Do you still want to cling to this pretense, Trump supporters? Do you still want to pretend ICE efforts are targeting “the worst of the worst?” Are you just going to sit there and mumble some incomprehensible stuff about “respecting the laws?”
Go ahead. Do it, you cowards. This is exactly what you voted for, even if it now makes you a bit queasy. Just sit there and soak in it. You are who you support, even if you never thought it would go this far.
“Worst of the worst,” Trump’s parrot repeat on blast. “This one time we caught a guy who did actual crimes,” say spokespeople defending whatever the latest hideous violation of the social contract (if not actual constitutional rights) a federal agent has performed. “Targeted investigation/stop” say the enablers, even when it’s just officers turning white nationalism into Official Government Policy. “Brown people need to be gone” is the end game. Full stop.
Here’s where we’re at in Minnesota, where ICE officers are being shamed into retreat on the regular, punctuated by the occasional revenge killing of mouthy US citizens.
Federal agents detained three workers from a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Willmar, Minn., on Jan. 15, hours after four agents ate lunch there.
Does that seem innocuous? Does this seem like some plausible deniability is in play here? Well, disabuse yourself of those notions. This is how it went down.
The arrest happened around 8:30 p.m. near a Lutheran church and Willmar Middle School as agents followed the workers after they closed up for the night. A handful of bystanders blew whistles and shouted at agents as they detained the people. “Would your mama be proud of you right now?” one of the bystanders asked.
Nice. Is this what you want from a presidential administration? Or would you rather complain ICE officers have been treated unfairly if people refuse to feed or house them, knowing full well that doing either of these things will turn their employees into targets.
An eyewitness who declined to give a name for fear of retribution, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that four ICE agents sat in a booth for a meal at El Tapatio restaurant a little before 3 p.m. Staff at the restaurant were frightened, said the eyewitness, who shared pictures from the restaurant as well as video of the arrest.
I’m not saying ICE officers shouldn’t be able to eat at ethnic restaurants. I am, however, saying that they definitely shouldn’t because everyone is going to think the officers are there for anything but the food. And I do believe any minority business owner should be able to refuse service to ICE officers who wander in under the pretense of buying a meal. The end result is going to be the same whether or not you decide to engage with this pretense. You’re getting raided either way. May as well deny them the meal.
El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant closed after WCCO confirmed agents visited the spot for lunch and later returned, detaining its owners and a dishwasher nearby after they had closed early due to the federal law enforcement’s previous appearance.
And here’s the DHS statement, which pretends ICE officers didn’t eat a meal at a restaurant and then return a few hours later to detain employees when they left the building:
“On January 14, ICE officers conducted surveillance of a target, an illegal alien from Mexico. Officers observed that the target’s vehicle was outside of a local business and positively identified him as the target while inside the business. Following the positive identification of the target, officers then conducted a vehicle stop later in the day and apprehended the target and two additional illegal aliens who were in the car, including one who had a final order of removal from an immigration judge.”
Nope. I don’t care what the ICE apologists will say about this. These narratives have places where they overlap but it’s impossible to believe this went down exactly like the government said it did. These officers picked out an ethnic restaurant, were served by an intimidated staff, and then hung around to catch any stragglers leaving the business that previously had graciously served them, despite the threat they posed.
Abolish ICE. It’s no longer just a catchy phrase to shout during protests. It’s an imperative. If we don’t stop it now, it will only become even worse and even more difficult to remove. Treat ICE like the tumor it is. Pretending its MRSA gives it more power than it should ever be allowed to have.
Prospective ICE concentration camp at 14901 Botts Road, Kansas City, Missouri | Photo by Nate Hofer
Editor’s Note: The terms used in this report are in accordance with human rights law and criminal legal definitions.
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, a concentration camp is“a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”
Under the Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute, kidnapping occurs when a person “unlawfully removes another from his place of residence or business, or a substantial distance from the vicinity where he is found” through “force, threat, or deception” for purposes including “to inflict bodily injury on or to terrorize the victim” or “to interfere with the performance of any governmental or political function.”
Less than a mile from where Kansas City’s Honeywell factory manufactures 80% of America’s nuclear weapon components, ICE is planning to build one of the largest concentration camps in the United States.
A leaked document marked ‘FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY,’ which has circulated widely on social media and formed the basis of reporting by the Washington Post, reveals that Kansas City is one of seven ‘mega centers’ planned across the country, part of a nationwide concentration camp network.
Photo by Nate Hofer
The Kansas City Defender obtained the spreadsheet independently and verified its authenticity: the site inspection listed for Kansas City occurred at the exact date, time, and location specified in the document.
The Kansas City Defender’s reporting is consistent with documents obtained by the Washington Post, which reported ICE plans to establish a “deliberate feeder system” to accelerate the operation.
