On Tuesday, Aug. 18, the Greene County Commission swore in interim Sheriff Jason Johnson as the new Greene County Sheriff. He has vowed to continue the agreement between the sheriff’s office and ICE to use the Greene County Jail as an ICE detention facility. Greene County Jail is the largest ICE detention facility in the state. The ICE detainee population was about 388 people per day during August 2026. Greene County has detained/deported over 5,400 people since the beginning of 2025. Pertaining to Greene County’s involvement with ICE, the sheriff’s office has withheld information, given disinformation, or outright lied about what is actually happening in our hometown and the jail they run.
I was one of about 20 protesters with the Immigrant
Justice Collaborative (IJC), who went to Sheriff Johnson’s confirmation. This ceremony took place in a small conference room, packed with county staff, and only a few of us were allowed in, and the rest were forced to listen from the adjoining lobby. In April, we were told by Commissioner Rusty MacLachlan that the ceremony would take place on the steps of the Greene County Courthouse, it would be open to the public, and the county would widely publicize this event. However, there was no announcement to the public. News media published an article just 20 hours before the actual ceremony informing the public that the installation would be happening that next morning. During the event, we chanted for the sheriff to end the contract with ICE. We were escorted out of the room. The response from the commissioners and sheriff might have been comical, if they weren’t actively ruining people's lives.
Presiding Commissioner Bob Dixon claimed that this was not the right way to go about our requests and our actions were divisive, and that our chanting was not peaceful. I would argue that interning over 5,000 innocent people in your county jail is not peaceful, but I guess chanting while people are being congratulated for doing so is viewed by some to be worse. There was a second ceremony later this day, which was also hidden from public attention. We attempted to access this swearing in at the Greene County Jail, but we were locked out and completely denied entry.
No matter how IJC has asked for transparency and accountability, we have been denied. In June, we came to a public Greene County meeting and waited for public comment for over four hours to speak. One woman spoke about her husband being detained and deported by Greene County. Teachers spoke about a student's father being deported. The commission's response to each of these comments was that this was not the right way to address this, and said they were hungry, because of the four hours they spent listening to a case on zoning, and did not want to listen to 15 minutes of people pleading for justice when their families and communities were being torn apart. They did not, in any way, respond to what we were asking them. They only talked about how we asked.
Prior to this, the IJC had been asking for months to conduct a Stakeholder Visit, a process created by ICE for community members to visit with people being detained on immigration issues and check on their conditions. The sheriff said they would not comply with this process, which is ICE policy, and denied our visit. We then asked Dixon for help to arrange this visit, he said he would look into it, but nothing came of it.
So apparently, following ICE policy is also “not the right way.” Maybe ... there is no right way. It doesn’t exist; this parroted talking point is just a deflection tactic so that the Greene County Sheriff can continue committing atrocities with no accountability.
For an agency that is supposed to be dedicated to the safety and betterment of the community, such secrecy demonstrates a different reality, that indeed the sheriff is not keeping us safe, he does not have our best interest at heart. He is shady, he is corrupt, and he is attacking our own community and making a profit off of it. We have watched as again and again, ICE continues to tear apart families, steal workers from our economy, violate the law, send people to their deaths, or straight up kill people in cold blood. This is who Sheriff Jason Johnson is choosing to partner with, and he is not only complicit, but an active participant in this assault on our community.
Miles Pearson lives in Springfield.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Will Greene County ever be accountable for ICE partnership? | Opinion
