Organizers of a demonstration in Overland Park opposing ICE raids in Johnson County said more than 1,000 protesters lined Metcalf Avenue on a sweltering Saturday to show support for immigrants in the community.
Organized by Johnson County-based advocacy organization Boots on the Ground Midwest, the protest was in response to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Lenexa and Kansas City, Kansas, last month, as well as news that Lenexa City Councilmember Melanie Arroyo was asked to prove her citizenship to local police.
The group has organized protests every Saturday morning in Overland Park, but co-founder Nancy Mays said they called on other progressive organizations, including Indivisible Kansas City and Heartland Mission Indivisible, to join their ranks this past Saturday along Metcalf Avenue from 80th to 103rd streets.
“We’re there every week, but we really wanted to make it much bigger and with a unified message around in support of our immigrant community,” Mays said.
ICE raids and questioning a city councilmember’s citizenship
On July 30, about a dozen workers at El Toro Loco locations in Lenexa and Kansas City, Kansas, were detained by ICE.
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.”
But the raid received pushback from Kansas City area nonprofit Advocates for Immigrant Rights & Reconciliation, some representatives of whom showed up as the raids were being carried out, filming workers being taken away in handcuffs.
Some local immigration advocates and legal experts questioned how the raids were conducted.
“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,’” said attorney Rekha Sharma-Crawford of Kansas City, Missouri-based immigration law firm Sharma-Crawford Attorneys at Law.
A week after the raids, Lenexa City Councilmember Melanie Arroyo revealed at a city council meeting that in July, Lenexa Police requested proof of her citizenship after the Kansas Bureau of Investigation passed along a concern from an anonymous caller who questioned her eligibility to hold public office. Arroyo was born in Mexico but has been a naturalized citizen since 2018.
The caller, who was not publicly identified, raised concern pertaining to “public testimony she gave related to her immigrant background” which she described earlier this year in both a Kansas City Star op-ed and in written testimony to the Kansas Legislature in defense of allowing undocumented immigrants pay in-state tuition rates at state colleges.
During the Lenexa City Council meeting on Aug. 5, Arroyo described the pain she felt having her citizenship questioned.
“I started to recognize that the reason why this felt uncomfortable was because I was being asked to show my papers, and many people with an immigrant background would know that this carries a lot of political and historical weight,” she said during the meeting.
After hiring a lawyer, Arroyo provided documentation of her status as a U.S. citizen, and the inquiry was closed on July 29.
Protesters lined roughly 20 blocks on Metcalf
At Saturday’s protest, people stood at busy intersections along Metcalf Avenue, from 80th Street around downtown Overland Park to 103rd Street, holding signs that called for preserving democracy in the United States, the abolition of ICE and support for immigrants.
One protester, who gave her name as Sarah H., said she’s been attending protests since the Vietnam War.
“I’ve seen a lot of things. When I was in grade school, my uncle was killed in Vietnam, and we were protesting the Vietnam War. And there’s still injustices that we just can’t seem to get a grip on,” she said.
She said she wanted to be a voice for immigrants in Johnson County who couldn’t attend Saturday’s rally themselves.
“I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be an immigrant. I have a neighbor who’s a naturalized citizen. She’s been here for 30 years. She’s afraid to leave her house,” she said. “Everyone has such angst about it, that people are being treated so horribly. It’s terrible.”
Sydney Mattox of Overland Park, who is a teacher in Johnson County, said she was thinking of her students as she held a protest sign.
“I’m a teacher of students who are a heavily immigrant population. So for me, it’s very personal because I’m scared to see what’s going to happen in the school situations and hospitals and churches and areas that are now open for people to go in and take and kidnap those people,” she said. “It’s just a very scary time right now.”
Earlier this year, ICE rolled back an Obama-era policy that directed agents to avoid conducting immigration enforcement actions in “sensitive” areas, including schools, hospitals and churches.
“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” a Department of Homeland Security statement said at the time the policy rollback was announced. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
“Surprised by the number of honks”
Waving the American flag and holding protest signs, a married couple in their 80s from Overland Park, who asked not to be identified by name, said they were happy to see a mixture of ages and backgrounds show up to protest.
The husband said they participated for younger people, while the wife said she hopes Congress and the president are listening.
Hearing how many people honked their horns, waved and cheered in solidarity, Mays said she was surprised.
“We always get way more honks than we do negative feedback. But today was exceptional, I will say,” she said. “Everybody there was very surprised by the number of honks that we were getting.”
The hope is that people who are afraid feel better knowing that they have support in Johnson County, Mays said.
“I hope that our immigrant community, and Councilwoman Arroyo, or anyone like her whose integrity has been unfairly questioned, felt support and and saw that,” she said. “We certainly saw that in some people who drove by. So that’s my hope, is that the immigrant community in Kansas City felt the support today.”
Other Johnson County protest news: Hundreds gather in Overland Park as part of statewide demonstrations to ‘defend democracy’
