The Kansas State Department of Education advised school districts to follow laws protecting students’ constitutional rights in wake of Homeland Security’s reversal of a policy forbidding immigration authorities from entering school property to make arrests.
Molly Adams / Lawrence Times
Trump has promised to deport undocumented immigrants and others en masse. Knowledge is power amid fear and uncertainty, a Lawrence immigration advocate says.
A bill proposed in the Kansas House seeks to remove people who are not U.S. citizens from the state’s voter rolls through temporary driver’s license records, invoking concern for potential disenfranchisement of Kansas voters.
Sen. Mike Thompson’s hearing on symbolic legislation about immigration laws featured one-sided testimony with dehumanizing language, unsupported speculation about a sex trafficking ring in Wichita, and a comparison between being in the country illegally and robbing a bank.
The ACLU warns that CoreCivic’s shuttered Leavenworth jail could play a role in President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans as an immigration detention center.
Immigration advocates are regrouping after a recent ruling prevented the expansion of health care access for more than 4,000 people in Kansas brought to the country illegally as children.
The state suicide and crisis hotline received a record number of calls a day following the election, with LGBTQ+ and Spanish-speaking lines seeing especially high traffic.
Kansas isn’t a battleground state nationally, but several key races are on the ballot, including the makeup of the entire state Legislature. Experts say the thousands of Kansans who become new citizens each year could play a decisive role.
Chloe Anderson/Lawrence Times
Every week, a group of women gather to practice aerial arts on 19-foot-tall silks. One of them is 26-year-old Jodi Simeon — described as fearless, despite knowing that her future in Lawrence hinges on random chance.
Two employees of a Lawrence business were convicted of conspiring to “encourage or induce” undocumented immigrants to reside in the U.S. But the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the federal statute “criminalizes a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech.”
