Nicole Boynton has endured some tough days throughout her life.

September 30, 1999, was one of them.

An argument with her then-boyfriend, Ronnie Moss II, escalated from a verbal altercation to a physical one, and she was on the receiving end of punches from the man who claimed to love her.

They shared a 9-month-old son, Romello, a townhome — and a life.

Boynton had endured trauma and sexual abuse from others throughout her childhood, and then Moss came along. That September day, she made the split-second decision to protect herself in a way that she hadn’t before.

The fight escalated to the point where a neighboring group of middle-school-aged girls overheard the commotion and knocked on the door.

Moss answered and told them everything was fine, but it wasn’t. 

After they left, he returned to confront Boynton who, at this point, had retrieved a steak knife from the kitchen.

He stepped toward her and grabbed her arm. During the struggle, she drove the knife into Moss’ chest.

It would be the last time she ever suffered physical abuse from him. The knife pierced Moss’ heart. He died.

“September 30, 1999, was one of the worst days of my life,” Boynton said. “It was one of the days that I lost somebody that I really loved and I cared about and I felt like I didn’t know how to save him anymore.”

Domestic violence cases that end in victim retaliation against their abusers, resulting in death, aren’t always as black and white as they may seem. For instance, it took more than two years before prosecutors indicted Boynton on charges of felony murder and aggravated assault.

Her case sits inside a national pattern advocates have documented for years: Women say they were trying to protect themselves or a loved one when they retaliated, while prosecutors frame them as violent aggressors and seek long sentences anyway. In courtrooms, the question often becomes narrow — did she kill him? — while the context that shaped that moment gets treated like background noise.

That narrowing lands hardest on Black women.

Ellie Williams, legal director at the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said she has watched that pattern play out in case after case through her work representing incarcerated survivors. Her office leads the coalition’s Justice for Incarcerated Survivors program, providing them with post-conviction representation and pushing courts to look again at convictions tied to abuse. 

“It is really rare that my Black female clients are given any sort of leniency in sentencing,” Williams said. “If they can be maxed out, they’re being maxed out.”

That same story is one reason Michigan advocates are pressing for their own survivor justice legislation.

Natalie Holbrook-Combs, program director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Michigan Criminal Justice Program, said the organization has advocated alongside imprisoned people in her state for decades, with a newer “hyper focus” on women serving long and life sentences. 

“In Michigan, we have about 33,000 people in prison right now and 1,750 of them are women,” she said, explaining that women’s needs get ignored because the system was built “for and by men.”

Holbrook-Combs said the numbers inside Michigan’s women’s prisons show racial concentration at the extreme end of punishment. According to reports she has read she said 191 women are serving life with parole in Michigan, including 172 serving life without parole, and “83 are Black.” She said more than 500 women are serving 15 years or more and “of those women, 250 of them are Black.”

She also described watching five domestic-violence-related clemency cases move through Michigan’s judicial appeals process, only to be denied after public hearings that required women to relive their trauma. 

“Three of those five women were Black women,” said Holbrook-Combs. 

Marta Nelson of the Vera Institute of Justice said the organization’s sentencing work exists because “you really aren’t going to be able to end mass incarceration without addressing how we sentence people in this country. Michigan’s long sentences make it a critical place to push reform.” 

Erin M. Ross, also with Vera’s sentencing initiative, said nationwide research consistently shows incarcerated women have extraordinarily high rates of victimization. “Some reports say at least 86 percent of incarcerated women have reported sexual violence,” Ross said. “Seventy-seven percent report partner violence and around 60 percent report caregiver abuse.” 

“At its core, my research shows that Black women who survive violence often enter the criminal legal system already socially, systemically and legally disappeared,” said Breea Willingham, Ph.D, associate professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. “A pattern I identify through my framework, Black Feminist Disappearance Theory, which explains how harm against Black women is routinely minimized, dismissed or reframed in ways that erase their victimization. That disappearance shapes what happens at every stage, from police response to charges, trial and sentencing. In simple terms, the system often treats Black women’s survival as criminal behavior.”

