News & Commentary

Logan DeMond with the Kansas American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found fault with the legislation in several areas: “This bill disregards civil rights, disregards due process, disregards necessary checks on law enforcement, and the likelihood of error exposes the state to what will be costly litigation.”

Logan DeMond, director of policy and research at ACLU of Kansas, said the bill cannot be viewed in isolation and called it another attack on immigrants in the state.

The ACLU of Kansas has testified against the bill, arguing it makes it harder to hold federal agents accountable for misconduct and expands immunity without strengthening oversight.

“While the full county program faced setbacks,” Google AI says, “residents can still potentially access a community ID through local initiatives, with efforts led by organizations like the ACLU of Kansas aiming to provide IDs for library, transit, and service access, though the process and availability for a specific municipal ID card need checking with local county/city offices.”

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.”

“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.