The Kansas City, MO, City Council placed a ban on detention facilities not owned by the city on Jan. 15, but that has not stopped Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence in Kansas.
According to KCTV News, arrests by ICE in Kansas City have more than tripled since January 2025. Club Sponsor of Students Demand Action, Sarah Podrasky, said that the problem of racial discrimination has been a part of U.S. history since the beginning.
“We can’t say that we have nothing to do with this, or point our fingers at another culture when our country was built on massacres of indigenous people and black and brown people,” Podrasky said. “It seems like a lot of white people are now saying, this is a problem, but black and brown people have been telling us it’s a problem for a long time. So why did it take white people getting killed for us to listen?”
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE targets immigrants they suspect of a crime and aims to deport many of them. According to NPR News, before the Kansas City, MO City Council’s ruling, officials from the city validated that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had been scouting a location for a detention center in the Kansas City area. Sophomore Alia León said ICE’s actions should not be normalized.
“This shouldn’t be normal. This shouldn’t be something that we’re seeing daily in the news, another person taken into custody or another family broken apart. That shouldn’t be normal. But it is,” León said.
According to The Star News, the council’s ruling has caused CoreCivic, a private prison operation company, to seek a permit to open an ICE facility. According to The Star News, Leavenworth’s planning commission voted 5-1 in favor of approving CoreCivic’s permit to open an ICE center that could host more than 1,000 immigrants. León said ICE’s presence in Kansas would be a source of fear.
Local protests occurred in opposition to ICE’s growing arrests in Kansas. Sophomore Penelope All has attended the protests at 9th Street and Massachusetts Street every Sunday from 12 to 1 p.m. All said that she started protesting because she feels she is making a difference.
“I hope that it shows the leaders of our state, of our country, that we are not going to rest until there’s change,” All said. “We need change, and how things are going right now is not okay… I think they’re starting to realize that.”
The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis in January, were followed by large-scale anti-ICE protests. All said ICE’s demonstrations remind her of the Nazis.