People kidnapped by ICE would be held in “processing sites” for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale concentration camps holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for trafficking to unknown locations, including the CECOT torture camp in El Salvador and other concentration camps throughout South America and Africa.
The list may not be final. ICE Senior Advisor David Venturella told WFTV that a site in Orlando, not included on the spreadsheet, is now under ‘exploratory’ consideration, suggesting the network could expand beyond the 22 locations currently identified.
Federal officials have compared the system to Amazon’s logistics network.
ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, that the administration aims to treat deportations “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
Feds Attempt to Intimidate & Terrorize Lee’s Summit Mother
On January 14th, a woman in Lee’s Summit was scrolling through Facebook when she came across the leaked DHS documents. She saw Kansas City listed. She saw a site inspection scheduled for 9:00 AM the following morning at a warehouse in south Kansas City. She reposted the information to Facebook and TikTok.
The next day, after dropping her child at school, she decided to take the long way home. She wanted to see with her own eyes whether federal agents would actually show up. She drove by the warehouse at 4001 E. 149th Street and saw news cameras, reporters, and protesters already gathered. She stopped briefly to say hello to friends she recognized, spoke a few words to an Associated Press reporter, and went home.
That afternoon, she says, Department of Homeland Security agents showed up at her front door.
Screengrab from video she took of agents showing up at her door in Lee’s Summit
“I’m a 49-year-old mom of two in the suburbs with no criminal history whatsoever,” she told The Kansas City Defender in an exclusive interview. “I don’t even have a passport. So the idea that Homeland Security would be on my front porch is crazy.”
“All I did was repost something on social media that I found on social media, and take the long way home so I could see with my own eyes whether or not they showed up,” she said. “That was it. That was the extent.”
She believes agents ran her license plates when she drove past the facility. From 2:30 PM until nightfall, she says federal vehicles circled her house. She believes they were waiting for her to leave.
Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca, who was also confronted by federal agents at the warehouse site that morning, told her he believes the visit to her home was targeted.
Door-to-Door
The woman is not alone. Across the Kansas City metro, federal agents have been conducting door-to-door operations that residents describe as terrorizing.
The woman told The Kansas City Defender that agents have been going door-to-door in neighborhoods on both sides of Highway 291 in Lee’s Summit. On one street, they pulled someone over in front of a resident’s house.
The Warehouse
Prospective ICE concentration camp at 14901 Botts Road, Kansas City, Missouri | Photo by Nate Hofer
The concentration camp planned for Kansas City, would be built in a 920,400-square-foot warehouse at 14901 Botts Road in the city’s far southern reaches.
Platform Ventures, a Kansas City-based real estate firm with $2.7 billion in assets under management, is the property owner. According to Councilman Johnathan Duncan, Polsinelli, one of the nation’s largest law firms, was the legal representative handling the transaction. Duncan told me in a statement that “the attorney involved in the transaction is Korb Maxwell, the same lawyer who helped negotiate the Kansas City Chiefs’ move to Kansas.”
The statement claimed Platform Ventures was approached in October 2025 with an “unsolicited offer” to purchase what it called a “vacant industrial warehouse.”
“PV does not question prospective buyers on their intent after close,” the statement read. “And we will not engage in public conversations involving speculation over future uses.”
But according to City Councilman Johnathan Duncan, whose district includes the site, Platform Ventures originally notified Port KC that the firm was selling the warehouse to the Honeywell national security campus located across the highway.
It was only through leaked documents that the city discovered the actual buyer was the Department of Homeland Security.
In an interview with The Defender, Jonathan Duncan told me “calls to Platform Ventures have gone unanswered.”
“We should be publicly and privately shaming Platform Ventures,” Duncan said in a statement to the KC Star. “They are a Kansas City company that has received public dollars for years and they need to get the message that the Kansas City community does not appreciate being sold out by a local company for quick financial gain.”
Numerous pages on Platform Ventures’ website now return a 404 error (including those that previously listed the staff).
Screenshot of the page that has since been removed, accessed via waybackmachine.org
The company’s LinkedIn profiles have been removed. According to Councilman Duncan, their phones ring unanswered to his calls. “Their offices have gone dark,” Councilman Duncan told me.
Public Money for Concentration Camps
The warehouse was built with public support on land that Kansas City spent decades developing.
The former Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base was decommissioned in 1994. Port KC, the city’s development authority, led the conversion of the property into an industrial hub, transferring parcels to private developers with the stated goal of bringing jobs to an economically distressed area.
In 2022, Port KC entered into a development agreement with Platform Ventures to construct multiple industrial buildings on the site. The agreement’s stated purpose: “to bring logistics and manufacturing jobs to an area and community of need.”
