Samuel Sey was detained by officials at the Columbus airport and is now being held at the Butler County Jail on an ICE hold. Records show he has been there since Oct. 21, turning a public commentator’s airport stop into a case that now sits inside ICE custody.
He is not just any detainee. Sey co-hosts The Narrative podcast with Aaron Baer, and he has publicly written about immigration in sharply moral terms, including a February 2025 post saying it is not unChristian to deport illegal immigrants. That same month, he said he was in the middle of his immigration process, putting his own case in the middle of a debate he had been arguing about in public.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Sey entered the United States legally in 2022 but stayed longer than his admission allowed by more than four years. DHS said he has no pending applications and accepted voluntary departure, and that he will remain in ICE custody until removed from the United States. Those details make the case more than a routine arrest: they show the government treating his file as a completed enforcement matter, not an open application.
The timing sharpens the contradiction. Baer said the matter was a paperwork issue and later said he spoke to Sam from the detention facility an hour before posting that neither of them had changed views on immigration enforcement. Joel Berry separately called it a clerical issue. Sey has not publicly walked back his February argument that Christian ethics do not denounce deportations; he has instead been placed in the same system that carries them out.
That system is local as much as federal. The Butler County Sheriff’s Office operates the jail and has signed contracts with ICE to help carry out deportation operations, and more than 3,600 people held there during Donald Trump’s second term have been deported, according to data from the Ohio Immigration Alliance. For Sey, the unanswered question is no longer whether he supports enforcement. It is what specific paperwork or status issue led airport officials to detain him in the first place, and how long he will remain in custody before removal follows.
