Advocates for a person held in the Butler County Jail last year on an ICE detainer have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging a guard abused him.
The lawsuit on behalf of Luis Tenelanda claims Sgt. Corneal Rowe, a guard at the jail, punched Tenelanda in the stomach and called him slurs in June 2025 after he and other inmates asked for their regularly scheduled recreation time. The jail was on lockdown at the time due to anti-ICE protests outside, according to the legal filing.
The suit says Tenelanda fell and injured his head and shoulder due to the blow. Attorney Whit Froelich says Tenelanda now has permanent injuries from the incident.
"He's experienced severe and ongoing pain in his arm preventing him from working," Froelich said at a virtual news conference Tuesday. "Mr. Tenelanda makes a living working with his hands. He can't do that anymore."
Tenelanda was later deported to Ecuador, where he currently resides.
"I know that not all police officers are bad or racist, but that day it was my bad luck that this officer appeared and struck me, and fractured my left shoulder for the rest of my life," Tenelanda said in a statement. "To this day my shoulder feels bad, I cannot work or even lift heavy things."
The Butler County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail, issued a statement saying the incident was investigated last year and denied the allegations in the suit. The sheriff's office declined to comment further on the pending litigation.
Suit claims 'active indifference'
The Ohio Justice and Policy Center helped file the suit. Executive Director Gabe Davis says it's not the first time an ICE detainee has reported abuse at the jail.
"In this lawsuit, we're not just asking a federal court to compensate Luis Tenelanda for what he's suffered, although he certainly deserves that," Davis said. "We're also asking through this lawsuit that the federal court declare, on the record, that Butler County and Sheriff [Richard] Jones have a custom, policy and practice of failing to adequately supervise and train their staff, and that they've acted with deliberate indifference to the rights of people in their custody."
The Butler County Sheriff's Office had a contract to hold ICE detainees from 2003 until 2021. It renewed the contract when President Donald Trump took office again last year. Currently, the county makes $105 a day per ICE detainee. That's up from $68 a day when Trump took office in 2025. Last year, the county took in about $4.4 million from the DHS contract.
Jones' office has denied wrongdoing in response to previous allegations of abuse at the jail. An inspection by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections in January found the jail meets most of its standards, despite issuing previous warnings about the jail being overcrowded.
Previous suit
The prior federal lawsuit makes similar allegations to Tenelanda's. Attorneys for Bayong Brown Bayong and Ahmed Adem allege the two immigrants detained by ICE in Butler County experienced physical abuse at the hands of guards there in 2020, including beatings and being pushed down a set of stairs.
Filings by attorneys for the county dispute this, saying no one was pushed down stairs and that force used against the two was proper because they were being disobedient. The county's filing also disputes claims in the initial lawsuit that Bayong lost a tooth in the incidents described.
Details from the filing shed light on how discipline in the jail works.
"In a correctional facility, a detainee who questions the lawful orders of a corrections officer or who demands to speak with a higher-ranking officer is effectively disobeying, which is a form of resistance," the county's answer to allegations reads, noting that such detainees are considered "a real threat to institutional security" subject to use-of-force, detainment in solitary confinement or other discipline.
Later in the filing, the county describes one metric used to determine if use-of-force is appropriate.
"If a corrections officer’s assessment of a situation reasonably leads them to believe that they may be assaulted by an inmate who is in close proximity to them, the corrections officer does not have to wait to actually be assaulted before reacting with reasonable force," it reads.
That lawsuit is still working its way through federal court.
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