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.
Downtown Peabody welcomes visitors in October 2025. During World War II, Peabody was the site of a German prisoner of war camp. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
What if an authority figure directed you to pull a lever that delivered a painful shock to an unseen victim?
If you’re like most people, you’d do it. And you’d keep doing it, at the urging of that authority figure, despite the howls of pain from the poor sap on the other side of the wall.
You’ve probably heard of the Milgram experiment, in which a Yale psychologist faked electric shocks to study the willingness of ordinary people to obey orders in conflict with their personal conscience. Nobody was really hurt, because no shocks were delivered and the yowls of pain came from actors. We’ll return to Milgram shortly, but let me explain how I got to thinking about the famous experiment in the first place.
It was Gov. Laura Kelly’s last State of the State address, delivered Tuesday.
“Kansans are the most civil, decent people on earth,” she declared.
I couldn’t agree more. But our nature is part of the problem.
Kelly, a Democrat, was trying to make a point about civility and bipartisanship in politics. She urged Kansas lawmakers, the supermajority of whom were Republicans, not to let the loudest and most extreme viewpoints “drown out the voices of the vast majority of Kansans, who want to see us work together.”
Problem is, the Legislature has ignored what the vast majority of Kansans want for years — and right-wing extremism already rules. That’s why we don’t have legalized pot or Medicaid expansion. About 65% of Kansans support recreational marijuana, and 74% think expanding Medicaid would help rural hospitals stay in business. Those figures are from the Fall 2025 Kansas Speaks public opinion survey by the Docking Institute for Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University.
Much of the daylight between what Kansans want and what we get is because of historic GOP majorities in the Kansas House and Senate, which routinely block any measure that might give joy or comfort to anybody but the rich. But some of the blame belongs to a collective culture in which Kansans are so desperate to be polite and cooperative, and not to be regarded as different, that we’ll defer to power even when we shouldn’t.
Not all Kansans are like this. I’m not. My journalistic training and the books I’ve read and the friends I’ve made have allowed me to transcend Sunflower bashfulness. But it hasn’t absolved my guilt about being different.
There’s no guilt like Kansas guilt, and it lurks inside us like a vestigial organ from our founding. Although admitted as a free state on the eve of the Civil War 165 years ago, Kansas throbs with the political memory of the struggle that made us bleed. In our collective conscience there nags the worry we haven’t lived up to our promise, that even though we helped end the stain of slavery we still struggle with other deadly civic sins. From racism to hunger to inequality, the job remains unfinished. Nobody today remembers the state’s founding, but every living and reasoning Kansan takes their catechism from the pages of history.
We Kansans are not only a civil lot, as a whole, but a decent lot.
Gov. Laura Kelly delivers her State of the State speech on Jan. 13, 2026, in the Kansas House. (Photo by Thad Allton for Kansas Reflector)
My definition of decency is behaving in a moral way, whether or not it conforms to accepted notions of respectability. You probably know a neighbor or a friend who has put their own self-interest aside to help you or someone else, and that’s the kind of approach Kelly specifically mentioned. Perhaps you donate food in a blessing box or give what you can to charity. But let me give you an historic example of Kansas decency in a time of trial.
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of captured German soldiers were sent to POW camps across America. Some of these camps were in Kansas, including one that held 100 or so prisoners at Peabody.
The POWs were billeted in town at a warehouse that had been turned into a prison. During the day the POWs were sent out to work, for meager pay, at surrounding farms, as long as the work was not dangerous and didn’t involve war production. POW labor helped alleviate a wartime manpower shortage at farms across Kansas.
“At first only the Mennonites invited the prisoners to work,” recalled Marian Franz, in the Mennonite Weekly Review in 1989. She had been an adolescent farm girl during the war. “Then others, observing the comfortable arrangement, employed them also.”
Franz wrote that she was more afraid of the armed U.S. guards than of the German prisoners. The Mennonites are historically known as pacifists and, during the war, many were conscientious objectors and given alternative service.
The German worked hard, were grateful for the quality of the food they were given, and even had a little time for hobbies such as sketching or whittling. The commander of the Peabody camp obtained soccer balls and boxing gloves for the prisoners. Even the guards who accompanied the prisoners to the field work developed a degree of trust.
“The original tension between the U.S. and German soldiers was relaxed by the hospitality that our Mennonite home and community extended equally to friend and foe,” Franz remembered. “As time went on fewer guards accompanied the prisoners. The guards no longer brought the guns into the house at mealtime. On occasion we sang together at the piano.”
Not everyone liked how well the German prisoners were being treated. Every time an American casualty list was printed in the papers, there were calls for some POWs to be executed. Once, when three farm women drove prisoners back their barracks in Peabody, they were unexpectedly met by a group of politicians, army officials and newspapermen who were conducting an official inspection. Wharton Hoch, a newspaper editor from nearby Marion, was particularly incensed. He condemned the practice of women transporting prisoners without guards, according to the Kansas City Times.
