If you have been anywhere near a television or a radio in the Cincinnati area lately, you have seen Sheriff Richard K. Jones. He has been on the local news. He has been on WLW. He has been on Channel 9. He has even ended up in the weather, which is not where most sheriffs go to make a point, and that is exactly why I like watching him. He can get on a set, talk about immigration, talk about the law, and then, if the moment calls for it, talk about whether your windshield wipers will work on the drive home. That is not a gimmick. That is a man who can think on his feet, and Butler County has benefited from that habit for a long time.
I have spent much of this year, 2026, working through the specifics of institutional persuasion and what proper ethical behavior actually looks like when you are trying to move a population. I am going to keep coming back to the root causes of purity, ethics, morality, righteousness, and the plain old goodness that used to be assumed in American public life. We need another Great Awakening in the United States. I do not say that as a slogan. I say it because the methods used against this country have been very sinister. They turned free speech into a weapon. Immigration was turned into a weapon. No place on earth has a more diverse population than the United States, and that diversity was not an accident of geography. It was a policy. When a policy is used to import people who reject the host country’s values, you are not running a humanitarian program. You are running a Trojan horse. Sheriff Jones has been willing to say the quiet part out loud, and that is why I want him in the room.
You Want This Man in the Party
People ask me whether Sheriff Jones is a hard-core Republican or a big-tent Republican. He is more the second than the first, and the question is the wrong test. You always want Sheriff Jones in the room. You want him on the news. You want him in your party. If you have built a party that cannot make room for a man like him to do good things, you are in the wrong place. You want people like him on your side.
Some of the people who have been against Sheriff Jones over the years are the same people who have been against President Trump, and they usually dress the objection up as ethics. I will get into the ethics of coalition-building in a separate piece, because I have been down that rabbit hole on purpose. I am usually a positive person. I am also, if I am honest about my own temperament, a little melancholy, and more Book of Revelation oriented than the average political commentator. The apocalypse has a following for a reason. There is a reason people talk about the Rapture taking the faithful out of a world that will not deliver justice. I know a lot of people who are so distraught over the lack of justice in ordinary life that they want God and Jesus to come and end the argument. I understand the feeling. I don’t think that excuses us from the work in front of us.
The work in front of us includes immigration, and it includes the people who will actually enforce the law while the rest of us argue about tone. Sheriff Jones has been that person in Butler County. He has done it well for decades. He has been especially visible lately, and he has earned the attention.
A Hamilton Kid Who Became the 45th Sheriff
Richard K. Jones was born on October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, in Butler County. He came up through the Hamilton city schools, volunteered for the draft, and served from 1973 to 1975 as a combat engineer in the United States Army, leaving as a Specialist 4. He then did the unglamorous work that actually teaches you how a jail runs. He went into the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, trained staff, rose to Senior Captain, and served as the warden’s designee for inmate appeals. From 1990 to 1993, he was a major at the Lebanon Correctional Institution. In 1993, he became chief deputy of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office and held that job for twelve years, adding deputies, expanding jail capacity, and dragging the office into the computer age.
He picked up the credentials along the way: an associate degree in corrections from Hocking Technical College, a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Wilmington College in 1981, and a master’s in corrections from Xavier University in 1984. In November 2004, Butler County voters elected him the 45th sheriff. He took the oath on January 3, 2005. He is now in his sixth term. That is not a media creation. That is a man the same county has returned to office, again and again, while the national argument about immigration has swung from one administration to the next.
In 2004 he put up the sign. “Illegal Aliens Here,” with an arrow pointing at the jail. The federal government was then in the habit of saying it did not know where illegal aliens were. Jones’s answer was a piece of roadside honesty: they are in my jail. The sign has come down and gone back up as presidents have changed. The sheriff has not. In 2006 he was already running billboards that said “Hire an illegal — break the law,” taking out newspaper ads, and opening a tip line on employers. Twenty years later, he is still on the same subject. Consistency is not fashionable. It is, in a sheriff, a virtue.
Immigration Is the Issue Because It Was Designed to Be
His main topic has always been immigration, and he has been a real enforcer of the law, not a press-release enforcer. Butler County had a contract to house federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled it because of the Biden administration’s rules. Two days after the 2024 election, he was already talking to federal officials about restoring the capacity. By early 2025, the “Illegal Aliens Here” sign was part of the public argument again. In February 2025, the county reentered an agreement to house U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees. Since March 2025, the jail has been holding them. Jones has a 287(g) agreement, covering both the jail-enforcement model and the task-force model, and he has said that fifty to sixty of his deputies have been trained by federal agents for that work.
