Among the extreme positions in the immigration debate, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones — a 20-plus-year sheriff and frequent guest on national right-wing talk shows — offers a solution.
“I’ve said this before. You take eight Republicans and eight Democrats, and you put them in a room up in D.C.,” Jones said. “They can’t go home, they can’t go anywhere, until they compromise and come up with a solution.”
While compromise is not something many D.C. partisan politicians do nowadays, Jones said it was how Washington once worked. He said President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, frequently compromised with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Democrat.
“Both parties worked together, and they worked things out. Right now, it’s nasty,” Jones said. “They need to work together, and the biggest word is compromise, and they won’t. Until they deal with this, until they deal with the kids that were brought here under DACA, that needs to be fixed somehow.”
He is steadfast in the belief that “opening our borders up and letting people and drugs pour in, it’s not the right answer.”
Problem solving over political grandstanding
Samantha Searls, a program manager with the organization Ignite Peace, which led a recent protest against the Butler County Jail holding ICE detainees, agreed the solutions start with Congress. However, she said “the political realities are that Congress is not likely to change those systems.”
That is why presidential administrations address immigration policy with executive orders.
Under the Biden administration, White House policy focused on first reversing many of the immigration policies during the first Trump term. This included unveiling the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which halted the construction of the southern border wall, ending Trump’s travel ban, and reaffirming protection for DACA recipients.
With Trump’s return to the White House, he signed executive orders on his first day blocking asylum seekers from entering the United States, declaring a national emergency at the southern border, and citing the migration of immigrants as a public health risk.
Searls said resources are needed to help people navigate the immigration system, and politicians need to make the system better and more accessible.
“It would be great if we would offer that help to every person who wanted to start a life here, instead of looking at them with suspicion and fear that they’re some outsider trying to hurt us, instead of folks who could help contribute to our community,” she said.
Searls said more stories about how immigrants make the community better are needed to change the narrative. Then, she said, “people will start to see how they are connected to the issue themself.”
“As everyday people start to see that their wellbeing is wrapped up in the safety and security of the immigrant community, I think that will shift public opinion,” she said. “Hopefully, our elected officials will listen to the people and how we want immigrants to be treated and how we want these problems to be solve instead of making some big political statement about being tough on immigrants but actually having a smart, educated conversation about what needs to change.”
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