The brothers behind Platform Ventures could choose not to sell out Kansas City to ICE | Opinion
Editor’s note: David Hudnall is a columnist joining the Opinion team. This is his first story for Opinion.
I thought, perhaps naively, there was a chance the brothers who own Platform Ventures would talk to me about the decision to sell Immigration and Customs Enforcement a warehouse for the purpose of detaining immigrants in Kansas City.
I went to the same high school, Rockhurst, as Ryan and Terry Anderson. They were a few years below me. We know a lot of the same people. Plus, Terry followed me on X last week. I thought maybe he had something he wanted to get off his chest.
But my DMs went unanswered. Same with phone calls and emails. I probably should have assumed the Andersons didn’t want any more attention, given that they took their website offline a few weeks ago, and when it came back online their names and faces weren’t on it anymore.
In situations like these, when the principals won’t answer basic questions, all we can go on is the facts. So let’s stick to those.
Platform Ventures is a real estate investment firm with a reported $3.6 billion in assets under management. Its office is in the Crossroads and its current and former real estate holdings include the Polsinelli tower on the west edge of the Country Club Plaza, the Hotel Kansas City building downtown, and Brookside Commons at 65th Street and Rockhill Road.
A few weeks ago, it came to light that Platform Ventures planned to sell a massive warehouse near the former Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base — a building it received a nice chunk of tax incentives for through the Port Authority of Kansas City. The buyer was the federal government, which planned to convert the warehouse into an ICE detention facility.
The news sparked immediate backlash. Kansas City leaders moved to block the plan, passing an emergency ordinance aimed at preventing new non-municipal detention facilities and signaling that the deal was not welcome here.
The Anderson brothers responded last week with a weird, short, vague statement. Here it is in full:
“Platform Ventures (PV) was approached in October 2025 with an unsolicited offer to purchase a vacant, industrial warehouse currently owned by an investment vehicle managed by PV at the former Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base.
“PV has a fiduciary duty to evaluate every sale or lease proposal involving this facility, as we do for all properties in our portfolio. In this case, all negotiations are complete. PV does not question prospective buyers on their intent after close, and we will not engage in public conversations involving speculation over future uses.”
The Andersons can, of course, choose not to engage in those public conversations. But the public is very much engaged in conversations about the Andersons. Not since the early 2010s, when I was reporting on the local businessmen behind Kansas City’s shadowy payday loan industry, have I heard the Mission Hills and Brookside crowd so disgusted with one of their own.
Questions for the Andersons
Platform Ventures said in its statement that “negotiations are complete.” We don’t know where exactly the deal stands — and neither does Port KC, its CEO Jon Stephens told me Wednesday — but presumably that means the Andersons have agreed to sell the warehouse to ICE.
By their own account, those talks started in October — many months after ICE began deploying masked and anonymous agents using unmarked vehicles in American cities. The Andersons can’t claim ignorance about that.
If they’d answered my phone call, I would have asked them if those negotiations were completed before or after an ICE officer in Minneapolis shot former Kansas City resident Renee Good in the head.
And I would have asked them if they were having second thoughts about the deal after Saturday, when two federal immigration agents fired their weapons, executing Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, also in Minneapolis.
I might have asked what conclusions they’ve drawn from the fact that, almost immediately after learning of the deal, the Kansas City Council held that emergency vote to block any new ICE detention facility within city limits for the next five years. Did the 12-1 vote give them any pause?
I’d have asked how they feel about Port KC’s upcoming vote on whether to stop doing business with Platform Ventures altogether. I’d have asked how they justify taking millions in public incentives for a project pitched as economic development, then selling it to the federal government — a buyer that removes the property from the local tax rolls and fundamentally changes what the public was told it would be.
I’d have asked what they think actually happens inside these facilities — the ones they would be responsible for bringing to Kansas City if this deal goes through. Because an agency willing to kill in public cannot be trusted to act lawfully or humanely in private.
And I’d have asked them how all this is going over at Visitation, the Catholic parish in Brookside where both Andersons are members and where Terry and his wife are currently chairs of a capital campaign to renovate and expand the school campus. Where does the church stand on rounding up immigrants and throwing them in cages?
Just drop the deal
I suspect the Anderson brothers have seen the social media outrage about the sale of their property and feel they’re being unfairly cast as villains by a liberal, emotional city looking for someone to blame.
I suspect they are telling themselves a story about this that goes something like: We’re businesspeople, not politicians; we didn’t make the laws; deals are deals; America runs on this stuff.
But I also think, deep down, they wish they hadn’t done this.
So, here’s my advice: Drop the deal. Eat the embarrassment. Find another buyer. Make a clean break and say, plainly, that you don’t want your legacy tied to masked men hauling people out of their homes and into warehouses on the edge of town.
The alternative is a lifetime of being whispered about behind your backs everywhere from church fundraisers to the Crown seats at the Royals game. That was the fate of those payday loan guys — many of whom were also churchgoing members of Kansas City’s business elite. They made millions. Some avoided jail. Some are even still doing deals. But none avoided the stain. Their names are mud in this town. People remember.
The Andersons aren’t breaking the law. But they could choose not to be the villain in this story. They could decide not to treat this moment as just another business transaction. People would remember that, too.
This story was originally published January 29, 2026 at 12:24 PM.
