soccer star to Honduras, a country he barely knew. It drove an East Price Hill man with a divinity degree to leave his family and self-deport to Guatemala. It made minor celebrities of a Trump-supporting sheriff and anti-ICE grandparents. It transformed a local Muslim leader into an icon of federal government overreach.
It also forced families into hiding. Kept children out of school. Threw neighborhoods into chaos and confusion. And traumatized local immigrants and their advocates with arrests, threats of arrests and rumors of arrests.
It made 2025 the year of ICE across Greater Cincinnati.
Early this month, in a coffee shop in Northern Kentucky, Oscar recalls his journey from El Salvador to the United States about a decade earlier.
He’d walked through the south Texas heat for three days without water when he and his companions found a full horse trough. It likely saved their lives.
Without it, he and fellow coyote-led travelers could have become among the hundreds who die annually while trying to reach the United States.
Now, Oscar and his U.S.-born wife, Francesca – The Enquirer is omitting their last names at their request for their protection – work, pay taxes and spend time with family and friends.
As their infant son sleeps in his stroller, they talk about their efforts to legalize Oscar’s immigration status and fret over the incoming president’s ever-changing plans for immigration.
Trump said he’d go after undocumented immigrants who committed crimes – but also, perhaps, naturalized citizens, or U.S. citizens with immigrant parents, or immigrants who’d already won asylum.
As deportations begin to rise, so do local protests. Nearly each week, hundreds stand and shout on streets, in parks, on campuses and in front of federal offices facing job cuts. Many wave pro-immigration signs.
Throughout January, ICE holds 113 detainees in Northern Kentucky’s Boone and Campbell County jails. Other counties will soon begin detaining people on behalf of ICE, too.
The temperature in Cincinnati is near-freezing on Feb. 7 when hundreds descend onto Cincinnati’s Fountain Square waving flags and holding signs in protest of Trump’s new immigration policies.
Then, they hit the streets – blocking traffic, chanting and encouraging others to join their protest against the immigration policy changes.
By the end of the month, there will have been 633 protests throughout the country – a 25% increase from the previous month, according to the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, which tracks protests.
Days later, ICE begins sending press releases about immigrants arrested in Greater Cincinnati, who have been charged with or convicted of violent crimes.
On Feb. 10, the agency announces the arrest of a man from Mexico, saying he has convictions for sexual imposition and aggravated assault in his home country.
“Our communities should not be a safe haven for these bad actors,” ICE official Robert Lynch says in the release.
Two weeks later, ICE touts another local arrest, of a man from Bulgaria. Then one from Bhutan, one from Burkina Faso and one from Rwanda. They too were convicted of serious crimes outside the United States, the agency says.
ICE’s claims about the men are nearly impossible for The Enquirer to verify, given the difficulty of obtaining documents from foreign countries. The agency does not issue press releases about what Enquirer journalists later determine are far more common arrests: local immigrants without convictions who are arrested for civil, not criminal, immigration violations.
In February, Northern Kentucky jails hold 181 people for ICE.
By March, Butler County and ICE are back in business. County commissioners vote to resume a contract for the jail to hold ICE detainees, a practice that dates back decades under Sheriff Richard Jones.
Jones, who says undocumented immigrants are committing crimes in Butler County, sets aside 250 to 300 jail beds for ICE to use. He’s been prepping the jail to work with ICE since Trump was elected.
Jones’ jail detains about 40 ICE inmates the first week of its new contract. His office collects $68 per day per detainee, and $36 an hour to transport them to the airport for the next stop in their deportation journey.
Among the arrested: two contractors, a father and son working on a construction site inside the Butler County Jail. They have fake identifying documents and admit to ICE agents they lack legal status, Jones says.
“They came to the wrong place,” he says.
Just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, the Kenton County Detention Center becomes the latest in the area to begin housing detainees on behalf of ICE. It joins Campbell County, with a similar contract since May 2024, and Boone County, which has worked with the agency for roughly 20 years.
The jails are paid $88 per day for each federal inmate they house and receive reimbursements, too, for services like medical care and transportation.
“We kind of looked at it as our beds being a commodity for the county and … what is the best use of those not only for our residents but for our taxpayers?” Kenton County Jailer Marc Fields says.
In March, ICE holds 226 detainees in Butler County and 209 in Northern Kentucky’s Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties.
That makes 435 people detained for ICE in Greater Cincinnati for the month.
In what becomes an ICE strategy across the country, a Honduran man is arrested during a routine check-in at ICE offices in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash. In response, his suburban Dayton church members stage a protest – one of the first outside the Butler County Jail.
The man cries in jail and prays for strength, he says in a letter to church members. “It has not been easy to be separated from my family, unable to see them, or even a touch from my kids or wife,” he writes.
