“Living in hell” — Cincinnati Enquirer’s 2025 retrospective on ICE
“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.” So begins Cincinnati Enquirer’s “'Living in hell.' How 2025 became the year of ICE in Greater Cincinnati.”
The article is a lengthy retrospective on immigration storylines in Ohio in 2025, chronicling how the Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration did not match reality.
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.
Read the full story here (behind paywall). The Enquirer also published a behind-the-scenes look at how they put their coverage together (behind paywall). Said Jolene Almendarez, Northern Kentucky reporter:
The most difficult part of writing this story was acknowledging there's so much we'll never be able to bring to light about how new immigration policies impact Greater Cincinnati.
A woman who's shouldering the responsibility of running a business, caring for children, and helping her aging parents after her husband's deportation in 2025. A group of sisters who are grieving the deportation of one of their sons back to the authoritarian-led Venezuela.
So many people we spoke to or were told about were too scared to talk to us on the record because it could put their lives or freedom at risk. That creates a devastating reality that essentially makes these people's lives – their pain, grief, struggles – invisible. Like living ghosts.
I definitely cried with helplessness because, really, what can I (or my colleagues) ever do about that?
At a time when many national media outlets report the Trump administration’s assertions without critical inquiry, we need local media more than ever. Philip Bump recently wrote:
You cannot trust the Department of Homeland Security. This seems like a political statement, but it isn’t. It is a recommendation rooted in 12 months of presentations and claims from Homeland Security officials and agents — claims that have been proven false at a remarkable rate.
Ohioan Tricia McLaughlin, he writes, is one of the administration’s most shameless liars. “In November, the online news site Zeteo compiled a list of seven times McLaughlin had been caught making false claims (including the Chicago incident). But it couldn’t include McLaughlin’s assertions in the wake of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis this week.”
Most notoriously in Ohio, ICE accused Ayman Soliman of being a murderer in Iraq — despite the fact that he had never been there. Cincinnati CityBeat revealed that the accusation was a “monumental screw-up on behalf of [Department of Homeland Security] lawyers… [who] exposed themselves in failing to delete a footnote in their filing as they copy and paste filings en masse to dragnet and target Muslims,” according to his confidant Tala Ali.
Yet for weeks, the government relied on this false narrative to convince the Immigration Judge to deny him bond and continue to seek his deportation. Ayman was eventually released, with his legal asylum status restored.
Both the Global Investigative Journalism Network and Press Watch have published guides for how the media should cover authoritarian regimes that spread lies instead of facts. “Shield yourself with evidence,” recommends GIJN.
