Trump immigration crackdown hits innocent citizens like Lenexa councilwoman | Opinion

There’s a concept in cybernetics called “the purpose of a system is what it does.” The idea of POSIWID seems pretty simple: Intentions — good or bad — don’t really matter when it comes to understanding how or why a system is supposed to work. All you have to do is look at the actual results.

The purpose of the Trumpist immigration system? It’s to harass people like Melanie Arroyo.

Arroyo is a U.S. citizen and a member of the Lenexa City Council. She is a genuine American success story, chosen by her neighbors and fellow community leaders to lead and represent them.

She is also an immigrant.

Because of that, somebody — we don’t know who — recently called the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to question her citizenship. Arroyo hired an immigration attorney and presented her papers to police, who quickly closed the inquiry.

“But at that point,” she said last week at a council, “the emotional and mental harm was already done.”

If you buy into POSIWID and believe that it applies to political systems and movements, then this is a real “mission accomplished” moment for Trumpism, which is ostensibly about keeping out migrants who haven’t jumped through all the hoops and gone through all the proper processes to be here.

In reality: Arroyo — who has jumped through all the hoops — was made to feel fear, to feel like a criminal outsider in her own, adopted country. That’s the purpose of the system.

‘No one voted to deport moms’

A lot of folks voted for Donald Trump understanding he would crack down on immigrants, but it’s fair to say some of those folks didn’t understand how wide the net would be cast.

“No one voted to deport moms,” a Kennett, Missouri, resident told The New York Times earlier this summer. “We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

That’s not how the system is actually working under Trump.

Instead, the system decided to go after Kennett’s Carol Hui, a Hong Kong-born waitress who had lived quietly in the town for decades. She was released only after the outcry from the Trump-voting community drew national attention.

And the system last month went after two outposts of El Toro Loco restaurants in Lenexa and Kansas City, Kansas, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents reportedly leaving the restaurants unlocked and open — with unattended burners on at cooking stations — when they left with as many as a dozen workers in tow (three of whom have reportedly been released since).

So much for supporting small, community-based businesses.

You don’t have to look far to find these kinds of stories. There’s the Army veteran — a Purple Heart recipient wounded in Panama — who “self-deported” to South Korea because of PTSD-induced drug offenses. The migrant father of three Marines who was punched in the head and neck during an arrest by federal agents. And there are any number of American citizens who have reported being swept up in ICE raids, apparently marked for detention on suspicion of being Latino.

And on and on and on.

Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, once promised to go after the “worst of the worst.”

Instead, the libertarian Cato Institute reported in June, two-thirds of the folks picked up by ICE this year had no criminal convictions whatsoever. A lot of hardworking moms and dads. Not so many gang members.

Homeland Security: ‘Defend your culture!’

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill includes $75 billion in extra funding for ICE, which will make it the best-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government — bigger, even, than the FBI.

ICE, accordingly, is on a hiring spree. “Defend your culture!” the Department of Homeland Security said in a recruiting post in social media last week, and if that doesn’t give away the (white supremacy) game, I don’t know what does.

All those new agents, with all that new money, are going to need something to do.

So expect a lot more stories like Arroyo’s: Tales of good community members who suddenly come under the scrutiny of federal law enforcement — informed on by their neighbors, perhaps, or some other busybody — because they have an accent or the wrong last name or otherwise don’t fit the “culture” as defined by Donald Trump and his lackeys.

“If this happened to me, this can happen to anyone on this council,” Arroyo told the Lenexa council last week.

Indeed, that seems to be the point.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence.

This story was originally published August 12, 2025 at 5:16 AM.