Kansas health care experts encourage safe and effective vaccines to protect against seasonal illnesses. (Getty Images)
LAWRENCE — Six viral diseases — including COVID-19, the flu and norovirus — have been found at high concentrations in Lawrence wastewater as Kansas communities face peak flu season.
COVID-19, influenza A and B, RSV, human metapneumovirus, and norovirus have all been detected at high concentrations in Lawrence wastewater within the last three weeks.
Wastewater data indicates trends of illnesses spreading within a community but does not correlate to exact case numbers, with doctors saying it’s normal to see high concentrations of respiratory illness during flu season.
“Wastewater data does not measure individual cases, but it provides a reliable picture of how much virus is circulating in a community,” said Veronica White, preparedness and epidemiology coordinator for Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health. “This data captures viral genetic material shed by everyone using the sewer system. One factor that may be contributing to the higher concentrations of respiratory viruses seen in Lawrence’s wastewater is its larger population.”
Lawrence is also seeing an early peak in influenza B compared to the rest of the country. Positive flu tests spiked the last week of 2025, with 32% of total flu tests coming back positive, according to data from the University of Kansas Health System.
Some health care providers such as Watkins Health Center at the University of Kansas are requiring masks for all visitors, patients and staff due to a “record surge in respiratory illnesses,” according to a sign at the front door.
White said early rise in the flu doesn’t indicate a more dangerous flu season, but rather earlier circulation of the virus than usual.
“Identifying this trend early through wastewater data allows people to take preventive steps, such as getting vaccinated, monitoring symptoms, and staying home when sick,” White said.
Wastewater data also indicated that a newer strain of COVID, known as the XFG or the Stratus variant, has accounted for 82.5% of positive COVID samples, with concentrations increasing by 25% in the last month. The variant has also been increasing nationally, White said.
Dana Hawkinson, medical director for Infection Control and Prevention program at University of Kansas Health System, said there are still large populations of people across the state who have not received a flu shot.
“There have been a large number of people ill and circulators too in our communities. But (the flu) still remains at a high level at this point in time,” Hawkinson said. “There have been extremely low numbers of people not getting the vaccine. We know that we can help prevent this and people’s chances of severe illness and death with it.”
Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said that vaccines are incredibly safe and effective.
Hawkinson said flu symptoms include fever, cough, congestion, body aches and a sore throat rather than stomach bug symptoms, with the definitions often getting mixed up during flu season.
Wastewater data has also indicated that Salina is seeing medium concentrations of the same illnesses, except for influenza A, which is considered to be at a high concentration.
“Based on the data, we expect viral activity to continue in both Lawrence and Salina over the next few weeks,” White said. “As we move through flu season, we anticipate seeing elevated influenza activity reflected in the wastewater, especially as the season approaches its typical peak.”
Medical experts continue to advise washing hands, covering coughs and not going into large public spaces when sick to prevent illnesses from spreading.
“You can still go get the flu vaccine,” Hawkinson said. “It’s still recommended, and you can do it now to protect yourself from infection.”
The Intelligence Trainer is one of NewsBlur’s most powerful features. It lets you train on authors, tags, titles, and text to automatically sort stories into Focus, Unread, or Hidden. But until now, there were limits—you couldn’t train on URLs, regex support was something power users had been requesting for years, and managing hundreds of classifiers meant clicking through feeds one by one.
Today I’m launching three major improvements: URL classifiers, regex mode for power users, and a completely redesigned Manage Training tab.
Train on URLs
You can now train on story permalink URLs, not just titles and content. This opens up new filtering possibilities based on URL patterns.
The URL classifier matches against the full story permalink. Some use cases:
Filter by URL path: Like or dislike stories that contain /sponsored/ or /opinion/ in their URL
Domain sections: Match specific subdomains or URL segments that indicate content types
Landing pages vs articles: Some feeds include both—filter by URL structure to show only what you want
URL classifiers support both exact phrase matching and regex mode. The exact phrase match is available to Premium subscribers, while regex mode requires Premium Pro.
When a URL classifier matches, you’ll see the matched portion highlighted directly in the story header, so you always know why a story was filtered.
