ICE detention centers debate over setting down roots here raise ire | Opinion
Editor’s note: Welcome to Double Take, a conversation from opinion writer David Mastio and editor Yvette Walker, tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate.
David Mastio: Proposals to set up Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in Kansas and Missouri appear to be moving forward, or at least are still alive. In Leavenworth, a for-profit Tennessee company called CoreCivic is pushing the city to allow it to reopen a prison there under its contract with ICE. Meanwhile in Kansas City, there are discussions underway about potentially selling a 1 million square foot warehouse on the former Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base to ICE for a 7,500-bed facility. Both have met with a hostile local reception.
I get the reaction. When the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort has not been inept, it has been cruel. When it has not been cruel or inept, it has been counterproductive. Two American citizens, whose lives were taken needlessly in Minneapolis, have become the most potent symbols of an increasingly unpopular Trump immigration agenda.
Nevertheless, I think opening these two facilities in Kansas and Missouri is the right thing to do.
First, this mass deportation effort is what Kansas and Missouri residents voted for when they pulled the lever for Donald Trump. The mass deportation of the millions of undocumented immigrants Joe Biden’s border policies let in our country — in a policy every bit as inept and counterproductive as anything Trump has done — were at the center of Trump’s campaign.
Second, the administration has largely followed the rules in its effort to set up these facilities. Congress passed an actual law giving Trump the authority to create them, as well as the funding to do it. People standing in the way aren’t on the right side here.
It seems to me that opposition to the Trump administration should focus on individual cases where immigrants aren’t being treated properly under the law, or on the bigger issues where Trump is doing things that he didn’t run on, such as attacking Iran or filching Greenland, or in which he is lawlessly misusing the powers of Congress from the White House, such as the tariffs that have done so much damage to Kansas and Missouri farmers.
Immigration policies dangerous
Yvette Walker: Trump’s handling of his most recent immigration policies has been more than inept or clumsy. It is shameful and dangerous. You mentioned two American citizens who died needlessly at the hands of ICE agents — let’s say their names: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But also look at the list of people who have been wrongly detained: Jose Hermosillo, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, Julio Noriega, Jensy Machado, Jonathan Guerrero. George Retes is a U.S. Army veteran who was detained by ICE for three days.
Just last month, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez was detained. The Sacramento Bee reported that Estrada Juarez was a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, “a program that began during President Barack Obama’s administration that has shielded people from deportation if they arrived in the U.S. as children and have no criminal record.” There are more whose identities are unknown. These actions need to be corrected before we open huge pens to house people who may or may not be undocumented criminals (emphasis on the word criminals).
We need something more important than facilities: We need more and better training of ICE agents; we need to allow a suspect to show proof of citizenship before detention and once that happens, let them go; we need to stop harassing people we suspect are undocumented.
Opening detention facilities sends a message that what ICE is doing is right and should continue. It signals that this will be an ongoing, long-term mass operation, and that is what people voted for. I differ, but this is not what most people voted for or wanted. And among those who did, there is still a solid half of the country who disagree with this policy. Many of them live in Kansas and Missouri. We don’t want these jails here.
Inhumane conditions
David: I am aware that there are plenty of people in our dark red Midwest who didn’t vote for Trump. Count me among them, but as much as I don’t like it, elections have consequences.
It is pretty rich for people who don’t want Trump to build these detention camps to turn around and then complain that people are being held in inhumane, crowded conditions without access to proper facilities and health care before they are deported.
It is pretty rich for people to say that Trump should concentrate more on expanding the number of ICE agents and training them better when they are forcing the administration to use more management time and attention, as well as resources getting other basic parts of their job done, like finding acceptable places for the people they arrest to be housed.
Yvette: I never said expand the number of ICE agents. Good Lord, do we need this many in the first place? And do you really think “forcing the administration” to train agents is a bad idea?
David: You say you want the administration to do a better job of sorting out citizens from noncitizens, and sorting criminals from decent people. I don’t see how they are going to get it done at scale without facilities to do it in.
Yvette: Maybe the scale is the problem. Just because the government gave ICE $85 billion doesn’t mean it needs that much. A decade back, its annual budget was less than $6 billion.
David: Moreover, I don’t have to cite cases from Louisiana to show examples of exactly the right kind of people being deported from Missouri and Kansas.
- Geovanni L. Cano, Pete Carrillo and Bayron Franco-Lopez were indicted only a couple weeks ago by a Kansas City grand jury for international drug trafficking. After they are convicted and serve their sentences, they’ll be deported, probably to Mexico. Cano had 22 kilos of meth on him and in his house when he was arrested. This is no small deal.
- The same week, Jose Navarrete-Hernandez of El Salvador was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for possessing fentanyl with the intent to distribute; 60 months for possessing firearms in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime; 27 months for possessing a firearm as an illegal alien; 27 months for possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number; and six months for illegal entry. He’ll go back to El Salvador when he is done serving that time. The fentanyl pills Carthage police confiscated won’t kill any Missourians. Just last week, I was writing about the carnage a single illegal gun can unleash.
- Also that same week, Pedro Lopez-Dominguez, previously convicted of a felony and wanted for other crimes in the Springfield area, pled guilty to illegal reentry to the United States by a felon. When he gets deported to Mexico, it will be the fourth time.
That’s one week in the Western District of Missouri. There are plenty more examples in previous weeks or in the Eastern District or in Kansas federal courts.
Complaints about building ICE facilities is more of the sanctuary city catch-22 where sanctuary cities and even whole states refuse to hold criminals for ICE in jails, prisons and courthouses while their politicians complain the administration isn’t doing enough to deport criminals.
And by the way, mistakes by ICE are nothing new. During the Obama administration, researchers cited by The Washington Post found that between 1% and 1.5% of ICE deportations were of U.S. citizens. Obama deported 962,000 people in fiscal 2009 — during the period of the study. You do the math.
Yvette: That’s the issue. The math is mathing when they catch bad guys. And yes, I think most people are happy to have the drug lords you mentioned off the streets. But the number of facilities being called for across the country (and here at home) assumes everyone they catch deserves to be detained. We know that’s not true. ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program (currently archived on whitehouse.gov) wasn’t perfect, but it was better than locking away someone who doesn’t deserve it.
The immigration detainment system is broken — maybe it has even been broken for a while. This administration needs to fix it, not house it.
This story was originally published March 5, 2026 at 5:11 AM.
