When Komal Kaur, an Olathe East alumna and founder of Eye of an Immigrant, thinks about immigration, she thinks about her parents.
On Thursday afternoon at Johnson County Square Park, Kaur told a crowd of roughly 100 people that she recently told her father — a Punjabi immigrant who is now a U.S. citizen and a truck driver — to start carrying his passport.
Kaur said her father replied, with a laugh, “It’s OK, I’m a U.S. citizen now, don’t worry about it.” She said she responded with, “Dad, it doesn’t matter.”
“I told him that he would be carrying the passport with him not because he did anything wrong, but because I wanted him to come home,” Kaur said to the crowd at the “Immigrants Make Olathe Beautiful” event. “I remember saying this heartbreaking line … I hated saying it out loud. I was like, ‘Dad, I’d rather pick up an alive father from detention than a dead father from the streets.’”
Kaur shared her conversation with her father just two weeks after the increase in ICE activity in Olathe led to the detention of 19-year-old U.S. citizen Alan Marquez.
For the better part of 2026, Olathe, like the rest of the nation, has seen an increase in ICE activity. Earlier this month, President Trump reversed a policy and ordered ICE to resume traffic stops, Reuters reports.
Jessica Ferrell, the executive director of Center of Grace in Olathe, shared stories of ICE’s presence locally impacting children and families within a 4-mile radius of Johnson County Square. Center of Grace is close by to the Boys & Girls Club, where multiple witnesses also reported seeing ICE activity earlier this year.
A 12-year-old boy woke up on a Sunday morning, the day after celebrating his accomplishments as captain of a successful soccer team, to his parents being detained. A mom on her way to work was detained by ICE less than 10 feet from her front door.
Ferrell recalled two teenage volunteers talking about an ICE detention in Olathe where one of them knew a local resident got arrested. One of the teens had said, “Oh, that’s where Jose’s dad got picked up.”
“The Olathe I know is better than this, the Olathe I grew up in is better than this,” Ferrell said. “So my call to action: Prove it, because I don’t see it right now.”
At the event, the Post didn’t see any counter-protesters in support of ICE and/or President Trump’s current immigration enforcement strategy.
Mixed reactions from Olathe leadership on ICE
With the increase in reports of ICE activity around Olathe over the past several months, some at the rally described different reactions from city leadership in response.
In front of the crowd on Thursday, Justin Gust, vice president of El Centro, recalled a conversation he had with Olathe Mayor John Bacon a couple of months ago, during which he sensed the mayor lacked a sense of concern for the city’s immigrant community or remorse for taking no actions to stop ICE activity.
During that meeting, Gust said an El Centro board member who works for a local school district talked about students whose parents were taken from the parking lot outside of their apartment. He said Bacon questioned why there should be fear of ICE in the community.
“There is so much that’s happening, all of these attacks — violent or not — that’s just a dumb question to ask, ‘What’s there to be afraid of?’,” Gust said to the crowd.
“I share that conversation because that is the reality of meeting with some of our leadership that we have come into contact with and how those conversations have gone.”
The Post reached out to Bacon for his comments and perspective and will update this story once we hear back.
There are other elected officials who feel differently about ICE activity in Olathe, though.
At the rally, Julie Steele, the board president of the Olathe School Board, said the Olathe community “is stronger because of the people who call it home,” including immigrants.
Steele said immigrants in Olathe “enrich” the community with “their talent, their culture, perspective, (and) hard work.”
As for education, Steele said “schools are better when we are culturally diverse.”
“My husband and I chose Olathe to raise our family for its vibrancy, for its diversity, and this elected official is not turning a blind eye to what’s happening right under our noses,” Steele said.
“It’s OK to change your mind”
Alyssa Murray, a Black and Hispanic woman, found herself in tears when Ferrell told stories of children finding out their parents have been detained.
“It is happening right here in our backyards, in our home, and our community members, our kids are being impacted,” Murray said. “I could never imagine what that would feel like if I also came home one day and my mom and dad weren’t there.”
Murray said she attended Thursday afternoon’s event to “feel the warmth and support” of the Olathe community standing against the “unconscionable” racial profiling of Black and brown communities.
The “Immigrants Make Olathe Beautiful” event showed Murray that the community cares about and supports immigrants.
Autumn Felix, an Olathe resident, brought her two daughters to the event on Thursday “because it’s a family affair.”
Felix, who has a 5-year-old daughter, said there are 5-year-olds whose fathers are “disappearing” because of ICE activity.
“That would be a really privileged thing of me to hide and shelter my 5-year-old from something that is directly affecting other 5-year-olds,” Felix said.
For her Olathe neighbors who disagree with the ICE activity in their community, Felix called on them to find ways to get involved and voice their concerns with elected officials.
Olathe residents who voted for this Trump administration and are starting to disagree with ICE activity, Felix wants them to know that’s OK, too.
“It’s OK to change your mind,” Felix said. “If maybe at first you agreed with what was going on, but, maybe now you’ve changed your mind or it’s gone too far, no one is going to shame you.”
Organizers aimed to support immigrants instead of ICE outrage
Martha Lawrence, co-founder of nonpartisan advocacy group Boots on the Ground Midwest, told the Post in a Thursday morning interview that the event is about supporting the immigrant community opposed to showing ongoing outrage against ICE.
The vigil and rally, co-sponsored by El Centro, a nonprofit that serves as a welcoming center for Latino immigrants, is a sign to the immigrant community that they are welcomed and they belong in Johnson County, Lawrence said.
“I think the immigrant community is feeling a lot of stress and a lot of anger about what’s happening, and we want to show them we support them and we do not support ICE,” Lawrence said.
Johnson Countians can show support in a variety of ways, Lawrence said, from putting a “We Support Immigrants” sign in the front windows of a business or signing up for a community defense course.