Regex matching for power users
For years, the text classifier only supported exact phrase matching. If you wanted to match “iPhone” and “iPad” you needed two separate classifiers. Now you can use regex patterns in the Title, Text, and URL classifiers.
A segmented control lets you switch between “Exact phrase” and “Regex” mode. In regex mode, you get access to the full power of regular expressions:
Word boundaries (\b): Match \bapple\b to find “apple” but not “pineapple”
Alternation (|): Match iPhone|iPad|Mac in a single classifier
Optional characters (?): Match colou?r to find both “color” and “colour”
Anchors (^ and $): Match patterns at the start or end of text
Character classes: Match [0-9]+ for any number sequence
A built-in help popover explains regex syntax with practical examples. The trainer validates your regex in real-time and shows helpful error messages if the pattern is invalid.
Regex matching is case-insensitive, so apple matches “Apple”, “APPLE”, and “apple”. This mode is available to Premium Pro subscribers.
Manage all your training in one place
Over the years you may have trained NewsBlur on hundreds of authors, tags, and titles across dozens of feeds. But when you wanted to review what you’d trained, you had to open each feed’s trainer individually and click through them one by one.
The new Manage Training tab provides a consolidated view of every classifier you’ve ever trained, organized by folder. You can see everything at a glance, edit inline, and save changes across multiple feeds in a single click.
Open the Intelligence Trainer from the sidebar menu (or press the t key). You’ll now see two tabs at the top: “Site by Site” and “Manage Training”. The Manage Training tab is available everywhere you train—from the story trainer, feed trainer, or the main Intelligence Trainer dialog.
The Site by Site tab is the existing trainer you know—it walks you through each feed showing authors, tags, and titles you can train. That’s still the best way to train new feeds with lots of suggestions.
The Manage Training tab shows only what you’ve already trained. Every thumbs up and thumbs down you’ve ever given, organized by folder just like your feed list. Each feed shows its trained classifiers as pills you can click to toggle.
Filtering made easy
The real power comes from the filtering options. At the top of the tab you’ll find several ways to narrow down your training:
Folder/Site dropdown — Only folders and sites with training appear in this dropdown. Select a folder to see all training within it, or select a specific site to focus on just that feed’s classifiers. This is especially useful when you have hundreds of trained items and want to review just one area.
Instant search — Type in the search box and results filter as you type. Search matches against classifier names, feed titles, and folder names. Looking for everything you’ve trained about “apple”? Just type it and see all matches instantly.
Likes and Dislikes — Toggle between All, Likes only, or Dislikes only. Want to see everything you’ve marked as disliked? One click shows you all the red thumbs-down items across your entire training history.
Type filters — Filter by classifier type: Title, Author, Tag, Text, URL, or Site. These are multi-select, so you can show just Authors and Tags while hiding everything else. Perfect for when you want to audit just the authors you’ve trained across all your feeds.
Edit inline and save in bulk
Click any classifier pill to toggle it between like, dislike, and neutral. The Save button shows exactly how many changes you’ve made, so you always know what’s pending. Made a mistake? Just click again to undo—the count updates automatically.
When you click Save, all your changes across all feeds are saved in a single request. No more clicking through feeds one at a time to clean up old training.
Subscription tiers
Feature
Tier Required
Title/Author/Tag/Feed classifiers
Free
Manage Training tab
Free
URL classifiers (exact phrase)
Premium
Text classifiers (exact phrase)
Premium Archive
Regex mode (Title, Text, URL)
Premium Pro
All three features are available now on the web. If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
Huge, huge, huge overhaul of training in all respects. New classifier types, regex handling for premium pro, and a new manage training dialog. Plus plenty of quality of life improvements to training.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — When an explicit video of 19-year-old Paris Hilton having sex was leaked by her ex-boyfriend in 2003, the world turned on her. She was pilloried in the press, called “horny,” and “trashy.” “Sex video gives Paris Hilton publicity money can’t buy,” The Guardian declared.
“reNowadays, the reaction would probably be different. Hilton’s ex-boyfriend, who was 12 years her senior, shared the video online a decade before the first “revenge porn” law went into effect in the United States. The full-length video was later published, becoming a bestseller. Hilton says she never saw any profits, and said she donated her $400,000 settlement with her ex to charity.
