“Dad, We’re Citizens”: In Kansas, ICE Terrorizes Americans and Cripples the Nation’s Meat Plants

A black pickup with a siren gets on the tail of a 20-year-old woman who is picking up her father from the meat plant. She pulls over immediately. The officer walks up to the driver’s door and demands that she roll down the window and show ID. Guadalupe N. asks whether he has a warrant and why she was stopped. He says nothing. An agency that no longer owes anyone an explanation possesses the most convenient form of power. It does not have to explain anything. It only has to show up. The officer ran her ID through a device, then the 2 were allowed to drive on. At home, the daughter got out of the car shaking and crying, and Frank D. took her in his arms. He works at Cargill in Dodge City, his daughter at the National Beef plant in Liberal. Both were born in Kansas, both have spent their entire lives there. He said he was furious, that this was his daughter picking him up, less than 15 minutes after his shift. “We were both born here, in Kansas. We’re citizens, Dad,” she told him. They were singled out, he said, because you can see where they come from.

What happened to the 2 of them on the side of the road has been happening across the entire southwestern part of the state since Tuesday. In Dodge City and Liberal, people have since been living with a fear that Liberal Vice Mayor Janeth Vazquez calls indescribable. Garden City and the smaller towns around it have been swept up as well. They heard about it Sunday night into Monday, Vazquez said, and since then many people have been afraid to leave their homes. Dozens have already been arrested. Exactly how many, ICE is not telling local officials. Even Senator Roger Marshall said no one had informed him in advance. Residents and local officials alike are convinced that agents are ignoring traffic laws and stopping people based solely on how they look, including American citizens.

The explanation from above and the people disappearing below do not fit together very well. Senator Jerry Moran wrote on X that he had spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who assured him that ICE was working with local police and targeting people with criminal arrest warrants. In response to questions, the agency sent over a list of deportees with criminal records, “the worst of the worst,” all from the faraway Kansas City area. That list had nothing to do with the factory towns in the southwest where the arrests were taking place. Kathleen Alonso of New Frontiers then spoke with the affected families. Their relatives, she said, had no criminal records at all.

This region supplies a good 22 percent of the grain-fed beef in the United States, according to the Kansas Livestock Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It does so with the hands of immigrants. National Beef alone employs more than 2,500 people in Dodge City. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2 union, which represents workers at the plants, condemned the “ICE chaos” and said the operation was spreading fear through the lives of people who earned their living and fed the country. Just a few weeks earlier, that same union had won higher wages there. The part of the country that feeds the nation is now afraid to go to work.

Fear has a precise schedule. At Meadowlark Elementary School, 120 children were absent on Wednesday. Businesses closed for the entire week, shifts went unfilled. On Tuesday morning, a mother was arrested while her infant was sitting in the car; a volunteer had to call a relative to come pick up the child. You feel helpless, Vazquez said, and you do not know how something like this can be healed. This is the kind of thing people know from the news; no one thought it could happen in a small town in southwest Kansas. Neighbors are shopping for people who no longer leave their homes. Others are driving other people’s children to school. On the morning of September 23, teenagers stood at an intersection in Liberal holding flags and signs that had long since been soaked through by the rain.

Janeth Vazquez, vice mayor of Liberal, Kansas, describes agents driving as though the law did not apply to them. An ICE vehicle had been heading south in front of her, she said, then suddenly made a U-turn out of nowhere and cut across oncoming traffic to go after another car. Whether people were actually taken away from inside the plants remains unconfirmed; reports of it are piling up nonetheless. On social media, one report after another names places around the area where agents were allegedly seen. Catholic Charities of Southwest Kansas, together with the Oklahoma law firm Cardoza Law, is offering free legal counseling.

What is confirmed is standing on the side of the road in Kansas. A young woman, born in her own country, is ordered to prove that she belongs, questioned by someone who owes her no answer. She showed the papers, just as she was told to do. That afternoon, it did not help her at all.