News & Commentary

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.

In a lawsuit backed by the ACLU of Kansas, plaintiffs seek to block a sweeping law that invalidated driver’s licenses bearing gender markers that differ from a person’s sex assigned at birth and restricts restroom use in government buildings. As plaintiffs told The Washington Post, the ID requirement has exposed them to scrutiny in ordinary interactions, even after they complied with the law.

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.

“This is an issue where folks are coming together across political perspectives, across ideological perspectives, and are saying that they want their privacy protected,” said Micah Kubic, Executive Director of the ACLU of Kansas.

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.”

“The combined effects of this bill—which is part of a larger legislative attack on immigrants and people of color—raise serious constitutional concerns,” according to an article on the ACLU of Kansas' website. “It significantly expands the authority of federal law enforcement in Kansas, weakens accountability, and threatens Kansans’ right to engage in lawful dissent.”

“I think this law is really about trying to figure out who belongs in Kansas and who doesn’t,” Harper Seldin, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told KAKE. “If S.B. 244 remains in effect, it’s a pretty clear statement that transgender Kansans don’t belong in Kansas and intersex people don’t belong in Kansas.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Kansas and Ballard Spahr LLP sued the state for alleged violations of the Kansas Constitution’s protections for personal autonomy, privacy, equality under the law, due process and freedom of speech. Gov. Laura Kelley also initially vetoed the bill before both the Kansas Senate and Kansas House of Representatives overrode the veto.