News & Commentary

Esmie Tseng, communications director of the ACLU of Kansas, told NCR that the opposition to the detention facility in Leavenworth comes from people of a variety of backgrounds who remember CoreCivic's previous failings and do not want it to operate without accountability. "The Sisters of Charity have been a consistent voice and serve as a conscience for the rest of the community," Tseng said. "They've given a voice to that human element." She also emphasized that the people of Leavenworth will not back away from CoreCivic. As she put it: "The community has not forgotten what they put this city through."

“This referendum seeks to dismantle Kansas’ merit-based judicial selection system and replace it with partisan judicial elections,” said Rashane Hamby, director of policy and research for ACLU Kansas, in a March 13 statement to the Kansas House. “This would inject politics into our courts, undermine judicial independence, and erode public trust.”

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing voter data and making sure that the voter rolls are correct and up-to-date,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas. “The system isn’t the problem,” he added. “It’s making sure that the system actually is correct, actually is professionally administered, (and) does actually protect people’s data and privacy. And that is something Kansas has struggled with before.”

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.”

The families, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas and the law firm Ballard Spahr, want a Douglas County District Court judge to issue a temporary injunction on the ban.

In 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas published a white paper about agreements between local law enforcement and ICE. “Being undocumented is not a crime,” the ACLU wrote, “and local law enforcement have no obligation to help the federal government enforce immigration law.” The ACLU contends that the agreements “have given rise to racial profiling, civil rights violations, and breakdowns in community relations” and “continue to disrupt communities and fuel racism and xenophobia in Kansas and around the country.”

Logan DeMond, a policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, told The Star that changing ordinances in anticipation of punishment is unnecessary when no direct threats have been made to the Unified Government. “These actions pose a threat to a more diverse, equitable county at the expense of local control,” DeMond said during a recent committee meeting, adding that repealing and suspending ordinances and practices means the Unified Government is “bending the knee to an administration drunk on power.”

Logan DeMond, director of policy and research for the ACLU of Kansas, submitted testimony in October over the initial standing committee vote to not proceed with eliminating the DEI verbiage. “This sets a very dangerous precedent for the Unified Government,” DeMond said. “This will only serve to widen the glaring inequalities that already exist.”