In Georgia, Williams said, murder historically carried a mandatory minimum life sentence — leaving almost no room for a court to account for domestic violence as a driving force in how a survivor responded. Under Georgia’s Survivor Justice Act, signed into law last year, that doorway opened wider: the law created routes for abuse evidence to matter at trial, at sentencing and after conviction through resentencing. 

Boynton’s story shows why that matters.

She was 18, exhausted from trying to keep peace inside a home where her body and safety never belonged to her. She told it straight, the way you do when the details have never left you.

She described a relationship where the rules changed constantly and where violence was the predictable ending of ordinary moments. 

“If I didn’t pay him enough attention or if I didn’t do something a certain way, I already knew I was going to get smacked or punched,” she said.

That day, she was nursing her son when Moss walked in and erupted.

“Before I knew it, he snatched Romello off my breast and threw him against the wall,” she said. “And we immediately started fighting.”

Her townhome windows were open — she liked them open while she cleaned — and the noise carried, alerting the neighborhood girls.

“When they knocked on the door, it was like he instantly stopped,” Boynton said. “It’s like it took him out of his trance.”

She ran upstairs to her son.

“He was still breathing, but he was unconscious,” she said.

In the seconds that followed, Boynton said, her mind went to escape. 

“In the kitchen, he chased me around the island and I got to the nearest drawer that I could and I hurried up and I grabbed a knife,” she said. “And so I’m thinking in my mind, if he see the knife, he’ll stop, but he didn’t care that I had a knife.”

Boynton said she pleaded.

“Please,” she recalled telling him. “Somebody’s gonna get hurt. Please, just stop.”

She said Moss grabbed her arm, overpowering her, twisting the knife toward her body.

“When he grabbed my arm, I knew I was gonna lose my life,” she said. “The knife was pointing at me, and all I was trying to do now is not get hit with the knife.”

Then: a swing, an attempt to break free, Moss falling back.

Boynton called 911.

On the tape, she said, she told the operator they’d had an altercation. She said she stabbed him — then corrected herself, trying to explain the force of his grip, her loss of control over her own arm. She said the wound looked small beside his heart, but blood pumped fast. She pressed a baby blanket to his chest. 

She says Moss grabbed her arm and apologized as he died.

When police arrived, Boynton said, they pushed her aside.

“I’m yelling at the police,” she said, “because I was applying pressure to him versus them just looking at him.”

Boynton said officers placed her in handcuffs with only a T-shirt on, then questioned her at the Marietta police station. She said she didn’t ask for a lawyer because her grandmother raised her to believe the truth would protect her.

“They waited to get all of the questions out of me,” she said. “And as soon as I finished, then they tell me that he died and I fell out.”

What followed, she said, was an outcome that felt decided from the beginning.

“They had already had it in their minds who to charge,” she said.

Prosecutors indicted her in 2001. The next year, her case went to trial and a jury convicted her of felony murder and aggravated assault. She says she later learned there had been a plea offer for 15 years — information she says she didn’t have when it mattered.

Her sentence: life. 

The legal framing of cases like Boynton’s often ignores a truth that advocates say is central: survivors do not enter the criminal legal system as blank slates. Large shares of incarcerated women report past victimization, including intimate partner violence and sexual violence — trauma that can shape pathways into criminalized survival. 

Williams said Georgia’s law was built to force the system to confront that context without treating it like an excuse or a footnote. She described “criminalized survival” as acts undertaken to stay safe, but that lead to incarceration: fighting back against an abusive partner, being coerced into crimes under threat, or being charged with “failure to protect” when an abusive partner harms a child and the mother is punished for what she could not stop.

That last category hits hard in public conversation because it cuts against the cultural script — the myth that a mother can always control an abusive man, that danger is something you can simply choose to avoid. 

Williams calls it what it is: another way the system criminalizes survival.

Black women are incarcerated at markedly higher rates than White women, a disparity that shapes who gets punished hardest when courts and prosecutors decide whose survival “counts.” The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., reports that Black women are imprisoned at about 1.7 times the rate of White women (rates per 100,000), even though women remain a smaller share of the total prison population than men.

