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“The pattern here is one of asking Kansans to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes and experience and instead to trust the word of the officials pursuing this particular policy,” Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, said in a phone interview. “Rather than acknowledging that people have legitimate concerns here, rather than acknowledging that legal and constitutional rights are being violated constantly, those in the positions of power on this, instead, just tell us all that we don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re insufficiently grateful to them, and challenge us to simply take their word for it rather than believe our own eyes.”

But Micah Kubic, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, detailed the optics of ICE operations across the country. “Kansans are seeing through these transparent attempts to turn neighbors against one another, and even if the U.S. Attorney finds them inconvenient, the facts are clear: masked, unidentified men are recklessly storming our streets, surrounding cars, separating parents from children, then disappearing them into ICE's creeping network of deplorable jails and prisons,” he said in a written statement.

During an ACLU protest in Riverside Park, City Council members Mike Hoheisel, Maggie Ballard and Joseph Shepard spoke out against partnerships known as 287(g) agreements. The agreements allow local law enforcement agencies to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand ICE efforts.

The executive director of the ACLU, Micah Kubic, also released a statement responding to the U.S. attorney. He says he doesn’t believe the U.S. attorney’s statement matches what people saw and heard. “I believe that people should rely on what their own eyes, ears, and common sense tell them, rather than what the U.S. attorney who works for the same administration that deployed the raids is telling them,” Kubic said.

During an ACLU protest in Riverside Park, City Council members Mike Hoheisel, Maggie Ballard and Joseph Shepard spoke out against partnerships known as 287(g) agreements. The agreements allow local law enforcement agencies to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand ICE efforts.

Multiple speakers discussed the arrests made in southwest Kansas at the rally that was hosted by the ACLU of Kansas. Despite what officials say, organizers say ICE agents arrested multiple United States citizens in those raids and that it is not only criminals being arrested as a result. They say many Hispanic communities are living in fear.

During an ACLU protest in Riverside Park, City Council members Mike Hoheisel, Maggie Ballard and Joseph Shepard spoke out against partnerships known as 287(g) agreements. The agreements allow local law enforcement agencies to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand ICE efforts.

A former maximum-security prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, is now a critical hub in the Trump administration’s immigration detention machine, transforming in just a few months from a facility shuttered for its inhospitable conditions to a privately run jail holding hundreds of immigrants.

For Esmie Tseng, the communications director for the ACLU of Kansas, coverage of these city meetings sanitizes the reality for detainees. “We’re making a contract out of putting people in cages,” Tseng said. “This isn’t just moving widgets from one place to another, or manufacturing notebooks and pens. This is profiting off of people being put in cages.”