ICE didn’t come to Lawrence for the immigrants, but for the politics | Opinion
You don’t come to Lawrence, Kansas, if you’re looking for undocumented migrants.
The college town where I’ve lived for most of the last quarter-century likes to talk a lot about “diversity” — we’re good progressives around here — but the funny thing about that is: We’re not actually all that diverse.
We’re mostly white. Blindingly white, honestly. It’s a little embarrassing.
Census statistics tell us that 5% of the local population is Black, 7.9% of us are Latino and 7.3% of us are foreign-born. All those numbers are well, well below the national averages.
That’s not to say there aren’t any migrants here. There just aren’t that many, not compared to someplace like Dodge City or Garden City or Emporia. So if immigration enforcement and mass deportations were your main goals — if, say, you were the Trump administration — you’d probably go someplace else to bump up your numbers, somewhere where your efforts might be more fruitful.
It’s just math.
All the same, it was hardly a surprise on Tuesday when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up in the parking lot of an Iowa Street Burger King — right across from the gym where I work out regularly — and conducted one of the agency’s trademark arrests, screaming at and intimidating the locals who stopped to document their activities. (There were reportedly five arrests total on Tuesday.)
No surprise at all.
Why? Because we’re liberal. Lefty. Progressive. And pretty much everybody knows it.
Politics and protests
Donald Trump won less than a third of the vote here in 2024. We declared ourselves a sanctuary city a few years back. There are anti-Trump protests on Massachusetts Street every weekend, and they’re often pretty well attended.
Again: You wouldn’t come here if you were looking for undocumented migrants.
But if you were an authoritarian-minded presidential administration looking to throw a scare into libs with burly, loud men in tactical gear, well, Lawrence might well be one of the first places you’d target.
Sound paranoid? Consider the track record.
Trump’s biggest anti-immigration shows of force, after all, have come in Democratic jurisdictions: Los Angeles. Chicago. Minneapolis. And it seems the president’s hurt political feelings were part of the reason why.
“I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it,” he told oil executives in January after Renee Good was shot to death by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
That’s not true. Trump didn’t win Minnesota in any of his campaigns. And Minneapolis, it seems, was made to pay. Is Lawrence next?
Home sweet home
My town admittedly doesn’t seem big enough to draw Trump’s ire. He easily won Kansas’ electoral votes in the last three presidential elections.
On the other hand, Lawrence is definitely a place that Republicans and conservatives around Kansas love to hate.
We’re a community built on the foundation of the Bleeding Kansas struggle against slavery. We burned when William Quantrill attacked. The Kansas Union burned more than a century later during protests against the Vietnam War.
We’re the place where “The Day After” was filmed and made Ronald Reagan reconsider the wisdom of nuclear war.
And we’re a city that has repeatedly declared itself a “safe haven” for migrants, transgender people and just about any other marginalized group in need of protection.
Lefty politics — politics that insist on human dignity and freedom — are baked into the city’s identity.
It’s why Lawrence was prepared for this moment.
For the better part of a year, downtown businesses — coffee shops, bookstores, boutiques — have been plastered with posters welcoming migrants in and ordering ICE agents to stay out. Groups such as Sanctuary Alliance and Somos Lawrence sprang into action Tuesday to document the arrests. And local law enforcement agencies stepped forward to say they had nothing to do with the federal show of force.
“If you are looking for something to do,” Sanctuary Alliance posted Wednesday to its Facebook page, “stay vigilant.”
Good advice, but unnecessary. We have our faults, but staying vigilant has never been Lawrence’s problem. Now we see what comes next.
This story was originally published February 18, 2026 at 4:08 PM.