The harm shows up inside women’s prisons in a way that’s hard to ignore: incarcerated women are overwhelmingly survivors of violence. 

Because the system does not reliably track “criminalized survival” in official sentencing data, some of the clearest numbers come from large-scale survey work that asked incarcerated women directly what happened. In a 2020 analysis for The Appeal, reporter Justine van der Leun coded 608 survey responses from women imprisoned on murder and manslaughter charges across 22 states and found that at least 30 percent said they were incarcerated for trying to protect themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. 

If those findings reflect the broader population, the analysis estimates — conservatively — that more than 4,400 women and girls could be serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival tied to violence and abuse. 

That same survey work also matters for the focus on Black women because it shows who is sitting in these cages when “self-defense” gets treated like first-degree intent, according to experts. Among respondents, 32.7 percent identified as Black. The reporting also notes that race and socioeconomic circumstances repeatedly surfaced in how women described being charged, prosecuted and sentenced. Those numbers don’t claim a single national “Black women self-defense sentencing” rate — because the system rarely labels cases that way. But they do document, at scale, that Black women are a significant share of the women describing survival-driven convictions inside the most severe homicide categories. 

“The Black women’s prison narratives I’ve studied repeatedly show they suffered prolonged abuse that was ignored by the system and their failed attempts to seek help,” Willingham said. “And at trial, context surrounding the women’s actions are often misconstrued or deleted entirely. If states truly want to stop criminalizing survival, reforms must expand how self-defense is recognized, allow complete evidence of prior abuse and invest in trauma-informed training and defense resources. Also, limit unchecked prosecutorial power.”

The Georgia Survivor Justice Act attempts to change outcomes at three points: trial, sentencing and post-conviction. Williams said the law modifies legal defenses — including self-defense and coercion — so lawyers can present abuse evidence in a way jurors are permitted to meaningfully consider in their decisions. It creates a mitigation framework that can move sentencing out from under mandatory minimums. And it allows retroactive resentencing, giving people already behind bars a way to return to court and ask for a new sentence that accounts for abuse as a significant contributing factor. 

That retroactive piece is where Boynton’s case broke open.

On January 5, a judge in Cobb County vacated her life sentence and resentenced her to time served, making her the first person released under Georgia’s new law. 

Boynton said she never stopped pushing paper — letters, requests, documents. She said she wrote a judge so powerfully early on that it helped her secure bond while her case dragged on.

“I didn’t know I was a writer until I wrote something so deep to the judge,” she said.

Inside prison, she said, incarceration stripped her privacy and dignity — telling her when to eat, when to move, how to live — while her mind stayed fixed on a future she couldn’t yet see.

“My body was there physically,” she said, “my mind would never let me stay there.”

She described cycling through multiple prisons as facilities closed and reopened — each transfer another disruption, another reminder that women’s incarceration in America is treated as an afterthought inside systems built for men. 

She also described health harm she connects to confinement: “Every prison that I’ve been to has something wrong with the water,” she said, describing serious illness and surgery near the end of her sentence.

Then came court — and a judge who looked at the record and said what Boynton had been saying for decades.

“You should have never been in prison,” Boynton recalled Judge Angela Z. Brown telling her, as the life sentence was lifted.

Boynton’s son appeared on Zoom.

“My son always tell me, ‘Mom, I love you. You’re my queen,’” she said.

Boynton still speaks of Moss as someone who was not “always a bad person.” She still marks his birthday at times. She grieves and remembers and holds contradiction, because real life keeps contradiction.

The law does not ask survivors to become perfect victims. It asks courts to become more honest about what abuse does to decision-making, danger and time.

Advocates see what has happened in Georgia as part of a broader shift. States including New York and Oklahoma have some of the most robust survivor sentencing laws, and Georgia’s is among the most expansive in how early it can operate in a case, according to Williams. 

Other states are moving, too. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation on January 21 aimed at fairer sentencing and record relief for survivors, a pairing advocates say is essential for rebuilding life after incarceration. 

