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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.”

Kobach and top legislative leadership had wanted Republican lawmakers to address SB 180 at a special session in addition to partisan redistricting. While amending the law could resolve statutory interpretation issues, it would not resolve constitutional claims raised by transgender people represented by the ACLU.

After the Kansas Supreme Court declined in September to hear an appeal on Senate Bill 180, the case is now back in Shawnee County District Court. The lawsuit pits Attorney General Kris Kobach against Gov. Laura Kelly's administration and a group of transgender Kansans represented by the ACLU.

“In general, anytime a politician tells you that they want to make it harder for eligible people to vote, you should ask yourself, ‘Why is that?’,” executive director Micah Kubic said. “And the answer is usually to avoid accountability and to avoid having everyday people get a voice in what they want and what they want their communities to look like.”