Turbocharged by your tax dollars, Kansas ICE prison will sweep up legal residents and U.S. citizens

Allow me a prediction: At some point, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility planned by CoreCivic in Leavenworth will imprison a man or woman on baseless charges. That person will be a legal resident of the United States, or perhaps even a full citizen.

It won’t matter. Because of inept federal law enforcement, because of racist executive orders, because of some awful event that we don’t yet know, this man or woman will be behind bars.

And all of us — because of the taxes we pay the federal government — will pay for it.

This might seem like an outrageous claim, depending on what news sources you follow. But it’s based on the unfortunate reality that our country’s government has already been doing this regularly since President Donald Trump’s return to office in January. You may support the president’s hardline views on immigration and the southern border. You may believe that everyone who has entered the country the “wrong way” should be deported. But his administration’s approach shows that no legal resident or U.S. citizen can be confident or comfortable either.

Some explanations might be in order. Many who oppose illegal immigration into the United States believe that there are two categories of people: legal and illegal.

That’s not true.

There are actually a wide array of immigration statuses. That can includes people who are in the United States as legal permanent residents — green card holders — and those who are here under various types of visa claims of asylum. I count at least 11 broad categories, with some in varied stages of legal flux.

In past months, we have seen the Trump administration repeatedly incarcerate and attempt to deport people who have a legal status. Their actions aren’t mistakes either: the administration has claimed it has the right to expel these residents, as surely as it has the right to expel those without a shred of legal protection.

I can list some of these people, if you like.

• Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder and student activist at Columbia University.
• Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student who wrote an op-ed critical of college administration.
• Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father whose “withholding of removal” legal status was ignored.
• Cynthia Olivera, a Canadian citizen with a U.S. work permit who was pursuing a green card.
• Mahmoud Khalil, also a green card holder, also a Columbia student.

You get the picture.

You don’t have to agree with what any of these people said or did or believed. You don’t have to believe that they’re good people or bad people or middling people (the government has gone out of its way to persecute Abrego Garcia, for instance). What we do know is that they were all, to various degrees, lawful residents of the United States. That offered no protection when the masked agents arrived.

Likewise, citizenship offers no protection. The Trump administration has offered an interpretation of the Constitution at odds with the 14th Amendment to deny birthright citizenship. It has also deported U.S. citizen children with their noncitizen parents. From 2015 to 2020, at least 70 potential U.S. citizens were wrongly deported, according to the Government Accountability Office. Just last week, the administration announced that one of the Justice Department’s priorities would be denaturalization — in which citizenship is stripped from people for various infractions.

To summarize: Those here illegally aren’t safe. Those here legally aren’t safe. Citizens aren’t safe.

No one is safe.

Given these facts, it’s worth asking what people who claim to care about illegal immigration really want from the United States. Do they really want to stop people who came here the “wrong way” and welcome people who came here the “right way”?

Or do they instead want to create a racially pure nation in which Caucasian people hoard rights and privileges, while Latino people from Central or South America are accorded second-class status or expelled altogether? I’m sure many would deny any such desire. They might want to have a word with the government.

All of which brings us to Leavenworth. The longtime prison town has tussled with private operator CoreCivic over plans to reopen its facility. A judge once called the prison a “hell hole,” but sordid history fades at the prospect of cold, hard cash. CoreCivic has inked a deal with ICE to the tune of $4.2 million a month.

The reopened facility could house up to 1,000 inmates. Their care and the prison’s overall operations will be funded by you and me. That’s right, our federal tax dollars will go to support ICE and this very contract. Indeed, thanks to the passage of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” huge new financial resources will flood immigration enforcement operations.

Americans and Kansans chose this contemptible path. They voted for the president, and they voted for senators and representatives who made this new funding a reality.

We now have to live with the consequences. Our government is abusing its people, stripping them of residency and citizenship on the flimsiest of pretexts. It will continue doing so. And the money that all of us earn doing our jobs will support those efforts.

In Leavenworth. In Kansas. In these United States.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, 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.