“For far too long, Black women survivors have been punished for surviving,” said Monifa Bandele, chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She pointed to survivor-centered reforms that treat coercive control and domestic violence as realities courts must weigh — and that recognize how a record can lock someone out of housing and employment long after a sentence ends.

The throughline across these reforms is not mercy. It is accuracy.

The current system has long demanded that women fit a narrow mold of innocence to be believed — and Black women rarely get the benefit of that mold. They are read as older than they are, tougher than they feel, more responsible for the violence done to them than the person who did it. They are expected to absorb harm quietly, then punished when they refuse.

Boynton named that imbalance in her own case.

“Back then, Cobb County was predominantly White,” she said. “You could have people do the same thing and they get involuntary manslaughter, versus I get a life sentence.”

She said she had no prior record. She spent three years out on bond without trouble. None of it moved the system.

“It was like they said, ‘She doesn’t know nothing about the law so we gonna get her,’” she said. “And that’s exactly what they did.”

Georgia’s Survivor Justice Act did not give her back 23 years.

It gave her back breath.

And it offered a blueprint that — if other states follow — could mean the next Black woman who survives does not have to spend decades proving she deserved to live.

Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it's destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.

“I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],” artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. “Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.”

Oreglia’s Pinterest account is where she keeps reference material for her work, including human anatomy photos. In the past few months, she’s noticed an uptick in seemingly innocuous photos of women being flagged by Pinterest’s AI moderators. Oreglia told 404 Media there’s been a clear pattern to the reference material the site has a problem with. “Female figures in particular, even if completely clothed, get taken down and I have to keep appealing those decisions,” she said. This pattern is common on many social media platforms, and predates the advent of generative AI. 

“We publish clear guidelines on adult sexual content and nudity and use a combination of AI and human review for enforcement,” Pinterest told 404 Media. “We have an appeals process where a human reviews the content and reactivates it when we’ve made a mistake.” It also confirmed that the site uses both humans and automated systems for moderation.

Oreglia shared some of the works Pinterest flagged including a photo of a muscular woman in a bikini holding knives, a painting of two clothed women in an intimate embrace, and a stock photo of a man holding a gun on a telephone that was flagged for “self-harm.” In most cases, Oreglia can appeal and get a decision reversed, but that eats up time. Time she could be spending making art.

And those appeals aren’t always approved. “The worst case scenario for this stuff is that you get your account banned,” Oreglia said.

r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. “Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins...every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,” read a post on r/Pinterest. 

The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out. 

“I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and ‘no AI,’” they said. “On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled ‘Hand Drawn’ but simultaneously marked as ‘AI modified,’ it creates confusion and undermines that positioning.”

Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they’ve seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as “AI modified” despite being older than image generation tech. “There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected,” she said. “Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI.”

Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. “I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it,” said another post. “I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete.”

Artist Eva Toorenent told 404 Media that she’s been able to cull most of the AI-generated content from her board, but that it took a lot of time. Whenever she saw what she thought was an AI-generated image, she told Pinterest she didn’t want to see it and eventually the algorithm learned. But, like Oreglia fighting auto-moderation and Zakuga fighting to get the “AI modified” label taken off her work, training Pinterest’s algorithm to stop serving you AI-generated images eats up precious time.

AI boosters often talk about how much time these systems will save everyone. They’re pitched as productivity boosters. Earlier this month, Pinterest laid off 15 percent of its work force as part of a push to prioritize AI. In a post on LinkedIn, one of the former employees shared part of the email CEO Bill Ready sent out after the lay offs. “We’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach—prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working.”

Toorenent removed all her own art from her Pinterest account after hearing the news that the site would use public pins to train Pinterest Canvas, the company’s proprietary text-to-image AI. But she has no control over other users uploading her artwork. “I have already caught a few of my images still on Pinterest that I did not upload myself…that makes me incredibly mad,” she told 404 Media. “It used to be a great way to get your work seen among other people, but it’s being used to train their internal AI.”

Oreglia told 404 Media that the flood of AI has changed her relationship to a site she once used to prize. “It's definitely affected how I search things and I'm always now very critical about where something came from... although I've always been overly pedantic about research,” she said. “It does make you do your due diligence but it sucks to constantly have to question and check if something is authentic or synthetic.”