In a WCPO interview in late September 2026, tied to the book, he said roughly 450 people in his jail were held on immigration matters, and that about 6,000 people had been deported from the Butler County Jail over the prior eighteen or nineteen months. Those are not theoretical numbers. That is a sheriff’s office doing the job most jurisdictions in this part of Ohio will not do.
He also said, in that same interview, that the second Trump term “messed up” the early execution, that they “went about it the wrong way,” and that you cannot deport twenty or twenty-five million people on the timetable some people imagine. National outlets immediately tried to spin that into a sheriff “turning on MAGA.” I do not buy the spin. I have watched this man long enough to know the difference between a critic and a man who says what he thinks. He has called Trump a real leader. He likes the bluntness. He thinks the economy has moved in the right direction. He also thinks a federal bureaucracy that has to fire people, hire people, and find its footing will make a mess on the way to a policy. That is not betrayal. That is the same habit that makes him say the thing on the weather segment. You want that habit in your party. A party that can only tolerate applause is not a party. It is a fan club.
Deporting everybody does not, by itself, solve the whole problem. I agree with him on that, and I have said it in my own way for years. Enforcement is necessary. It is not sufficient. You also have to promote the country you are enforcing on behalf of. You have to say, out loud, why the law exists. You have to be willing to do it on WLW, on Channel 9, on Channel 5, on Fox, and, if that is where the audience is that day, in the weather. The strategy against us has been to get people stuck in a bureaucratic decision, transfer information and loyalty away from the host culture, and husk out society from the inside. I know immigrants who are more American than a lot of people born here, people who have not lost touch with how good it is to live in this country. Sheriff Jones has been one of the most consistent cheerleaders of that distinction for at least twenty years, and by his own count longer. Legal immigration can be expanded. Illegal entry cannot be treated as a civil right. He has been clear on both.
The Weather, the Wipers, and the Point of Being Clever
Which brings me back to the weather. I thought it was Channel 9, and the recent long interview was, in fact, WCPO (Channel 9) with Stephen Knobel, posted around September 24, 2026, under the heading of immigration and leadership. The sheriff’s own office has also been putting a weekly weather outlook in front of people, which tells you something about how he thinks about an audience. He does not wait for the national shows to call. He goes where the county already is.
And yes, I enjoyed the windshield-wiper bit. A stiff man cannot do that. A consultant cannot do that. A man who has spent his life in rooms where the next sentence has to be true can get handed a forecast and still sound like himself. It is clever, it is local, and it is funny, and funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is how a serious man keeps the room. Butler County has always produced characters who understand that. Jungle Jim Bonaminio turned a produce stand across from the old Fisher Body plant into one of the country’s most unusual independent grocers. Sheriff Jones turned a Hamilton upbringing and a corrections career into a national immigration argument without ever really leaving the county. I will take both. I would rather have a county that produces originals than a county that produces spokespeople.
He wears the suit jacket with the American flag on it. He has the cowboy hat. He has had the snub-nose where a snub-nose belongs. He will tell you about the lawyers, and he will tell you about the jail, and he will not sand it down for a panel. That is the man I want as sheriff. That is the man I want in the party. Working with him can be challenging. He is a hard person to get along with if your idea of politics is a permanent compromise of your own position. I do not think the answer is to become him. The answer is to find the common cause and do the work. On immigration and on law and order, the common cause is obvious. A president can set the policy. He still needs Tom Homan; he still needs sheriffs, and he still needs people who came into the fight from different rooms and different ethical habits. You are not a king. You are a president. The freebies of the Obama years, of Obamacare, of the Biden credit-card bill, do not vanish because a new man takes the oath. Somebody pays. I warned about that while it was happening. The people now complaining about prices are often the same people who applauded the spending. The midterms are not the moment to wander off in search of a purer candidate. They are the moment to rally behind what has actually been accomplished and to keep the enforcers in the field.
