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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.

“I think this is a textbook example of what is supposed to happen,” Kansas ACLU Executive Director Micah Kubic told KCUR. “When communities come out to say, ‘This is not what we want our city, our town, our state, our country to look like,’ folks in power respond to that.”

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.”