By July, he’s on his way back to Honduras, deported. He is not allowed to say goodbye to his wife and two children. They remain in Ohio.
Throughout April, 387 people are detained in Greater Cincinnati by ICE.
On the last day of this month, Alonzo Mendez stops at an East Price Hill Kroger store to buy supplies for a birthday party, with his partner and two daughters waiting in their car. ICE agents arrest him when he emerges, leaving his family in the store lot.
Dozens protest his arrest outside the Kroger, dozens more later at ICE offices. His supporters say he is a good man, involved in a local evangelical church, with a theology degree from Guatemala and no criminal record.
“His children need their father,” says Walter Vasquez, his friend and an immigrant advocate. “His partner needs her co-parent. His church and community need him back.”
But Mendez had been living in Cincinnati for more than three years without legal authority. To avoid being deported – which would prevent him from trying to return for 10 years – he “self-deports” and returns to Guatemala two months after his arrest.
The month also brings the ICE arrest of a Salvadoran man in Hamilton. ICE officials say he is an MS-13 gang member and murderer, accusations his lawyer disputes.
He’s one of 485 people detained across Greater Cincinnati over the month.
At mid-year, Greater Cincinnati immigrants and their advocates remain on high alert for ICE.
Emerson Colindres, a recent Dater High School grad, walks into ICE’s Blue Ash office for a check-in June 4. Officers arrest Colindres, a 19-year-old with no criminal record, and tell his mother and sister they have 30 days to leave the country.
As ICE agents prepare to take Colindres to the Butler County Jail, he tells his mom he doesn’t want to be locked up. He begs her not to leave.
Fleeing Honduran gangs, Colindres’ mother brought him and his younger sister to the United States when he was 8 years old. She applied for asylum, but was denied. Her family was given a final order of removal in 2023, which meant they were considered deportable by ICE.
From a jail phone, Colindres tells The Enquirer he’s never been separated from his mom. He’s scared, for himself and other inmates.
Tears well in his mother’s eyes as she remembers the look on his face the day he was arrested. She won’t see him in person again until weeks later, when he is deported to Honduras, and she and her daughter join him.
On June 16, Cincinnati Eyes on ICE launches a Facebook page, joining other social media sites that invite readers to report ICE activity.
Followers post ICE sightings – some unverified – from Hamilton to Newport. Agents are at Kroger, Home Depot and UDF stores, and restaurants and shops with Spanish names, posters say.
They post photos, too, of agents with weapons and in vests, standing aside SUVs with tinted windows. Some report “slippery, frosty or snowy” conditions, afraid they’ll attract surveillance by writing ICE. Some use the ice emoji.
“We want to let ICE know they are not welcome here,” page co-administrator Cat Ruehlman says.
In June, 660 people are detained by ICE.
An Enquirer analysis finds most ICE detainees in the Butler County Jail, 71% of them, have no criminal convictions. Similarly, in Northern Kentucky jails, less than 2% of immigrants detained were charged with a violent crime.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin disputes these findings in an email, one of several she’ll send The Enquirer this year. McLaughlin says ICE targets criminals who “pose a threat to our communities.”
ICE arrests Ayman Soliman, a Cincinnati imam, on July 9, after stripping him of asylum on dubious allegations. He loses his job as a much-loved hospital chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s.
Homeland Security answers some of The Enquirer’s questions about Soliman and other detainees, but mostly offers the same policy statement: That immigrants, even with pending applications or legal status, aren’t shielded from immigration enforcement.
Just before he is detained, Soliman says he will be killed if forced to return to Egypt because of his earlier political activism. He says the same when released from the Butler County Jail 73 days later.
Jailed in Egypt four times, his time in jail here traumatizes him, he says. Despite that, he is buoyed by support across Greater Cincinnati, while disappointed in the U.S. justice system. Either way, he says, “I have no other option but to stay here.”
While Soliman sits in jail, a rally for him on July 17 turns violent. Supporters gather near the Cincinnati end of the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.
After a peaceful vigil, some begin marching across the bridge in protest of ICE. They are met by waiting Covington police officers, who order them to leave the bridge or face arrest. Less than a minute later, officers begin clearing the crowd, responding to some protesters with violence.
Officer Zachary Stayton punches a protester’s head multiple times before putting him in handcuffs, viral video clips show. He pulls a woman by her hair and shoves her face into the sidewalk while arresting her.
Police arrest 15, including two journalists, and charge them with felony rioting and various misdemeanors. Months later, Stayton is suspended without pay for 30 days due to the incidents on the bridge.
Two days later, on July 19, Oakley resident Anthony Kelly admits to federal officials that he is the person behind the moniker “Slab.”