The Jail, From the Other Side of the Glass
I have seen the Butler County Jail from the other side of the usual tour. I sat as foreman of a Butler County grand jury, and I have been around that building enough to have an opinion that is not borrowed from a press release. It is not a resort. It is also not the worst thing in the world, and I don’t think Sheriff Jones gets enough credit for how the place is actually run. He talks about the food. I would not say it the way he says it, but I will say this much from my own ethical seat: if you are serving a long sentence and you are eating the burger they serve in that jail every day, you are eating a better burger than the speeches against him would lead you to believe. I do not think he has a contemptuous relationship with the people in his custody. I think he runs a serious jail, and I am proud of it. I am proud that it is our jail.
The critics do not usually argue the operations. They argue the premise. In September 2026, Butler County for Immigrant Justice protested outside the Government Center in Hamilton and called the 287(g) agreement immoral. Around the same time, Jones and West Chester got into a public dispute over a September 14 fender-bender and whether township officers should have turned an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. The sheriff’s office arrested the man on September 18. Township officials disputed the sheriff’s account of their policy. There was also, in May, a federal lawsuit from a former ICE detainee alleging an assault in the jail; an internal investigation reported no assault, and the office denied the claim and stood behind its staff while the case was active. I am not going to pretend every allegation in a jail is fiction. I am going to say I have watched this operation more closely than the people holding the signs, and I trust the man who’s been willing to put his name on the door.
Read the Book
The book is They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. It came out on May 18, 2026. It is 294 pages long. I enjoyed it. I learned things about him as a younger man in Butler County that I did not know, even after years of watching him in public, and I have lived in this county my whole life. It is a practical explanation of why Butler County works as well as it does: law first, straight talk, no patience for the swamp, a memory of an older America in which extended families lived near one another, and neighbors still knew each other’s names. That older America is the one he keeps returning to. It is also the one I grew up in, a few miles down the road.
If you want to understand the sheriff instead of the caricature, read the book. If you want to understand the county, read the book and then look at the jail, the sign, and the number of times the voters have sent him back.
What I Had
I miss the old life more now than I missed it when I was in it. That is the ordinary trick of age. If I could buy it back, the church, the Sunday night, the bag of chips on the way home, I would think hard about the price. I don’t think I would change the course. I didn’t have the context then for how good it was.
We went to church most Sundays. My parents were active. I knew the pastor extremely well. I went through catechism. The church was off Nilles Road in Fairfield along Winton Road, and after the service we would drive past Jungle Jim’s as it grew, year after year, from the roadside stand across from Fisher Body into the monster it became, one of the biggest independent grocers in the country and about as Butler County a thing as exists. Sometimes we stopped for a bag of chips or a pop. Sometimes it was Chester’s pizza for Sunday night. Then The Wonderful World of Disney, back before the house had air-conditioning, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom at seven. I loved that show. I loved every Sunday for those reasons, life in Butler County.
After that we worked. We cut the grass. We worked the garden. We did the things a household does when the household still believes work is part of the day, not an interruption of it. I have had a lot of comments lately about my work ethic. I learned it there. I look at younger people now, and I do not blame them for missing what nobody handed them. I do think they would benefit from a little more of that life than the present culture is willing to admit. A church on Sunday, a grocer who started with rejected potatoes and a truck, a sheriff who grew up in Hamilton and stayed: these are not nostalgia props. They are a civilizational technology. They are how a county transmits a standard.
Ethically, there are not enough values out there right now. I can see that more clearly at this age than I could when I was driving past Jungle Jim’s with a bag of chips, half listening to my parents, thinking about Wild Kingdom. The context arrives late. That does not make it less true.
Purity Is Not a Strategy
So here is the political point, and I will come back to the ethics of it in the series I have been building. A big-tent party is not a party without standards. It is a party that can tell the difference between a standard and a vanity. Immigration is a standard. The law is a standard. The willingness to say both of those things on a neutral platform, and to keep saying them after the headlines turn, is a standard. Sheriff Jones meets it. He is a Butler County kid who grew up and did the job. He is on Channel 9 talking about immigration and, when the segment allows it, about whether it is going to rain. He is a pride of this county in the same family of local facts as Jungle Jim’s, not because the two men are the same, but because both of them are unmistakably from here.
I love the Republican Party more with him in it than without him. I want the people who are strong on Trump and strong on immigration in the same room as the sheriff who will tell you the execution has been uneven. That argument is allowed. The alternative is a purity spiral that hands the institutions to people who do not believe in the country at all. If you do not have the law, you do not have a society to argue about. Immigration is one place the law has been deliberately hollowed out. Sheriff Jones saw it early, built a record on it, wrote it down, and is still willing to go on the air and say it.
