West 75th Street in Prairie Village is not an easy street to cross in the middle of a block, particularly on weekday afternoons as Shawnee Mission East High School lets out and rush hour traffic begins to build.
Nevertheless, Sister Sue Andrew, a member of the Catholic religious community the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, took a chance during a lull between traffic lights on Monday afternoon and joined a group of about fifty protesters holding signs in front of a two-story office building along 75th Street.
The building is where Flint Development has its office. The company recently became more widely known for its efforts to sell warehouse property around the U.S. to the federal government to be converted into immigration detention centers.
Andrew hadn’t known about the protest ahead of time but saw others gathered along the sidewalk on 75th as she pulled up to her home.
“I just got home from grocery shopping, put the ice cream away and came right over,” she said.
As someone who had walked in protests for civil rights in the 1960s and against the Vietnam War, she said it seemed the thing to do when confronted with bombings in Iran and the prospect of warehouses used as holding facilities for immigrant detainess being prepared for deportation.
“It makes me happy when I see this happening and Shawnee Mission East kids protesting,” she said, a seeming reference to other student-led protests in recent months. “Thank god, thank god someone is awake and they’re younger than I am.”
Why protest Flint?
Andrew’s sentiment was shared by many of the people lined up to hold signs on the block in front of the building at 3515 W. 75th Street that Flint Development shares with a bank.
The protest was arranged by the newly organized The People for PV with the help of Boots on the Ground Midwest, an activist group of volunteers formed to defend democratic norms, protect voting rights and protect immigrant families from inhumane and illegal policies, according to its website.
Flint Development was the focus Monday because of news that the developer has been marketing some of its warehouse properties to the Department of Homeland Security to become detention centers for people picked up during immigration raids.
Flint, founded by Devin Schuster and Hunter Harris, made headlines last month as it became known that the federal government was seeking warehouses for that purpose.
On Monday, Flint officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company’s offices were closed during the protest.
Earlier this year, Flint tried to negotiate the sale of one of its property in Oklahoma City but walked away after facing considerable local opposition there.
The developer has also reportedly sold a warehouse near El Paso, Texas, that could be converted into an 8,500-bed detention facility and become one of the largest such immigrant jails in the country.
Protesters Monday said they hoped their efforts would cause Flint to reconsider such deals, as it did in Oklahoma City and as another entity, Platform Ventures, did last month over a proposed warehouse-to-detention site in southern Kansas City, Missouri.
“Not the way you want to make money”
Since the Prairie Village City Council came out in solidarity with Minneapolis opposition to ICE raids there, a protest was organized in front of Flint’s location to raise awareness, said Anne Melia, one of the Prairie Village organizers of the protest.
“We still have a lot of community members who don’t know,” she said.
Linda Avery, another protester on Monday, said she was concerned that the company was putting profits above people.
“That’s not the way you want to make your money, by building a detention center, a warehouse for human beings,” she said.
Chris Whitehead of Overland Park, was among two or three people holding banners for Veterans For Peace.
He said that after three tours in Iraq as a Marine infantryman, where one of his jobs was helping families reunite with their loved ones, the warehouse plan is “not what I want to see for our country.”
Bryson Ripley, a Kansas City, Kansas, Marine veteran and president of the Kansas Chapter for Veterans for Peace, said he worked in corrections during his service and knows about best practices for detention centers. The conditions in ICE facilities are “terrifying, abhorrent,” he said. “We are violating human rights.
“What really brings us out here is a concern about the way private business and private companies are being used to further a fascist agenda,” Ripley said.
Veterans for Peace is an organization dedicated to educating people about the true costs of war, Ripley said.
Keiran Cohen, an Overland Park member of Boots on the Ground, said the idea of the protest is to make the business dealings Flint is involved in uncomfortable for its leaders.
“We’re basically here to say to the owners that it’s unacceptable and evil to make money this way,” she said. “No one should be supporting this.”
The protesters were met mainly with supportive honks from the cars streaming by on 75th Street, as they remaing outside the office buildng for about 90 minutes on Monday afternoon.
The protesters did report a few thumbs down, and at one point, a man shouted from his car window, “Donald Trump is the president.”