Using that nickname, he’s been posting threatening messages about ICE online. He says he has a shotgun and bullets and names Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem among the “rabid dogs that need to be put down.”
“You come here for me, you’re getting shot,” he writes, according to a federal lawsuit against him.
Officials arrest Kelly ‒ a U.S. citizen of Hispanic origin, according to jail records ‒ on charges that include making threats to assault or murder a U.S. official.
Throughout July, 389 people are detained by ICE.
On Aug. 16, Daniel Flores Leon and Marlen Ortiz Soto are en route to her Hamilton home around 11:30 p.m. after a day in Indianapolis, where he lives. Fairfield police stop his pickup truck for a driving violation.
Three minutes later, federal officers take over, video obtained by The Enquirer via a public records request shows.
“We have reasonable, probable cause that you are not here legally,” one tells Soto, who moved to the United States from Honduras in 2019.
The other pulls a crying Soto from the arms of her swearing boyfriend and stands her next to the truck.
“I want to call my mom,” Soto says, sobbing as officers put her in handcuffs.
“That’s what happens when you fight the police,” the officer responds.
Twenty minutes after the couple is stopped, Soto, 24, is on her way to the Butler County Jail. Leon, a U.S. citizen, is released from the scene.
The couple is stopped as Fairfield and federal officials pursue immigrants they believe are involved in violence at a nearby Peruvian night club. They pull over and arrest 34 people driving near the club. All are detained by ICE. All are here illegally, Butler County Sheriff Jones says in a press release.
The same month, across the river at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in Hebron, a University of Cincinnati student makes a 24-hour trip home to India to obtain a single document for his visa.
The student, after two years at UC, soon learns his visa has been canceled. His application for a new one is denied.
In August, area jails detain 678 people for ICE.
Worries about ICE continue spreading across Greater Cincinnati.
Rosemary Ventura, the daughter of Guatemalan parents and a community activist, picks up supplies for her mother’s East Price Hill deli at Walmart and encounters what she says is now regular racial hatred. “Damn, get out of my way, f—ing Mexican,” a woman tells her.
Racial profiling has increased in 2025, Ventura says. She tells her younger brother to keep his hands on the wheel and remain silent if stopped while driving. “Now, I’m out of hope. Now, we just have to take it,” she says.
Vasquez, the immigration advocate who also lives in East Price Hill, says he knows about 20 people who have been deported and many who fear deportation. “They are living in hell right now,” he says.
He tells immigrants to stay home if they don’t need to go out. He tells them not to drive if they don’t have a license. He tells them: “We will be OK – but I don’t believe that myself.”
In Butler County, a group of senior citizens attend weekly commissioner meetings.
Seven Mile resident Anne Jantzen, 82, and about 70 other protesters call on commissioners, sometimes tearfully, to cancel the county’s contract with ICE.
“I’m here because I’m outraged. I’m here because I’m angry,” a member says at one meeting. “I’m here because I need to be able to look my grandkids in the eye and say I did not remain silent.”
Detaining immigrants without criminal records is unjust, the protesters argue.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost disagrees. Ohio jails can legally detain people for noncriminal immigration violations, even if they have not committed any crimes, he writes in a legal opinion.
Over the month of September, ICE holds 702 local detainees.
ICE is on the move in an East Side neighborhood, a resident posts on Facebook. Six agents in four cars knock on doors and look in windows at neighborhood apartment, she reports. They wear heavy body armor. One carries a shield.
“They’ll likely be back tomorrow morning,” she writes, inviting others to join her then.
The next day, about a dozen people linger outside the apartment, holding children, pets and cups of coffee at the appointed hour. ICE does not return.
Back in East Price Hill, immigrant advocate Nancy Sullivan hosts an event she calls Whistlemania at the neighborhood library.
Her nonprofit immigrant advocacy group, Transformations, hands out “many hundreds” of red whistles and red cards. Joining a national movement, local immigrants and their allies now have whistles to alert others to the presence of ICE and cards that spell out their rights.
The same week, Transformations joins 10 other pro-immigrant groups in asking Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval and Cincinnati City Council for an executive order or law to protect the city from federal agents seeking to detain immigrants. They get no response.
In Northern Kentucky, nuns with the Diocese of Covington spread a message: As followers of Jesus, Catholics can’t abide the mistreatment of immigrants.
This month, they start coordinating efforts between Northern Kentucky advocacy groups. FIESTA NKY is one of them. It helps 3,000 local Latinos with housing, food and other necessities in its first year.
Clients’ needs grow in 2025, with some having a harder time renewing their legal status, FIESTA founder Theresa Cruz says. Many fear deportation. “It’s really hard to live between fear and uncertainty,” she says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”
In October, ICE holds 832 detainees in Greater Cincinnati.