Read They Call Me Jonesy. You will get the man, not the montage. And if you are building a party worth belonging to, leave a chair for the sheriff in the flag jacket. We are going to need him.
NOTES
1. Butler County Sheriff’s Office, “Sheriff,” biographical sketch of Richard K. Jones, https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff. See also the author note to Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (2026). Born October 11, 1953, in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio. Hamilton City Schools. United States Army, combat engineer, 1973-1975, Specialist 4.
2. Ibid. County and office biographies place the Lebanon Correctional Institution major’s posting from 1990 to 1993 and the chief-deputy years from 1993 until he took office as sheriff in January 2005. Education: associate degree in corrections, Hocking Technical College, 1979; bachelor’s in criminal justice, Wilmington College, 1981; master’s in corrections, Xavier University, 1984.
3. Elected November 2004 as the 45th sheriff of Butler County. Took office January 3, 2005. Reelected to a sixth term in November 2024. See Butler County Sheriff’s Office biography, and Lauren Pack, “Sheriff Richard Jones makes it clear illegal immigrants are in his jail, but he is not housing ICE prisoners – yet,” Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025.
4. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025. The “Illegal Aliens Here” sign, with an arrow pointing at the jail, went up in 2004. Jones: “Originally the government said there were no illegal aliens. They said they don’t know where they are at. So I put that giant sign up with an arrow pointing to the jail in case they couldn’t find them. I let them know they were in my jail.” The sign has come down and gone back up as administrations changed. It was put back into the public argument in early 2025.
5. Julia Preston, “Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog,” The New York Times, July 31, 2006. Six billboards in Butler County read “Hire an illegal – break the law!” Jones also took out newspaper advertisements, opened a tip line on employers, and kept the yellow “Illegal Aliens Here” street signs outside the jail.
6. Pack, Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025; Journal-News, May 19, 2026, and September 30, 2026; Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Butler County housed federal immigration detainees from 2003 until June 2021, when Jones canceled the contract over Biden administration rules. Two days after the 2024 election he was back in contact with ICE. The county reentered an agreement to house ICE detainees in February 2025. Housing resumed in March 2025. Jones has a 287(g) agreement covering the Jail Enforcement Model and the Task Force Model. He told Local 12 that 50 to 60 deputies had been trained by federal agents. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the jail holds up to 848 maximum- and medium-security inmates, and that the sheriff’s office is paid $68 per day and $36 per hour to transport ICE detainees to the airport.
7. “Butler County sheriff says Trump administration ‘went about it the wrong way’ on immigration,” Journal-News, September 30, 2026, reporting the WCPO interview with Stephen Knobel. Jones’s figures: about 450 people in the jail held on immigration matters, and about 6,000 people deported from the Butler County Jail over the preceding 18 to 19 months. He also said, “You can’t deport 20, 25 million people,” and “I don’t even think [Trump’s] deported maybe over a million.”
8. The Daily Beast headline of September 24, 2026, “JD Vance’s Ultra-Trumpy Hometown Sheriff Richard Jones Turns on MAGA,” is the clearest example of the spin. The underlying WCPO quotes acknowledge early execution problems in the second term (“Has it been kind of messed up when they first started this under the second term? Sure they have.” “Did they go about it in the wrong way? Sure they did.”) and the practical limits of mass removal. They do not renounce enforcement, the 287(g) agreement, or Jones’s description of Trump as a real leader. In the same interview he said he likes Trump’s bluntness and what he sees as positive movement in the economy. See also WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” September 24, 2026.
9. WCPO 9, “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership,” posted September 24, 2026, interviewer Stephen Knobel. The sheriff’s office has also posted weekly National Weather Service outlooks under its own name, including a September 28, 2026 outlook introduced by meteorologist Natalie Fitzpatrick on the office account.
10. Local 12, “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations,” September 23, 2026. Demonstrators with Butler County for Immigrant Justice called for an end to the 287(g) agreement outside the Government Center in Hamilton. Jones’s reply, as reported: “The whole system’s broke and won’t be fixed by either party. So, we can’t allow people to come into this country illegally and not know who they are and where they’re at.”
11. Matthew Cupelli, “How a fender bender led to Butler County sheriff, West Chester dispute,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 2026, updated September 27, 2026. The collision was September 14, 2026. No injuries. Jones said a West Chester policy kept officers from turning an alleged undocumented driver over to ICE. Township officials said that was false. The sheriff’s office arrested the 26-year-old man on September 18. Jones said he was from Mexico, had been in the United States four years, and would likely be deported.
