Athens County has already seen what happens when immigration enforcement outruns judgment. A new national estimate now gives local taxpayers a way to measure the price.
Victor and Gregory Laverde Laguna, dual citizens of Colombia and Venezuela, were arrested in Athens County in September 2025 as part of a sting targeting an alleged extortion scheme. They maintained that they had answered a Facebook ad for courier work and did not know the job was connected to a crime. The state later dismissed the charges with prejudice. In written orders, Athens County Common Pleas Judge Patrick Lang said each man remained innocent regarding those charges.
Before their local cases were resolved, the Southeast Ohio Regional Jail transferred the brothers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gregory has Down syndrome, and Victor is his legal guardian. After more than five months in ICE custody, Cleveland Immigration Court Judge Richard Drucker found that neither man was a danger to the community or a flight risk and said he would have granted bond if he believed he had authority to do so.
Yet on March 6, he denied bond, citing administration directives and unsettled case law, while granting the brothers voluntary departure and ordering them to leave for Colombia—or alternatively Venezuela—by April 6. Their family said financial pressure and the desire to escape continued detention influenced that decision.
One case cannot tell us the full cost of a federal policy. It can show us how that policy operates in Athens County.
The Economic Policy Institute’s new Cost of Deportations Calculator draws on a National Priorities Project estimate that Congress and federal agencies have committed $268.9 billion to immigration enforcement from fiscal years 2025 through 2029. The calculator attributes a share to each locality based on its share of federal income taxes paid. Applying that published method to the IRS’s 2022 county data produces an estimated Athens County share of $16.1 million—about $1,042 for each county tax filer who owed federal income tax after credits.
That figure is not a county invoice, and Athens officials cannot redirect the money. It is a proportional estimate of local taxpayers’ stake in a federal spending choice. The Laverde case is not an accounting of the entire sum, either. It is evidence of the choices this enlarged enforcement system can make.
More money can buy more detention beds, more transfers and more months of confinement while courts sort out who may be released. It does not by itself guarantee better targeting or safer communities.
Immigration enforcement has a legitimate role. People who pose genuine public-safety threats should be priorities, and final removal orders should be carried out after fair process. But serious enforcement requires judgment, not simply capacity. In the Laverde brothers’ case, the state charges were dismissed and an immigration judge found no danger or flight risk. Yet detention continued until cost and hardship helped make voluntary departure the family’s quickest way to end the brothers’ confinement.
Congress should guarantee prompt, individualized bond hearings for people whose detention is not explicitly required by statute. It should also require ICE to publish enough field-office data for taxpayers to see who is detained, for how long, at what cost and with what result. Faster, fairer decisions on asylum claims would reduce needless detention while preserving enforcement against genuine threats.
Athens County’s representative, U.S. Rep. Troy Balderson, and Ohio’s senators should demand that accounting before approving another dollar beyond the funds already committed. The questions are straightforward: How many detainees actually pose a danger or flight risk, and what public-safety result justifies the cost?
The Laverde brothers should not be reduced to a statistic, but their experience should inform how we understand one. At an estimated $16.1 million, Athens County’s stake is large enough to justify close scrutiny. A system that kept these men confined even after a judge found they were neither dangerous nor likely to flee was neither fiscally disciplined nor just.
Richard T. Herman
Founder of Herman Legal Group