She’s thought about leaving the platform, but feels stuck. “I just want to be able to take all my references with me. I've been on the platform for about ten years and have very carefully curated it. It's really nice to be able to just go to my page and search for something I saved instead of having to save everything to folders although I also do that,” she said. “More and more I'm trying to curate and collect physical references too but some of that can take up space I don't have so it can be difficult. Having a physical reference library just seems more and more necessary these days…artists have to be adaptable to this kind of thing these days. It's annoying but not unmanageable.”

Ready has been vocal and proud about the company’s commitment to forcing AI into every aspect of the user experience. “At Pinterest…we’re deploying AI to flip the script on social media, using it to more aggressively promote user well being rather than the alternative formula of triggering engagement by enragement,” Ready said in a January column at Fortune. “Social media platforms like Pinterest live and die by users’ willingness to share creative and original ideas.”

I'm generally skeptical about AI, mostly because we're currently living in a hype bubble about it, with stories both good and bad, everywhere.

It's clearly not going away so I decided that instead I should treat AI like any other technology that may have good or bad qualities, by evaluating it on its own merits whenever I could. I've heard enough good stories from people I know doing amazing things with AI that save them time and effort that I'm still willing to give it a try from time to time.

Lately, everyone is into AI agents and Paul Ford wrote a great piece about it that mirrors what I've heard from programmer friends also using them. I even dipped my own toes into this water last week when I asked Claude to code up an iOS app that I've had in my head for years and in less than two minutes it cranked out the swift code and files I need to dump into Xcode to test my new app out (haven't done that part yet but it definitely shows promise).

So let's try and save time with AI!

The things I'm most interested in are automations that reduce tedious things I have to do by hand, so asking AI to look up anything I've written in the past on a certain subject and find it for me, or turn a meeting transcript into an outline of things to do next on a project are both things that seem easy enough for a pattern-recognition engine to complete.

Someone at my work asked me to compile a list of a previous articles I've written over the past year that had already been edited and vetted by our in-house experts, so we could re-use them as internal documentation or in other contexts.

I thought this could be a perfect job for AI to save some time for me.

I tend to write a handful of pieces each week, so after a year of working there, I've got a couple hundred articles in my Google account. Google Doc's "last opened by you" interface means it's not easy to look up all my previous docs on a single screen, much less be able to go through them easily. It would take literal hours to open hundreds of docs by hand, read them a bit, then categorize them myself.

Claude trips and falls

I fired up Claude.ai and asked it to look at everything I authored in my Google Docs account, and produce a list of article titles that linked to the docs, all grouped into categories of related subjects.

Claude told me it didn't have access to my google account, even though I use Google sign-on as my login. Claude said I needed to install a Google plugin, and while digging around for that I figured out I was already connected to Google's API (again, from my login).

I told Claude and it apologized with a "oh right, my bad" which was 4-5 minutes wasted tracking down an already existing Google connection. Not a great sign.

So I asked Claude to dig up my old articles and found out Claude doesn't have API access to searching specific files in my Google Drive or Docs so instead it asked me to create, then copy and paste a "share link" for every single thing I've written.

I decided it was time for me to try using Google's own AI instead.

Gemini save me!

I started my first ever session with Gemini, as I figured it should have no issues dealing with Google APIs, so I asked it to compile a list of pieces I've written over the last year about disaster recovery and toss them into some categories for me.

At first it gave me a list of 17 articles spread across four or five categories. I knew this was barely scratching the surface, so from memory I started expanding my requests, asking for all the things I wrote about fires and floods in addition to the stuff it found about hurricanes.

It gathered 30 pieces and eventually over 40 titles of old content and the categories expanded to over a dozen. As I read through results, I kept thinking of more things I wasn't seeing and I'd ask it to gather additional pieces on specific subjects.

What's wild is each time I'd ask for an updated list, it would return a different number of items. Sometimes it would drop back down to 17, other times over 50 would be returned. Mostly about 30 docs I wrote would be shared in the list. Every two or three times I'd make a new request, it'd stop numbering my list and go back to plain bullet points. Then I'd ask it to reinstate the numbers.

