Note to Kobach, Noem and Trump: Free Joe Ceballos! | Opinion
Joe Ceballos doesn’t deserve this.
The recently re-elected mayor and four-time council member of Coldwater, Kansas (population “more than 820” according to the city’s website), has become the right wing’s national face of election fraud, after Attorney General Kris Kobach very publicly outed him as a noncitizen in his unending quest to make something out of nothing.
Kobach and the Trump administration are pursuing Ceballos with a zeal usually reserved for mass murderers.
His name has been on national TV news, in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. At least two federal agencies have issued self-congratulatory press releases, one of which characterized him as a “criminal alien.”
There’s not much doubt about what Ceballos is alleged to have done. He was brought to the United States undocumented at age 4, granted permanent resident status in 1990, and registered to vote as a 20-year-old special education student during a school field trip to the county clerk’s office.
He did it because he wanted to fit in and vote for Republicans like his friends, according to an outstanding story on the situation by Roy Wenzl, a former Eagle journalist writing for the Kansas Leadership Center Journal.
In fact, Ceballos said he probably voted for Kobach and President Donald Trump on multiple occasions because he nearly always voted straight-ticket Republican — again, following the lead of his friends.
Ceballos got himself in trouble when he applied for U.S. citizenship this year, just as the Trump administration was embarking on its increasingly violent crusade to rid the nation of immigrants (except white ones).
And for those who say, “it’s only illegal immigrants,” I’m going to tell you to open your eyes.
Trump and everybody who works for him has lied about that since Day One.
He started out by revoking the legal status of at least half a million immigrants from a list of select countries, all predominantly populated by people with darker skin. Just last week, he targeted another 350,000 legal immigrants from Haiti for deportation.
On Thanksgiving, Trump posted a viral (and virulent) tirade against legal immigrants on his personal social network which he calls “Truth Social,” though it is practically devoid of truth and antisocial as hell.
In the post, he called immigrants “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America,” and blamed legally present refugees as the cause of “Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.”
And that was the nice part. He also called a governor “retarded” and repeated a debunked Internet rumor that a congresswoman he hates married her brother.
Ordinarily, I’d provide a link to the post. But I strongly believe no decent human being should ever have to swim in the roiling cesspool of racism, bigotry and disinformation that is Truth Social. So I’ll just copy and paste the rest of the president’s remarks at the end of this column.
On Monday, his Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted this on X: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies . . . WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
And Wednesday, Trump brought it to life by blocking all immigration requests from 19 countries with dark-complected populations.
Tell me again about how this is just about the “illegals.”
American dream turned nightmare
Absent the current anti-immigrant hysteria, Ceballos would be a heartwarming story of the American dream — a hardworking, tax-paying immigrant who started with nothing, struggled in school but got a job as a pole-climbing utility worker for the local power company, built a small tree trimming business on the side, and by the sweat of his brow earned enough money to buy a 165-acre farm where he runs 35 head of breeding cattle.
He earned the respect of his neighbors by being kind and helpful, the guy who puts up the Christmas lights on Main Street and gets his hands dirty fixing balky sewers. The kind of guy you can count on, the kind of guy you want as your mayor.
But now, he faces the loss of everything, as the anti-immigrant mob circles him like hungry sharks circle a wounded seal.
Kobach has charged him with three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury. And Kobach was all too delighted to hold a press conference announcing those charges could cost Ceballos $200,000 in fines and put him behind bars for more than five years.
The Department of Homeland Security has already stated “If convicted, he will be placed in removal proceedings.”
Ceballos violated the law and should pay a penalty. But the punishment should fit the crime, and what Ceballos is being threatened with is way over the top.
It’s not like this has never happened before.
In 2011, when Kobach was just getting the ball rolling on his falsehood that undocumented immigrants are stealing elections, he released a sheaf of hundreds of alleged election violations spanning 13 years.
I checked out every complaint pertinent to Sedgwick County, and they were all bogus except for two instances of legal immigrants who voted out of turn.
One case involved a man who was told by the person who registered him that while he was not a citizen of the United States, he was a citizen of Wichita and could register and vote in city elections. I can see how that happened. Since moving to Kansas 27 years ago, I’ve noticed a tendency among the populace and politicians here to routinely say “citizens of Wichita” when they mean “residents.”
The other case was a woman who was so befuddled that she sent in her voting record along with her citizenship application to show what a good citizen she’d be.
Both were placed in the court diversion program, where minor charges are dropped as long as the violator keeps a clean record for a year.
But Homeland Security is doing its best to demonize Ceballos.
They put out a press release calling him a “criminal alien” in the headline and giving the customary unearned ego strokes to Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
“Thanks to President Trump and Secretary Noem, states now have access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” the press release gushed.
But the documentation attached to their own press release shows that the SAVE program had nothing to do with it.
Ceballos was caught by some low-level clerk, because he filed a citizenship application in February where he was asked “Have you ever registered to vote or voted in any federal, state or local election in the United States?” And he checked “Yes.”
That’s evidence of confusion, not criminality.
Kobach’s spotty record
When Kobach was secretary of state, he got the Legislature to grant him unprecedented prosecutorial power in 2015 to chase down the hordes of “illegal aliens” he claimed were upending Kansas elections — and his record’s a complete bust.
He’s prosecuted only about a dozen election-related violations in the last 10 years — and not a single undocumented immigrant among them.
Most were privileged rich people who own property in two states and thought that entitled them to vote in both. They pleaded out, paid a fine and went on with their lives.
If your last name is Christensen, the cost of unlawful voting is $1,000 and court costs, an example drawn from a Kobach press release.
If your last name is Ceballos, it’s everything you’ve ever earned in your whole life, plus potential jail time followed by permanent exile.
Ceballos is no threat to the United States. By all accounts, Coldwater has benefitted from him being here.
As mayor, he had a $500 a month job tending to municipal minutiae and the mini-crises that all small towns experience on a regular basis.
Like these, excerpted from the most recent meeting minutes of the Coldwater City Council:
Charlie told the council a gopher chewed through electrical lines from the shut off to lift station at the lake, it blew out the capacitors, starter and relay so he had Wildcat Electric run new electric line temporarily above ground in conduit.
The repairman for the Ditch-Witch machine was supposed to be here last Friday to fix the hydra vac pump clutch, but he couldn’t make it, he is supposed to be here tomorrow.
Lake Co-Manager Debbie Dutton reported Don is doing well after his surgery. She also reported she is keeping an eye on the cabins, have people renting them until the middle of December, she plans to work 10 to 15 hours per pay period keeping the cabins clean.
A just resolution would be that Ceballos be required to step down as mayor, pay a reasonable fine, and be allowed to go back to tending his cows.
Because when it comes to upholding the true values of Kansas and the United States of America — hard work, humility, looking out for your neighbors and serving your community — Joe Ceballos is a far better citizen than those who want to get rid of him.
—The following is the full text of President Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving post on “Truth Social,” without any changes in wording or punctuation.
A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being “Politically Correct,” and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration. The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form. They put up with what has happened to our Country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.). As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
This story was originally published December 5, 2025 at 4:23 AM with the headline "Note to Kobach, Noem and Trump: Free Joe Ceballos! | Opinion."