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The bill’s passage has drawn opposition from groups like the ACLU and the Kansas Press Association, who says the bill will violate First Amendment rights. Critics say the vague writing of the bill will lead to legal battles over its enforcement.

“These new provisions break down the boundaries that exist between local and federal operations. They expose agencies in our state to federal civil rights litigation and it’s all for the goal of targeting immigrants in our community,” Logan DeMond, the director of policy and research for ACLU Kansas, said. “This is a direct attack on due process. There are serious constitutional concerns with this legislation. It’s not just an attack on immigrants. It is an attack on all of our rights.”

The ACLU of Kansas testified in January that such methods could lead to the disenfranchisement of people who are otherwise eligible to vote. In his testimony before the Kansas legislature, ACLU of Kansas director of policy and research Logan DeMond said that “voter inactivity must never be treated as evidence of ineligibility.” He warned that people facing housing instability, who live in rural areas with limited mail access and those who simply choose not to vote could get “swept into purge processes, especially when combined with unreliable address or database matching.” “These bills are part and parcel of the illegal and dangerous attempts nationally to subvert our democracy and to dismantle our fundamental constitutional protections against government overreach and state violence,” said ACLU of Kansas Executive Director Micah Kubic about the laws’s enactment.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas in 2017 analyzed the legal liability of local law enforcement when they operate under the 287(g) contracts for ICE. Because they are free to disregard detainers, those agreements have not been found in court decisions to be a defense for unlawful detention, the ACLU said, listing lawsuits. “Jailers cannot evade responsibility for unlawful detention by claiming the federal government required them to hold the person on an immigration detainer,” ACLU’s report said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas last month warned that the state’s legislature is attacking elections and voter rights “from a multitude of directions.” The group called HB 2587 a “shell bill,” noting that it was originally drafted for an unrelated purpose. And in fact, the bill’s title is: “Authorizing a licensed private psychiatric hospital to maintain a stock supply of emergency medication kits for pharmaceutical emergencies.” Micah Kubic, the ACLU of Kansas’s executive director, claimed in a press release last month that the state’s politicians were eroding “Kansans’ ability to vote by obstructing voter registration, shifting deadlines, restricting mail-in voting, sharing sensitive data, fabricating the issue of widespread fraud in Kansas elections, and assigning blame to noncitizens. Legislators have opted to do all this before key primary and general elections in Kansas, giving county clerks and voters virtually no chance to adapt to or even understand these changes.”

The ACLU of Kansas has sued to block SB 244, though a district court judge denied a temporary restraining order and the case is not set for another court date until late September. By then, Kansas’ Aug. 4 primary will have passed, and Kansas elections officials will have already printed ballots for November, with actual voting soon to get underway. It’s not clear that any good voting options will exist for those targeted by SB 244.

Logan DeMond, director of policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said the bill would have a chilling effect on the exercise of constitutional freedoms. “Protecting the right to worship is critically important, but it must be balanced with protecting the fundamental right to free expression,” DeMond said. “The bill’s civil enforcement provisions only heighten these concerns.”

“Transgender Kansans should have protection and dignity in our state instead of persecution,” said ACLU of Kansas Executive Director Micah Kubic in a January press release.

The ACLU posits that it becomes difficult to maintain educational or professional status due to the possibility of complaints, which will make employers and schools wary of keeping transgender people around.