Now a private company has completed negotiations to sell that publicly-subsidized building to the federal government for mass human caging and trafficking.
Port KC released a statement acknowledging it has “very limited ability to disallow a sale of the facility.” The development at Richards-Gebaur includes multiple warehouse buildings. Both 4001 E. 149th Street and 14901 Botts Road are/were owned by Platform Ventures.
Inside the Camps
In a statement, ICE claimed the planned facilities “will not be warehouses” but “very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”
The statistics and eyewitness testimony tell a completely contradictory story.
“If we are seeing that sort of outward extreme violence in broad daylight in the streets of Minneapolis and streets across the country, imagine what people must be facing behind closed doors and behind bars in ICE detention centers,” Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at the Detention Watch Network, told Truthout.
Even prior to the Trump administration, a 2024 report by Physicians for Human Rights examined 52 deaths in ICE custody and found that 95 percent were preventable with appropriate medical care.
In December 2025, the ACLU and human rights groups sent a letter to ICE documenting conditions at Fort Bliss, the largest detention facility in the country. The letter described beatings and sexual abuse by officers, coercive threats to compel people to accept deportation to third countries, medical neglect, hunger, and denial of access to legal counsel.
The facility is located on the same military base used to intern Japanese Americans during World War II. Detained people have described the facility as a “torture chamber.”
Also at Fort Bliss, the county medical examiner will likely rule the death of 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide due to asphyxiation after a witness at the facility claims they saw guards choke him to death.
In Philadelphia, 46-year-old Parady La died from untreated drug withdrawal nine days after ICE arrested him. Withdrawal is fatal but easily treatable with proper medical supervision. When La was found unresponsive in his cell, officers administered naloxone, a drug used to treat overdoses, not withdrawal. It was the wrong medicine. He died of brain and organ failure.
Pregnant women have reported being shackled at the ankles, hands, and waist during transport. The ACLU documented women restrained while actively miscarrying. One woman detained at a facility in Louisiana was taken to a hospital after experiencing severe abdominal pain and bleeding, where medical personnel performed an invasive uterine procedure without her consent and injected her with an unknown medication. She was informed she had miscarried. ICE returned her to detention that same night and held her for two more months. She continued to experience heavy bleeding, swelling, fever, and severe pain. Her sick call requests went unanswered.
A Senate investigation led by Senator Jon Ossoff identified 510 credible reports of human rights abuses in ICE detention between January and August 2025, including 85 reports of medical neglect. Detainees described meals too small for adults, expired milk, and water that smelled foul. At one Texas facility, a teenager reported that adults were forced to compete with children for bottles of clean water.
These are ICE’s “regular detention standards.” This is what Platform Ventures sold Kansas City to in order to make a quick buck.
The City’s Response
Hours after ICE conducted its site walkthrough, Kansas City’s City Council voted 12-1 to pass a five-year moratorium on permits, licenses, and zoning approvals for any non-municipal carceral facility. The ordinance took effect immediately and extends through January 15, 2031.
Mayor Quinton Lucas issued a statement attributing the action directly to reports of the planned concentration camp. “We consistently hear from residents that Kansas City’s focus should be on economic development and housing, not mass detention facilities holding thousands,” Lucas said.
The sole dissenting vote came from First District Councilmember Nathan Willett, who argued that the city should not obstruct federal law enforcement.
1st District City Councilman Nathan Willett, the sole vote against a ban on non-municipal detention facilities in Kansas City
Asked whether the moratorium could actually stop the facility, Mayor Lucas told KSHB “I think the simplest way I can answer that is it would probably end up in court.”
The moratorium applies only within Kansas City limits. The federal government could pursue locations in neighboring Grandview, unincorporated Jackson County, or across the state line in Kansas. But even with the moratorium, the federal government has vast authority to override local ordinances through eminent domain and the Supremacy Clause. City council members told The Kansas City Defender the ordinance will slow the process, but stopping it entirely will require sustained pressure.
This is a developing story. The Kansas City Defender will continue to investigate.
Ryan S. is the Founder & Executive Editor of The Kansas City Defender.
Day 286 of quarantine I have discovered www.webstaurantstore.com
It is, I BELIEVE, a website intended to be used by restaurants for bulk ordering food and utensils. And this is bringing me such unbounded delight scrolling through and recognizing that I, a single individual, ALSO can order ridiculous obscene enormous offensive-to-all-common-sensibilities shipments of BULK FOOD, to my LITTLE LITTLE APARTMENT, for PENNIES on the dollar. I have this god given power to flood my entire living space with bulk grains and it is one single button click away from my reality.