At a Thursday news conference on Capitol Hill, Hilton spoke about the impact of having the intimate video shared without her consent.
“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse,” she said. “There were no laws at the time to protect me. There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it. They called me names, they laughed and made me the punchline. They sold my pain for clicks, and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, to even be grateful for the attention. These people didn’t see me as a young woman who had been exploited. They didn’t see the panic that I felt, the humiliation or the shame. No one asked me what I lost.”
The movement to outlaw image-based sexual abuse has entered the mainstream in the two decades since Hilton became the butt of crude jokes everywhere. But the laws haven’t kept up with technological advances, especially as explicit deepfakes can be made with AI image generators for virtually no cost.
Hilton spoke at the news conference alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Laurel Lee, the co-sponsors of the DEFIANCE Act, a bill that would allow victims of deepfakes to directly sue the people who caused them harm. The bipartisan bill passed the Senate unanimously last week, just as it did last year, and now the lawmakers are rallying for a House floor vote.
“This bill shows what is possible when we put victims ahead of politics,” Lee said.
The push to pass the DEFIANCE Act is the latest effort to unite women lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and Lee, a Florida Republican, across party lines. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Sarah McBride, progressive Democrats, and Republican Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Claudia Tenney, Nancy Mace and Marianette Miller-Meeks were among those in attendance at Thursday’s news conference.
The House has yet to schedule a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, spoke favorably of the bill to The Independent after last week’s Senate passage.
Years after the first violation, fake images of Paris Hilton still abound. During the news conference, Hilton said over 100,000 nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of her have been circulated online.
The DEFIANCE Act allows targets of deepfake abuse to sue the creators, distributors or commissioners of explicit nonconsensual images. There is a booming market for high-quality (read: more life-like) sexually explicit deepfake videos, and the DEFIANCE Act would allow survivors to recover profits from their likeness.
“Take It Down gave us removal, and DEFIANCE will give us recourse and restitution,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Last year’s Take It Down Act was championed by First Lady Melania Trump and instituted criminal penalties for the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery, real or fake. The second provision of the law, which requires platforms to have a process to remove nonconsensual images 48 hours after reporting, goes into effect in May.
Seventeen-year-old Francesca Mani, a survivor of deepfake abuse from her high school peers, emphasized that DEFIANCE would provide accountability for perpetrators.
“DEFIANCE adds consequences that hit where it hurts. If ethics aren’t in your heart, self-preservation should be,” she said. “If you don’t care about others, protect yourself. It’s not cool or comfortable in jail and to Congress: pass this now, please, no more waiting while tech outpaces justice.”
The DEFIANCE Act has been revived as the image generation feature of Grok, the AI chatbot integrated in social platform X, has been used to make nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children. Reporting from The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates Grok created and posted over 1.8 million sexualized images of women over nine days in December. X said it took steps to restrict the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes, but users have been consistently able to bypass guardrails.
None of the speakers at the Thursday news conference mentioned Grok or X specifically in their remarks.
But Ocasio-Cortez said she is among the women elected officials who have been targeted by such nonconsensual explicit deepfakes. Users asked Grok to generate nonconsensual images of the congresswoman in January.
“As a survivor of sexual assault myself, this resurfaces trauma for so many people across the country, and that is what it is intended to do,” she said. “Because the creation of this content parallels the same exact intention of physical assault, which is about power, domination and humiliation. And while these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real. Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this. Teenagers switch schools and children lose their lives. Congress has a moral obligation to stop this harm.”
When asked about potential free speech conflicts, Lee said that there were no First Amendment concerns with the bill and that it does not contradict Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally does not hold online entities responsible for speech posted on their platforms.
This isn’t the first time Hilton has visited Capitol Hill to advocate for a bill. Last year, she shared her experiences as a survivor of the “troubled teen” industry, helping pass the Stop Institutional Abuse Act.
Hilton closed her official remarks by talking about the world she wants to build for her 2-year-old daughter.
“I would go to the ends of the earth to protect her, but I can’t protect her from this, not yet, and that’s why I’m here, because this isn’t about just technology,” she said. “It’s about power. It’s about someone using someone’s likeness to humiliate, silence and strip them of their dignity. But victims deserve more than after-the-fact apologies. We deserve justice.”
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.
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