News & Commentary

The latest ruling serves as the final from a 2020 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Spencer Fane. The suit challenged the legality of Kansas Highway Patrol’s policy of targeting drivers whose vehicles had out-of-state license plates.

Micah Kubic, the ACLU of Kansas Executive Director, called the investigation a wanton and disgraceful abuse of power by Lenexa police. “George Orwell told us about thought crime as a cautionary fable, and this instead seems like an attempt to put it into action,” he said.

“The original bill (HB 2426) required the state of Kansas to invalidate legally issued birth certificates and driver’s licenses to depict strictly someone’s sex assigned at birth,” a presser from the ACLU of Kansas reads.

Appellate judges deemed Kansas Highway Patrol's practice of targeting drivers from specific states to be unconstitutional.

The ACLU of Kansas also criticized the bill’s passage. “Bathroom bans are grounded in prejudice and misinformation,” said Logan Demond, ACLU of Kansas policy director in a statement on the organization’s website. “And they don’t actually make anyone safer.”

The case led by the ACLU against KHP is best known for challenging the Kansas two-step, a controversial technique used by troopers to extend traffic stops and eventually search vehicles.

Monica Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas, said the result was KHP must retrain its troopers to “observe and respect the rights of all people traveling Kansas highways.”

Logan Demond, ACLU of Kansas policy director, posted a statement to the organization’s website that said, “Bathroom bans are grounded in prejudice and misinformation and they don’t actually make anyone safer.”

Micah Kubic, ACLU of Kansas Executive Director, said in part in a statement on the group’s website: “This bill undermines our state’s strong constitutional protections against government overreach and persecution. It subjects people to unacceptable privacy violations and puts them in harm’s way. Discriminatory laws like this bill violate the fundamental rights guaranteed by the state constitution. They contradict what it means to be a Kansan.”