As November starts, families with children who attend Princeton City Schools, where more than 3 in 10 students are Hispanic, are buzzing about ICE. The school district tells them about an ICE sighting near one of its schools.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we are encouraging students to go directly home after school today,” an email to families reads.
Staff members, including Superintendent G. Elgin Card, clutch umbrellas on the rainy afternoon to escort students, who would normally walk home, to an extra school bus. Card gets in his car, following the buses, then hops out to walk children to their front doors.
“You hate that any kid has to feel afraid to go home,” Communications Director Tricia Roddy says.
In Sycamore Township, three schools and the school district office spend part of Nov. 11 on lockdown with an ICE detainee on the run nearby. He’d escaped from the window of an ICE vehicle en route to its Blue Ash offices.
Meanwhile, Catholics keep vigil.
On Nov. 13, about 20 Xavier University students join 20 others outside the ICE building.
As ICE officers watch from sidewalks, nuns and other volunteers hand out plastic rosary beads and lead the group in prayer. The gathering comes a day after U.S. Catholic bishops call on the Trump administration to end “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence” against immigrants.
That night, members of Norwood’s Holy Trinity church repeat the ritual with a bilingual prayer service.
The next day, Cincinnati Archbishop Robert Casey does the same at the Butler County Jail, where prayers are offered in five languages for immigration detainees.
Outside the ICE building, Xavier junior Tyler Hawatmeh says he is praying for people being detained and those detaining them. As a descendant of a Christian family that left Jordan because of religious persecution, Hawatmeh considers all immigrants his brothers and sisters.
“This isn’t just 50 to 100 people praying here in Blue Ash, Ohio,” he says, “but people around the world, people for thousands of years who have been sending the same prayers.”
Back in Butler County, nine months into its renewed ICE contract, the sheriff’s office gets a pay boost from the federal government. It is now paid $105 per day to jail each detainee.
In November, 786 local people are detained by ICE.
As the Trump administration threatens asylum proceedings for all immigrants, a Cincinnati man from Mauritania is optimistic about his application.
Like other local Maurtanians, Nadhirou Tambadou came here from the northwest African country to escape racial discrimination by a government with a history of ethnic cleansing.
Authorities killed his father in 1990, he says, and threatened him with the same fate for protesting violence.
He fled and applied for asylum in 2023, with a hearing on his case set for March 2. If granted, he will try to bring his wife and four children to Cincinnati, he says. He has two boys and two girls, born between 2014 and 2022. “It would be safer,” he says. “There is a lot of violence there.”
On Dec. 5, Samuel Saxon, a top agent of ICE in Cincinnati, attracts headlines, not for his position but for accusations of domestic violence. He faces felony charges of strangulation and other offenses, after a neighbor reports him for assaulting the woman he lives with in Corryville. Later, federal officials add a charge of making a false statement to a U.S. agency or officer, and move him from Hamilton County’s jail to Butler County’s. Years before, he’d won a medal for exceptional service to ICE.
The year 2025 is coming to a close, and immigration enforcement remains a crucial concern within migrant communities and law enforcement agencies.
In Washington, D.C., federal officials claim victory, touting their “record-breaking achievement of more than 2.5 million illegal aliens leaving the U.S.” in a Dec. 10 press release.
“Illegal aliens are hearing our message to leave now,” McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, says in the release.
Trump again refers to the homelands of some U.S. immigrants – Haiti, Somali, Afghanistan – as “s—hole countries.” “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?” he asks supporters at a Pennsylvania event.
In Greater Cincinnati, Ayman Soliman, the local imam, talks about his ordeal – in interviews, before student groups and in therapy. He leads prayer at the Clifton Mosque.
The Mendez family is reunited in Guatemala. Vasquez, his friend, delivers his partner and their girls to the airport in October to return home. “The kids were happy to be with dad,” he reports.
Emerson Colindres’ mom posts photos on social media of church, family and their new life in Honduras. Her soccer star son has made a second-division Honduras team.
The Butler County grandparent protesters continue to call for an end to the county’s ICE contract. Commissioners don’t budge.
Sheriff Jones takes to Facebook to grouse about a Guatemalan man involved in a head-on car crash that left the other driver hospitalized. The man, jailed for ICE in Butler County, should be deported, he says.
ICE’s presence is poised to grow in 2026. Sheriff offices in Warren and Clermont counties now have contracts with ICE that allow them to help federal officers make arrests. In Kenton County, the sheriff’s department is mulling an expanded relationship with the agency.
Jones remains staunch about Butler County’s work when speaking about its growing partnership with ICE.
“This,” he says, “is just the beginning.”
By the end of 2025, ICE has detained just more than 6,600 people across Greater Cincinnati.
