Local officials never received a list of those detained in raids
Dodge City’s gates boast that it is the “Queen of the Cowtowns.” Its main street carries the name of the classic Western set here, “Gunsmoke,” and murals celebrating cowboy history sit beside quinceañera dress shops, Mexican bakeries and city signs printed in both Spanish and English.
In the weeks before the election, Jose Del Real surveyed a rally crowd from a park stage — hundreds of his neighbors holding furious signs, his own daughters crying in the front row. Del Real, whose family came from Mexico when he was a kindergartner, draped an American flag over his shoulders, put on his Iraq veteran cap and ended his speech with a message: “None of this matters if you do not vote. Let’s go vote.”
They did. Dodge City’s county and two of its neighbors in southwestern Kansas — Republican strongholds where immigrants have settled for decades to work at feed lots and slaughterhouses — swung hard to the left. The shift helped elect Adam Hamilton to the U.S. Senate and unseat Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.
Since Democrats won back control of Congress, Trump has sent mixed messages about immigration enforcement. He suggested that his approach to deportations was too harsh but also named Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. Both parties will be recalibrating their approach ahead of the next presidential campaign.
Here in Kansas, the late-September raids ignited a wave of anger that turned many apathetic residents into determined voters. Masked officers in tactical gear banged on doors before dawn and stopped cars in the middle of intersections. Businesses shuttered, families feared leaving their houses, and children stopped going to school. Some people livestreamed themselves being detained. One man pleaded “God help me” in Spanish, his hands shaking, as he asked anyone watching to let his family know.
The resistance reached beyond Democrats or the Latino population, which has grown to about two-thirds of Dodge City. Roger Marshall issued a statement pleading with the administration to consult local officials before launching raids.
Del Real regrets that he didn’t vote in 2024, when Trump returned to office pledging mass deportations. “We had to see it in front of us,” Del Real said. “I had to see it in the flesh.”
This corner of Kansas is responsible for much of the country’s beef. Dodge City and the region’s other hubs, Garden City and Liberal, form the Golden Triangle of Meatpacking, responsible for about a quarter of the U.S. beef supply. Some residents thought their importance to the nation’s food supply might spare them from the administration’s deportation campaigns, said Amy Soberanes, a 25-year-old local organizer. Soberanes, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said she and others tried for years to get people — particularly young, Latino neighbors — engaged. From rural Kansas, raids in places like Minneapolis and Chicago felt abstract, she said, until residents saw their own streets in social media videos.
People were furious, said Soberanes, who worried that daily protests could get out of hand. Organizers told people not to slash tires or break windows, to store up their anger and take it out on Election Day. “We’ll see them at the ballot box,” she recalls repeating. Her phone rang and rang, and people she had pressed for years to vote asked how to register. “If ICE hadn’t come, we would still be red, 100%,” she said. “And so I thank Donald Trump for sending immigration here.”
No one knew immigration officers were coming. Dodge City Commissioner Rick Sowers said he and other city officials learned of the operation the same way everyone else did — through social media, or masses of unmarked trucks on their neighbors’ lawns. They scrambled to get answers from the federal government about who officers were looking for, who was in charge and how long they would stay, and never did. Local officials have still never seen a list of those detained, Sowers said.
The Trump administration issued statements naming five “heinous criminals” it said had been arrested. The Wichita Eagle examined that claim and found that none of the five were apprehended during the surge: four had been deported months before and the fifth was already in prison, the newspaper reported. The agency said it detained 104 people from southwest Kansas.
Scott Fischer, the local Republican chairman, who describes himself as a supporter of strong borders, said he was surprised by the operation’s intensity. “There was a little showmanship,” he said. “I don’t know why it was like that.”
Fischer said he still considers the county red — it voted narrowly for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson. The Associated Press called that race Thursday: Masterson lost to Democrat Cindy Holscher. But some Dodge City Republicans abandoned the party in the U.S. Senate race. Dr. Russell Arben Fox, a political science professor at Friends University in Wichita, said swings as dramatic as that one couldn’t have happened without some white, moderate Republicans changing their minds.
More than half of Kansas voters in the Senate race disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 midterm voters. That figure is consistent with the 61% of voters who say the same nationally.
Fischer said most of the Latino immigrants in the area are hard-working, family-oriented, faithful people — a perfect fit for conservative Kansas values — so local Republicans tend to have a nuanced view on immigration. Public officials have for years begged the federal government for reforms to provide a pathway for the workers who run the region’s economy. “In general terms, mass deportation is not practical,” Fischer said. “When we say send them all home, what does that mean? Who is them?”
To many residents, “them” meant relatives and friends. In this small town, nearly everybody is connected to everybody else, so residents did what they could to help. Oscar Soto delivered food to people afraid to leave their homes during the raids, and started calling it “the black week,” after the black plague. His mother came from Mexico, he said, and though she is here legally, she was terrified. “It seemed unreal,” Soto said. “It was stuff that’s never been seen here, and it was day after day after day.”
Soto works at a family-owned grocery and strung a garland of flags from around the world above the counter when it opened. Most of the store’s customers are from Mexico and Guatemala, he said, but he hung the flags to signal the store was for everyone. He then hung a large American flag from the ceiling. It means to him that anyone, from anywhere, can come here, work hard and build a life, free from fear. That belief in the American dream was shaken for him when ICE arrived, so he registered to vote for the first time at age 39, stood in line to cast his ballot, and said he was amazed by how many young, Latino voters were waiting with him.