I kept going, getting frustrated with the inconsistent output. After an hour of futzing, I eventually tailored my request to docs I'd been the original author of, that had more than a couple hundred words, and to omit any meeting transcripts, since a lot of those were brainstorm sessions with 3-4 people throwing ideas around. Gemini thought some of the ideas pitched in meetings were actual articles and some of my resulting items were things I once pitched but never wrote.

The wheels come off the bus

When I thought my list was finally looking comprehensive, I started checking each of the links to my old Google Docs. A few article titles linked to meeting transcripts. A few linked to my resume which I guess I uploaded at some point. I started seeing a couple articles I know I didn't write, like something about earthquake strapping on buildings to prevent damage, and when I'd follow the link to see what Gemini was using as a source, it was a piece I wrote on how to protect your home from prolonged freezing temperatures.

I know I'm supposed to mention errors to AI so it can fix things. So I asked Gemini why it was hallucinating an article I never wrote about earthquakes, and why it linked to an unrelated piece. I got apologies and muddled excuses. I noticed half the links to my shared Google Docs linked to a google.com search instead of a docs.google.com URL. Again I asked Gemini to be sure and link directly to actual pieces and I got more apologies.

I asked Gemini to save the list output as a new doc in my account and was told it wasn't allowed to create new files even though it's Google's Gemini in my Google account accessing my Google Docs.

Eventually, I copied and pasted the results from a few dozen Gemini outputs into one giant long document. I found about 50 unique pieces I had to categorize and share, and as I worked on those by hand, the titles continued to jog my memory about other pieces I'd written but weren't mentioned so I'd search Google Docs and add them to the list myself.

Conclusion: not good

A thing I thought might take five minutes and save me oodles of tedious work ended up taking over two hours to produce a long list, half done by hand, half by Gemini, after removing erroneous links and straight up hallucinations.

I think my request of "Hey Gemini, show me a list of all the articles I wrote over the last year and arrange them into categories by subject" is a straightforward one, and I came away from this experience surprised that Gemini shipped these features as bleeding edge AI to customers when it never really delivered for me.

I've had a few good experiences with AI actually saving me time and effort (especially around transcribing audio and video to text I can later edit/transform into stories) but in this case I can't believe we're boiling oceans and burning forests and firing everyone in the tech industry for AI systems that can't complete fairly simple tasks.

Rep. Heather Meyer debates the "bathroom bill" that passed the House Feb. 18, 2026. She says it paints a "bullseye" on trans people. (Photo by Morgan Chilson/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Kansans will soon be required to use the bathroom of their biological sex at birth in all government buildings after the House joined the Senate Wednesday to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. 

House Substitute for Senate Bill 244 will go into effect immediately after paperwork is filed at the Secretary of State’s office. Along with the public facilities regulations, the bill requires Kansans to use the gender marker of their biological sex at birth on their driver’s licenses and birth certificates. It invalidates documents that were issued to transgender people previously. 

The House vote was 87 to 37, with Republican Rep. Mark Schreiber joining all Democrats present in opposing the bill. It passed the Senate on Tuesday. 

Kelly said in a statement after her veto was overridden that the bill was poorly drafted and will cost taxpayers millions of dollars to comply. 

“It is nothing short of ridiculous that the Legislature is forcing the entire state, every city and town, every school district, every public university to spend taxpayer money on a manufactured problem,” she said. “Kansans elected them to focus on education, job creation, housing, and grocery costs.”

Just four Democratic opponents were able to debate the bill before Rep. Barb Wasinger, R-Hays, made a motion of the previous question, which means all debate stops and a vote is immediately taken.

Rep. Heather Meyer, an Overland Park Democrat, said the legislation was discriminatory and “paints a bullseye” on the backs of legislative colleagues who are trans women, including Rep. Abi Boatman, D-Wichita, and former representative Stephanie Byers, a Democrat from Wichita.  

“I feel safer in a restroom with those representatives than I do or would with some people here, including women, and I’m not even joking about that,” she said. 