30 POUNDS of chocolate for $100. 20 POUNDS of peas for $13?? $13!!!! I will wake up every single morning from now on knowing that a box of donuts and a sack of dried split peas heavy enough to bodily injure someone both carry equal monetary weight. 25 POUNDS OF ONION POWDER for $50. Do you understand the enormity? the accessibility? the potential here? With the single click of the button I can put myself in a position of bequeathing more than a humanly comprehensible amount of onion powder in my will. AND IT WOULD ONLY COST ME $50 TO MAKE THIS A REALITY.
But what gets me
What truly gets me
is the 50 POUND BAG OF RICE
FOR LESS THAN $20
Do you know how much that kills me? How much I’m losing my mind? that I can order MYSELF WORTH OF RICE for something to the tune of $50? I can OUT-RANK MYSELF WITH RICE, DEMOCRATICALLY OVERRULE MYSELF WITH RICE, IN MY OWN APARTMENTfor the fucking PENNIES that is $50
I’m so sorry for the normal person I’ll be after quarantine because the cabin-fever version of me I’m inhabiting right now is perhaps just uninhibited enough to follow through on this dream I’ve just discovered of out-ricing myself.
real talk though, if you had a large number of people in your community who wanted a particular food item and couldn’t afford it (for instance if you’re in a food desert and need produce or if you’re a part of a large disabled and/or overworked community who all need prepared frozen food), you could pool funds and get an order from a supply store like this.
it requires organizing for finance management, ordering, transport, and distribution, but if you build a stable mutual aid network, it’s genuinely within the realm of possibility.
This idea is called a buyers club (or buying club, buying coop, etc) and it’s a great time-tested method of mutual aid. And there are guides and tools for starting your own at managemy.coop
There has been a lot of conversation on social media about the downsides of polyester. But are those downsides as bad as they're believed to be? Are there upsides?
A Kansas district court judge sanctioned Attorney General Kris Kobach with a $1 fine for failing to know the law. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach will pay a symbolic $1 sanction because he “should have known” better than to file a motion in a court that did not have jurisdiction.
Kobach, along with his solicitor general, Anthony Powell, was admonished and fined by District Judge Thomas Luedke in a long-running case regarding gender marker changes on driver’s licenses.
Kobach filed the case in Shawnee County District Court in 2023 against David Harper, director of the Kansas Division of Vehicles, demanding that his division stop allowing gender changes on driver’s licenses. Harper has since retired from the position, and the current director is Deann Williams.
The case reached the Kansas Court of Appeals, which ruled against Kobach in finding there was no harm to allowing people to change their gender markers. In October, Kobach and Powell filed a motion once more in the district court, asking the division of vehicles to maintain a list of gender changes made on driver’s licenses.
The state noted the division already maintains such a list – rendering the request “completely unnecessary.”
“Respondents seek sanctions against Petitioners contending that the motion was presented for an improper purpose, needlessly increased the cost of litigation, was contrary to the law, and essentially requested the Court disregard the mandate” of the Kansas Court of Appeals, the Division of Vehicles court filing said.
The state asked the court to dismiss the motion, which violated three different legal principles. The court dismissed the motion and sanctioned Kobach and Powell for “filing a motion that they knew, or should have known, the district court lacked jurisdiction to consider.”
Rep. John Carmichael, D-Wichita, said the handling of this lawsuit was another example of Kobach’s ineptitude.
“I am getting tired of reading orders, opinions, rulings, etc., that continue to point out that our attorney general is wrong on the facts, wrong on the law and doesn’t seem to recognize it,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s going to take. Judge (Julie) Robinson ordered the attorney general to take remedial, basic legal classes because he didn’t understand the rules of evidence in her court.”
Carmichael was referring to a high-profile federal court case in 2018, when Robinson found Kobach in contempt and struck down his signature law that required new voters to prove their citizenship.
Kobach consistently engages in “bad lawyering,” as shown by judges who have sanctioned him, Carmichael said. He also noted Kobach in the House Judiciary Committee last week “flat out misrepresents the holding of the Court of Appeals.”
“He impugns then-Chief Judge (Karen) Arnold-Burger’s opinion in the case, suggesting that the court ignored his evidence, when in fact, that is simply not true,” Carmichael said. “In the case in the court of appeals, the court went through witness by witness, describing why the attorney general had once again engaged in bad lawyering and failed to prove his case.”
In a news conference on the first day of the legislative session, House Minority Leader Brandon Woodard, D-Lenexa, also questioned Kobach’s approach on the gender markers court case.
“The Republicans can’t even define what ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ is across the state, so a legal, statutory definition is probably where they should start when it comes to the gender markers,” he said. “Once again, Kris Kobach has lost in court and is asking the Legislature to clean up his mess.”
Danedri Herbert, Kobach’s spokeswoman, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the judge’s sanction.
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