The commander of the four prison camps in central Kansas immediately put an end to the practice.
“When these prisoners first came to Kansas there was an urge on the part of the people to kill them,” the commander, Col. H.L. Shafer, told a town meeting, as reported by the Times. “Now there is a tendency to swing just as far the other way and fraternize with them. Treat them fairly but as prisoners.”
Franz became friends with one of the prisoners, Berthold Schwarz, who had been captured in North Africa after Erwin Rommel’s defeat. He returned to Germany at the end of the war. In 1988, Franz was reunited with Schwarz during a trip to Europe.
“It was evident the prisoner-of-war experience was emotional for Schwarz,” she wrote. “He pored over photos of how the Peabody prison looks today.”
I didn’t know of the German POW camp at Peabody until October, when I visited the historical society there and was surprised to see a wooden model of what appeared to be a twin-engine Heinkel bomber. It had been carved out of scrap wood by a German POW. There I also learned of “Spoils of Victory” by Daniel Markowitz, a 2025 novel about the German POW experience among Mennonite families in Kansas.
Franz, who for 24 years as director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund lobbied Congress unsuccessfully to establish the right of conscientious objectors not to fund wars, died in 2006. She was 76.
I’m not a pacifist. But I am worried about our current blundering into war, the increasing threat of nuclear annihilation, and the loss of the stabilizing influence of American power on the world stage.
I’m also not naive enough to think German prisoners during World War II were treated well in Kansas just because it was the right thing to do. Had they been Japanese prisoners, they likely would have been treated far worse, as were the Japanese Americans in the concentration camps at Manzanar and elsewhere. Also, there is the problem that the German POWs, decent people by appearances, were part of the Nazi regime. Hardcore Nazis, including SS officers, were barred from farm work, but even Rommel’s rank-and-file soldiers were fighting for fascism.
Which brings me back to Milgram and his famous experiment.
“Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time,” Milgram wrote in his 1974 book detailing his experiment. “It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.”
In 1960, Milgram devised the test, in which subjects were paid $4 an hour to administer the shocks, ostensibly to study the effect of pain on learning. The subjects were the ones with their fingers on the button. There was an “experimenter” who directed the shocks be increased while a “learner” supposedly tried to memorize word pairs, but the learners were actually actors who were in on the scheme.
Milgram found that two-thirds of subjects turned their machines up to the maximum of 450 volts when told to do so, despite the cries of pain from the learner. Perhaps more disturbing, every subject was willing to inflict some pain.
There has been ample criticism of Milgram’s work, particularly from psychologist Gina Perry, who in 2013 wrote “Behind the Shock Machine,” in which she interviews the original subjects and concludes Milgram may have overstated his percentages and erred in his broad generalizations. Yet, Milgram’s results have been replicated so many times that his conclusions remain substantially valid.
The real unease with Milgram’s experiments, I think, lies in the central question that drove him to experiment in the first place: Why are otherwise decent people disposed to obey orders that result in cruelty, suffering and death to their fellow human beings?
It is the essential question of civilization.
On presidential Election Day in 2024 I visited several polling places in my town and observed, from a safe and legal distance, as scores of my neighbors cast their votes. The polling places for some of the precincts, like mine, were churches. For others it was a public building, including the municipal auditorium. It all went smoothly enough, with voters behaving cordially and the volunteer poll workers doing their jobs with efficiency and dedication. As I watched, I recalled the Trolley Problem, a thought exercise in which you’re given the choice to kill one person in order to save five.
But I was wrong. What I was watching was akin to the Milgram experiment in real life.
No experimenter was giving orders to shock, but each person voting had the memory of authority figures — politicians, preachers, activists, family members and even journalists — crowding the booth with them. There were no fake electrical shocks or cries of pain, but there were real cultural and economic shocks and actual pain for unseen human beings radiating beyond the ballot.
We can think for ourselves, but often we do not. Every day is an actual Milgram experiment. The key to casting a moral vote is to seek reliable information, find the moral compass within yourself and act accordingly.
Failure leads to severe moral dissonance.
Just take Coldwater. This Kansas town overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and Kris Kobach. Yet, as Kansas Reflector Opinion Editor Clay Wirestone wisely points out, they also mourned the loss of their mayor, Joe Ceballos, who could face deportation after Attorney General Kobach filed fraud charges against him for voting without being a citizen.
Much of the rest of the country must be experiencing similar political vertigo. ICE is a murderous American masked police, the GOP-packed Supreme Court is poised to render yet more Dred Scott-like bad decisions, we’ve abducted the president of Venezuela and we’re risking the collapse of NATO by threatening to conquer Greenland.
Welcome to the new world disorder.
Most Kansans are civil and decent humans. But we need leaders, elected and otherwise, who will clearly denounce the moral collapse at the center of this political chaos, not call for more compromise or deference to authority. Now is the time not for civility, but for civil disobedience.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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