Rep. Alexis Simmons, D-Topeka, said she took issue with a statement that the bill codifies societal norms. 

“We used to also have a law that women were subjugated to pregnancy and marriage because that was considered the societal norm,” she said. “Societal norms also would have included slavery and Jim Crow and other horrific stains on our nation’s history.”

Rep. Lindsay Vaughn, D-Overland Park, said evidence shows that bills like SB 244 negatively impact the mental health of trans people and cause “hateful stereotypes.” 

“Attempting to legislate away the rights of people who are different from you has played out in history time and again,” she said. “So I want to ask which side of history does this body want to be on today?”

After debate was shut down, many Democratic opponents used the one-minute opportunity to explain their vote to show support for trans people and their frustration with the bill. 

Rep. Carolyn Caiharr, R-Edwardsville, supported the bill and voted to overturn the veto. 

“Our young women deserve to have restrooms and locker rooms where they can undress without men in the room. This bill protects girls and women, the ones feminists used to claim to stand for,” she said. 

Along with opposing the bill, several Democrats talked about the fact that debate was cut short Wednesday, and that the process allowed no public input on the bathroom restrictions. 

“Statesmanship requires the willingness to listen to those you disagree with, to care when you are exhausted, and to respect when you are not willing to,” said Rep. Kirk Haskins, D-Topeka. “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. They deserve our protection, even if we don’t want to listen to them.”

Rep. Lynn Melton, D-Kansas City, said lawmakers were silenced during the debate on SB 244. 

“Kansans want tax relief and affordability,” she said. “Fourteen voices were silenced today that represent thousands of people who deserve to be heard. Shame on this chamber.”

Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, said in a statement that SB 244 protects privacy and safety. 

“While the Governor fearmongers and muddies the water with her misleading veto message, our position remains steady: This isn’t about scoring political points, but doing what’s right for women and girls across our communities,” he said. “Kansans expect clarity, not confusion.”

Advocacy groups joined in a written statement criticizing the passage of SB 244 and raising concerns about its effects. 

“This discriminatory bill undermines our state’s strong constitutional protections against government overreach and persecution,” said Micah  Kubic, executive director of ACLU of Kansas.

Michael Poppa, executive director of Mainstream Coalition, said the legislativesupermajority was targeting an already marginalized community. 

“Kansas families are being crushed by rising housing and healthcare costs. Small businesses face workforce shortages,” he said. “Rural communities are losing hospitals and struggling with failing infrastructure. These are the issues that demand action.”

Other organizations included in the statement were Equality Kansas, Kansas Interfaith Action, Loud Light Civic Action and Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes.

Platform Ventures, the Kansas City investment firm at the center of a firestorm over its plans to sell a massive south Kansas City warehouse to the federal government for use as an ICE detention center, announced today that it is “not moving forward” with the sale.

The announcement comes after weeks of sustained, escalating mass protests, student walkouts, a national general strike, business shutdowns, and relentless community organizing that made Kansas City a flashpoint in the national resistance to the Trump administration’s kidnapping and concentration camp machine.

Let us be absolutely clear about what happened here: the people of Kansas City forced Platform Ventures’ hand.

This was not a corporate change of heart. This was not Platform Ventures suddenly discovering a conscience after secretly negotiating to hand over a publicly subsidized, $80 million warehouse to be converted into a 7,500-bed concentration camp. Ultimately, it was a calculated business decision made under extraordinary pressure from a community that refused to be complicit in the machinery of mass incarceration and deportation.

What They Said

In a statement released February 12, Platform Ventures claimed it “chose not to move forward” because “the terms no longer met our fiduciary requirements for a timely closing.”

To be explicitly clear, they are not saying it was wrong. They are also not saying they oppose detention. They are saying the deal stopped making financial sense. The company also cited “baseless speculation, inaccurate narratives and serious threats toward leadership” as motivating the statement.

