This story has been updated to include comments from the Department of Homeland Security.
Three of roughly a dozen people who were detained in immigration raids at Mexican restaurants in Lenexa and Kansas City, Kansas, earlier this week have been released, according to a local nonprofit.
A spokesperson for the group Advocates for Immigrant Rights & Reconciliation, or AIRR, said that three people taken into custody at two El Toro Loco locations on Wednesday have since been released.
It’s not clear which location the three were from. In all, AIRR says seven workers were taken into custody at the KCK location and another four or five were detained at the Lenexa restaurant.
AIRR also says at least one of the people detained was sent to the Kay County Detention Center in northern Oklahoma. The facility, located about an hour south of Wichita, Kansas, is listed on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website as a detention site.
The AIRR spokesperson added that some of the people swept up in Wednesday’s ICE actions are now seeking legal counsel.
In an emailed statement, Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary with the Department of Homeland Security, said federal agents were “carrying out a criminal federal search warrant to rescue victims of human trafficking.”
“Extremists and activists, one with their child in tow, tried to interfere with law enforcement by storming the restaurant, calling law enforcement Nazis, and attempting to keep officers from leaving the scene,” McLaughlin’s statement continued. “Unfortunately, these types of smears and obstruction to law enforcement operations are becoming more and more common. Our brave ICE law enforcement are facing an 830% increase in assaults against them as they carry out operations.”
Lenexa was notified of the warrant before the raid
On Thursday, Lenexa city officials confirmed that federal immigration authorities informed the city that the U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kansas, had issued a criminal search warrant, ahead of the raid at El Toro Loco, 10088 Woodland Road.
According to witnesses and other businesses in the strip mall near El Toro Loco in Lenexa, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, an investigative arm of ICE, first showed up at the restaurant around 11 a.m. Wednesday.
AIRR representatives who came to the restaurant as the raid was carried out questioned the HSI agents, who cited a criminal search warrant and suggested the investigation was related to “allegations of labor trafficking and exploitation.”
In a statement posted to Facebook on Thursday, Lenexa Mayor Julie Sayers said Lenexa Police officers did not participate in the raid and were not present during the execution of the warrant.
Sayers added that Lenexa officials, even though they’d been notified of ICE’s enforcement action before it was carried out, “did not have visibility to the underlying facts of the case.”
She said outside law enforcement agencies sometimes give the city advance notice they will be carrying out an operation inside the city “as a professional courtesy, but they are not obligated to do so.”
She continued:
“The Lenexa Police Department’s position remains consistent: our mission centers on community policing — building trust, maintaining public safety, and serving all who live, work, and visit Lenexa, regardless of immigration status. Our responsibility is to protect the public, uphold the law, and serve our community with honor, integrity, and professionalism.”
El Toro Loco in Lenexa remained closed Thursday
El Toro Loco’s Lenexa location was closed Thursday afternoon, with the lights off, doors locked and patio empty.
There were several signs posted to the front door, including a handwritten sign reading “Closed,” which AIRR says was posted by HSI agents on Wednesday.
Other handwritten signs expressed support for the restaurant. One gave instructions for what to do if ICE shows up at someone’s front door.
Other signs said, in English and Spanish, that the restaurant is hiring servers.
Calls to the Lenexa location went unanswered Thursday.
Questions remain about purpose behind raids
Advocates and immigration law experts continued to question the underlying reasons behind HSI’s actions on Wednesday at the restaurants in Lenexa and KCK.
Michael Sharma-Crawford, who runs prominent immigration-focused law firm Sharma-Crawford Attorneys at Law with his wife in Kansas City, Missouri, pointed out that the HSI agents appeared to have a “valid district court search warrant. So they had sworn an affidavit before a federal magistrate about the facts of an investigation.”
But he said from the publicly available information — including videos and still images of the raids taken by advocates as they were being carried out — there are “a lot of issues with the operation and closure of the enforcement action.”
Rekha Sharma-Crawford, his legal partner and wife, raised similar concerns that agents may have unduly arrested workers at the restaurants when they were there to search the premises in connection to alleged human trafficking crimes or labor violations.
“A search warrant is for purposes of searching a premise. It’s not necessarily inclusive of, ‘And then we get to arrest whoever we want,'” she said in comments to the Post Thursday.
“What concerns us is if you’re going into an establishment claiming that there is human trafficking going on, but the only photos that you see are people coming out in bounty chains and handcuffs, I don’t know that that’s how we treat victims of human trafficking,” she said.
Juliana Garcia and Kaylie McLaughlin contributed to this report.
