News & Commentary

Esmie Tseng, communications director for the ACLU of Kansas, said the data confirms what is already known. “This is clearly a numbers game about quotas and percentages for ICE agents, divorced from the humanity of who is impacted and blurring the lines between the civil immigration matters and the cruel legacy of our criminal legal system,” she said. She argued each data point represents someone going through a traumatic experience that she said can involve being grabbed off the street by strangers in masks, put in chains, thrown in the back of an unmarked vehicle and driven to a facility with deplorable conditions. 

Although Easter said not much changes under the new agreement, the ACLU of Kansas warns that the issue can fall back on taxpayers. “It’s still a problem,” ACLU Kansas Executive Director Micah Kubic said. “If ICE asks… the county to detain someone and ICE was wrong about who it was… it will be the Sedgwick County Sheriff that does that, and it will be Sedgwick County taxpayers who pay the bill for those wrongful detentions.”

Monica Bennett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, told the Kansas News Service that immigrants are being used as scapegoats for rising government spending on health services.

“They held that if a police officer witnesses a traffic violation, they can go ahead and conduct a traffic stop, pull someone over, even if that stop is ‘pretexual’” — meaning the real motivation was to investigate other potential crimes.” said Kunyu Ching, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

The American Civil Liberties Union said in May that those detainees are held in “crowded, unsanitary conditions” and that some have attempted suicide.

The companies are working to reactivate idle detention centers including a 1,033-bed facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, owned by CoreCivic.

A coalition of local, state, and regional organizations has come together to counter this narrative. It includes Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation (AIRR), based in Kansas City; the ACLU of Kansas, which previously fought to shut the prison down; the local Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth; and Loud Light, representing immigrants in southwest Kansas. Together, the groups have mobilized residents, organized local faith leaders, and courted former prison guards to their campaign.

Local organizations, including the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth and ACLU of Kansas were also present.

“When we say we’re worried about the dehumanization of people inside the facility, when we say that we’re worried about the exploitation of workers, when we talk about life and death circumstances for everyone inside, the answer to those questions does not count in dollar amounts,” Esmie Tseng, spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, told those gathered.