There was nothing baseless about any of it. ICE agents were physically spotted touring the warehouse on January 15. Port KC documents confirmed the plan. Jackson County Legislature Chair Manny Abarca confirmed that a DHS supervisor told him the facility would hold at least 7,500 beds and was planned to open by the end of 2026. Platform Ventures’ own previous statement confirmed “all negotiations are complete.”

The speculation was in fact confirmed by various sources, repeatedly, by the company’s own words and by the federal agents walking through the building.

What Actually Killed the Deal: The People

What Platform Ventures will not say, and what mainstream outlets may underreport, is the extraordinary, multiracial, cross-generational movement that erupted across the Kansas City metro in the last month.

Organizations like Decarcerate KC, Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation (AIRR), the Missouri Workers Center, Stand Up KC, and dozens of other grassroots groups mobilized with a speed and ferocity that corporate Kansas City was not prepared for.

On January 15, the day ICE agents toured the warehouse, protesters were already on site. Jackson County Legislature Chair Manny Abarca drove to the site himself and was confronted by ICE officers who told him he wasn’t allowed on the publicly subsidized property. He recorded the entire interaction.

That same day, the Kansas City Council, at Mayor Quinton Lucas’ request, passed a five-year moratorium on non-municipal detention facilities within city limits.

On January 20, hundreds gathered across the metro for protests and immigrant rights trainings. Students at Staley High School in North Kansas City staged a walkout with hundreds of students marching against ICE. In Overland Park, North Kansas City, Raytown South, Grandview, Wyandotte, student protests have drawn students and adults alike. Across the country, student walkouts have become one of the most powerful expressions of resistance, with young people refusing to sit quietly while their classmates’ families are targeted.

On January 24, hundreds braved single-digit temperatures and snow to march through downtown Kansas City as part of a national shutdown. Protesters marched from Oppenstein Park directly to properties owned by Platform Ventures on Baltimore Street. Decarcerate KC’s Pateisha Royal vociferiously denounced the planned concentration camp. The Missouri Workers Center’s Terrence Wise said what so many were feeling: “I’m a father of three, and I cannot accept that ICE just last night kidnapped a 2-year-old, whisking her off to the sort of detention facility they want to build here.”

Dozens of Kansas City businesses closed their doors or donated proceeds to AIRR KC and other immigration defense organizations in an unprecedented show of economic solidarity.

Port KC voted to sever all ties with Platform Ventures on February 9.

Leavenworth saw over 100 protesters rally against the separate CoreCivic detention center proposal. Representatives Emanuel Cleaver and Sharice Davids sent letters to DHS denouncing the planned operation.

The walls closed in from every direction because the people closed them.

It’s Cause to Celebrate. It’s Also Cause to Organize.

Platform Ventures’ statement is carefully worded. They said they are “not actively engaged” with the U.S. government or “any other prospective purchaser” for the I-49 property. They did not say they would never sell. They did not say the federal government has abandoned its plans for a mega-detention facility in the Kansas City metro. They did not say they oppose the caging of immigrants.

The CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth is still moving forward. ICE arrests in the Kansas City metro have surged in Missouri and nearly tripled in Kansas from January to October 2025. Masked federal agents are still roving our streets. The $45 billion allocated for ICE detention in the “Big Beautiful Bill” is still law. The administration is still targeting our neighbors.

What happened here is a victory, and it belongs to every single person who showed up in the cold, who walked out of class, who closed their shop, who marched to Platform Ventures’ front door, who trained their neighbors on their constitutional rights, who made phone calls, who refused to look away.

But a victory and a conclusion are two different things.

The fight for Kansas City continues. The fight against the carceral state continues. The fight for our immigrant neighbors, our unhoused neighbors, our Black and brown communities targeted by every arm of the state continues.

Platform Ventures backed down because organized people are more powerful than organized money. Remember that. And stay in the streets.

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This is a developing story. The Kansas City Defender will continue to provide updates.

Resources: If you or someone you know needs immigration legal assistance, contact AIRR KC (Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation). Know your rights: you have the right to remain silent, the right to refuse entry without a judicial warrant, and the right to an attorney.

The post BREAKING: Platform Ventures Backs Down From ICE Detention Center Sale After Weeks of Mass Organizing and Protest appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.