Leaked ledger: Sheriff Richard Jones, call your office!
The math ain't mathing for the Butler County Sheriff's office when it comes to more than $1.5 million that ICE paid for its collaboration in its mass deportation efforts.
The most infuriating thing about the Trump Administration—other than the stupidity, cruelty and incompetence—is the blatant corruption.
Donald Trump is, without question, the most corrupt president in American history.
Just yesterday, we learned that Trump stole classified documents tied to his business interests, some of which only six officials in the federal government were cleared to access.
In Trump’s defense, he gave every warning sign imaginable to America’s hog voters that he was an amoral white-collar career criminal before we made the mistake of electing him the first time.
It’s a message his supporters received loud and clear. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her rumored paramour, Corey Lewandowski, orchestrated what appears to be a brazen $220 million embezzlement from the United States Treasury.
“Corey made out on that one,” Trump reportedly remarked to his aides last week, almost out of respect.
Given the open graft from Homeland Security’s (former) power couple, it would be unsurprising to learn about similar antics from lower-level stooges stemming from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill that sent barrels of taxpayer pork into DHS’ coffers.
That bill, as noted by Dallin Overstreet of PoliMetrics, flipped the financial relationship between ICE and local authorities. Previously, in the 287(g) contracts, local authorities were paid to cooperate with ICE.
The Big Beautiful Bill reversed that, meaning that ICE paid local authorities to cooperate. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein obtained the numbers behind those contracts, which showed that ICE essentially bribed local police to do its bidding.
You can view that entire document here:
The Rooster would like to draw your attention to ICE’s spending with the Butler County Sheriff’s office, led by noted villain in the Rooster Cinematic Universe, Sheriff Richard Jones.
The math is simply not mathing.
In December 2024, Sheriff Jones flashed an almost childlike glee in lending his office to Trump’s planned mass deportations.
When asked about what those logistics would look like, Jones told The Rooster that “It looks like I’m going to have buses loaded up with people … that are being deported.”
In January 2026, The Rooster exclusively reported on what that looked like in reality: Abductions of law-abiding immigrants, rotting food, and dangerously cold cells in an overcrowded prison—among other forms of cruel and unusual punishment.
But thanks to the leaked ICE ledger, we know that the Butler County Sheriff’s office has made an amount of money that, by all appearances, shouldn’t be possible even with the new cozy financial arrangement.
In November 2025, Jones appeared in an ICE-produced commercial touting “the dent” that the Butler County Sheriff’s office has put on undocumented immigration in Ohio.
His office has also put a dent in federal taxpayers' wallets, which you can view by searching “Butler County” in the raw data table:
There are two items of interest:
$776,250 for UAC, which in ICE’s needlessly cruel parlance, stands for Unaccompanied Alien Children.
As PoliMetric said about the fees: “The federal government is separately pricing out, and paying for, the apprehension of migrant children as a distinct enforcement category.”
What makes that number remarkable, other than the obvious, is that Butler County Jail does not hold juveniles.
There is a 66-bed Butler County Juvenile Detention Center, but as this handy organization chart demonstrates, Sheriff Jones has no role in overseeing that prison for rowdy teenagers.
It’s also possible that Jones, like all other so-called “Constitutional Sheriffs,” believes himself to be the ultimate arbiter of “legal” and “illegal” in his county, and he could be housing hundreds, if not thousands, of juveniles in his adult prison.
But one Ohio-based immigration attorney, who represents several former and current inmates under Sheriff Jones, told The Rooster that none of their clients have relayed first-hand knowledge of such an arrangement.
It’s possible Jones is billing under the wrong code, or that ICE is sending money to the Butler County Sheriff’s office, rendered under the wrong category. Either option would only speak to the lack of oversight of slapdash federal spending.
While none of the answers would paint Jones or ICE in a favorable light, there’s still the second and somehow more eye-popping ICE expenditure with the Butler County Sheriff’s office.
More than $750,000 for overtime/ICE assistance pay in 6.5 months.
The spreadsheet notes that only 10 Sheriff’s deputies have been trained for this program, which means that they’ve each billed more than $12,000 a month to ICE—on top of their regular deputy duties and salary.
That’s egregious, even by law enforcement’s notoriously lax standards for billing taxpayers for overtime.
There will need to be criminal prosecutions in 2029
Public corruption is part of the human condition. We may never live in a world or a country completely free of it.
But we cannot allow alleged law enforcement to enrich themselves through incentivized cruelty. Not if we want to have any chance of stopping this country’s slide into kakistocracy, which, as things stand, would apparently delight at least 40 percent of the American public.
Sheriff Jones might see himself as the ultimate authority figure within Butler County. He might see it as his God-given right to harvest as much federal pork spending as possible in exchange for arresting, imprisoning, and deporting immigrants whose primary offense is a civil immigration matter.
But that doesn’t make it so, no matter how ridiculous his cowboy hat becomes.
Unfortunately, the Ohio Republican Junta cannot be trusted to investigate this matter. Sheriffs like Jones—or a similar oaf in Portage County’s Bruce Zuchowski—are a protected class within reactionary political circles.
That duty, unless the Democrats pull off a shocking statewide sweep in November, will fall to the next Democratic president.
Earlier this week, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker pitched “Project 2029,” a detailed plan to prosecute Trump officials for brazen corruption, which, unfortunately, will have to be a Day 1 proposition for the next Democratic president if they’re serious, which, as we saw in 2020, they might not be.
Pritzker already has my vote. Because guys like Sheriff Jones are little more than fat pigs gorging on public coffers despite already being well compensated in their position of power.
In my opinion, that’s a much more serious crime than coming to America in search of a better life despite not having your immigration papers in order.
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