Immigration raids in southwest Kansas meatpacking towns helped turn Republican strongholds toward Democrats in the midterms, according to a new Associated Press report.
A county around Dodge City and two neighbors, where immigrants have long worked at feedlots and slaughterhouses, shifted sharply left, according to the report. That helped Democrat Adam Hamilton become Kansas’s first Democratic U.S. senator in nearly a century.
Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, whom Hamilton beat, had asked the administration to consult local officials before any raids.
Late-September raids that stirred fury, the Associated Press reported.
Officers arrived before dawn, businesses closed, and children stayed home from school. Dodge City Commissioner Rick Sowers said city officials learned of the operation from social media and never saw a list of targets. The agency said it detained 104 people from the region.
The Wichita Eagle found none of the five “heinous criminals” the administration named were arrested in the surge, the Associated Press reports. Four had been deported earlier and one was already in prison.
Organizer Amy Soberanes said “if ICE hadn’t come, we would still be red, 100 percent.” Army veteran José Del Real, who hadn’t voted in a decade, urged a crowd to vote. Grocer Oscar Soto, who called the raid week “the black week,” registered for the first time at 39.
Local Republican chairman Scott Fischer, who says he backs strong borders, said the operation’s intensity surprised him. He still considers the county red, and it narrowly backed Republican Ty Masterson, who lost the governor’s race. Wichita professor Russell Arben Fox said such swings required some moderate white Republicans to change their minds. The Associated Press's voter poll found more than half of Kansas Senate voters disapprove of how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing its job.
President Donald Trump has sent mixed signals since the election, per the report, saying deportations may have been too harsh while naming hardliner Stephen Miller as chief of staff.