12. Journal-News, “New Butler County Jail lawsuit alleges assault of ICE detainee,” May 19, 2026, and “Internal investigations shows no assault on Butler County Jail detainee,” May 28, 2026. Attorneys for Luis Tenelanda sued Sheriff Richard Jones, Sgt. Corneal Rowe, and the county on May 18, 2026. The office denied the allegations, cited a 2025 internal investigation that found no assault, and declined further comment while litigation was active.
13. Richard K. Jones, They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America (May 18, 2026), 294 pages, ISBN 979-8253821909. In the book he describes Trump as a real leader and returns to the phrase “The America I once knew.”
14. Jungle Jim’s International Market places the Fairfield beginning in 1973, across from Fisher Body, after earlier produce selling out of a truck. James O. “Jungle Jim” Bonaminio, born 1949 in Lorain, Ohio. First store opened in 1975 at about 4,200 square feet. See Jungle Jim’s, “The Jungle Jim Story,” https://junglejims.com/about-us.
15. WLWT, “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation of CPS grad, high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants,” June 28, 2025. Jones said the office then had ten deputies with ICE-equivalent arrest authority, wanted ten more, and expected to have about fifty. At that point he said Butler County was the only jurisdiction in Ohio with that arrangement, and that the jail was the only ICE holding facility in the Greater Cincinnati area.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bonaminio, James O. “The Jungle Jim Story.” Jungle Jim’s International Market. https://junglejims.com/about-us.
Butler County Sheriff’s Office. “Sheriff.” Biographical sketch of Richard K. Jones. https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.
Cupelli, Matthew. “How a fender bender led to Butler County sheriff, West Chester dispute.” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 2026. Updated September 27, 2026. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/butlercounty/2026/09/26/ohio-sheriff-township-feud-over-handling-of-undocumented-immigrant-collision/91941383007/
Daily Beast. “JD Vance’s Ultra-Trumpy Hometown Sheriff Richard Jones Turns on MAGA.” September 24, 2026. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jd-vances-ultra-trumpy-hometown-sheriff-richard-jones-turns-on-maga/
Jones, Richard K. They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America. May 18, 2026. 294 pages. ISBN 979-8253821909.
Journal-News. “Butler County sheriff says Trump administration ‘went about it the wrong way’ on immigration.” September 30, 2026.
Journal-News. “Internal investigations shows no assault on Butler County Jail detainee.” May 28, 2026.
Journal-News. “New Butler County Jail lawsuit alleges assault of ICE detainee.” May 19, 2026.
Local 12. “‘It is immoral’: Protest urges Butler County sheriff to stop assisting ICE deportations.” September 23, 2026. https://local12.com/news/local/immoral-protest-urges-butler-county-sheriff-stop-assisting-ice-deportations-immigrants-immigration-customs-enforcement-police-hamilton-ohio-cincinnati-justice-deport-deportations
Pack, Lauren. “Sheriff Richard Jones makes it clear illegal immigrants are in his jail, but he is not housing ICE prisoners – yet.” Dayton Daily News, February 3, 2025. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/sheriff-richard-jones-makes-it-clear-illegal-immigrants-are-in-his-jail-but-he-is-not-housing-ice-prisoners-yet/IDDB223XFRDTHC4WVXSMROEXNM/
Preston, Julia. “Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog.” The New York Times, July 31, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/us/31sheriff.html
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g).” ice.gov.
WCPO 9. “Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones On Immigration And Leadership.” September 24, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SVSNrejQus
WLWT. “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation of CPS grad, high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants.” June 28, 2025. https://www.wlwt.com/article/butler-county-sheriff-speaks-out-on-immigration-policies/65229930
“Jungle Jim’s International Market.” Wikipedia. Revised 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Jim%27s_International_Market
FURTHER READING
ICE, “Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g),” ice.gov, is the practical companion to the local record. For the older national argument Jones walked into, see Julia Preston, New York Times, July 31, 2006, and the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General reviews of 287(g) from 2010 onward. For the county side of the same years, the Journal-News archive on the ICE contract from 2003 through the June 2021 cancellation and the February 2025 reinstatement is the cleanest local paper trail.
Rich Hoffman
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About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
