LEAVENWORTH – More than a century of experience and utility in northeast Kansas may be brought to bear in what President-elect Donald Trump promises will be an unprecedented deportation action oagainst illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent criminal offenders in that cast.
Proposal documents recently acquired by the ACLU outline submissions by numerous private companies for detention facility bids to be located across the United States in a preparation phase for deportations that was launched last summer by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE sent out Requests For Information to established contractors for development of those temporary detention sites which would house illegals until their deportation. One location specified in the RFI was Leavenworth, Kansas, the site of the now mothballed Leavenworth Detention Center owned by CoreCivic of Brentwood, Tenn.
It was not initially clear how many jobs the facility would provide or what the economic impact to the region would be if the facility was approved.
Other facilities proposed in the ICE planning documents included South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, TX; Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, NV; Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, NM; Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, NM; California City Correctional Center in California City, CA.
Some 8 million illegal immigrants poured across the U.S. southern border since the early days of the Biden Administration, when the new president quickly undid border security measures instituted by the Trump Administration in the previous four years. As urban areas of the country began to publicly oppose the masses of illegal immigrants due to the cost they imposed on local services, the issue rose in prominence beyond right wing talking points and became one of the most important issues of the 2024 election. Incidents of illegal immigrant crime, such as the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, by a gang-connected illegal immigrant, placed more emphasis on efforts to clear the country of the illegal criminal element first.
Though insulated from the country’s borders, Kansas has seen its own impacts from illegal immigrant crime. In November ICE rounded up 19 criminal illegals in Southwest Kansas, including a previously deported 29-year-old Mexican national with convictions for drug trafficking, theft and illegal re-entry after deportation, and a previously deported 43-year-old Mexican national with convictions for burglary, driving under the influence and illegal re-entry. In October, Porfirio Dela Cruz-Cantu, an illegal Mexican national working at a Garnett restaurant, was arrested for assault after a bicyclist on the Prairie Spirit Trail said he tried to sexually assault her.
Kansas geography makes it central to human trafficking routes coast to coast. In late November law officers near Topeka arrested the driver of a Honda Odyssey containing 10 Hispanic individuals, one of which was a 4 year-old female hidden inside the cabin. Police arrested the driver, Juan Pescador-Chimal, accusing him of human smuggling but eventually charging him with harboring undocumented immigrants. One of the individuals identified himself as Oscar Hernandez Garcia, but a check of his fingerprints revealed his actual identity as an illegal Honduran named Erlan Navarro Zuniga, wanted on five warrants in San Francisco. The 4 year-old told officer she had not seen her parents in several days.
Leavenworth has a rich history of both Kansas and national service as an incarceration site. It was the site of the first territorial jail in 1861, and U.S. Army Disciplinary Barracks was established there in 1871. In 1895 that facility was transferred to the Department of Justice to create one of the first federal prisons in the country. The federal pen there opened in 1906, and would eventually house infamous criminals like Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly and Robert Stroud – known as the Bird Man of Alcatraz.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
