Voters in southwest Kansas have delivered a striking rebuke to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, electing a Democrat to the US Senate for the first time in nearly a century after federal agents swept through their meatpacking towns in September.
Adam Hamilton defeated incumbent Republican Roger Marshall on 3 November, and the three counties most affected by the raids swung towards Hamilton by more than 20 points on average from Trump’s 2024 vote share, according to results compiled by Reuters and USA Today.
The raids began on 22 September, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal — towns in the so-called Golden Triangle of Beef, dominated by meatpacking plants staffed by a mostly immigrant workforce. Federal agents detained 104 people, according to the local US Attorney.
Workers described agents waiting outside a National Beef plant at shift change, detaining departing employees on the street. Others fled back inside and spent hours in the cafeteria until the agents left. In the days that followed, company switchboards were tied up with workers calling out, and regional cattle and livestock groups reported workforce disruptions at feedyards, dairies and meat processors, costing millions of dollars.
Local officials complained they were kept in the dark. Dodge City’s city manager, Nick Hernandez, said officials learned about the operation from social media and spent 48 hours calling state and federal legislators for information. Even Marshall, a long-time supporter of Trump’s immigration policies, criticised the raids, saying police “were not given advance notice or the level of cooperation we would expect,” causing “mass disruptions to local communities and businesses.”
Dodge City is now 67 per cent Hispanic, according to the US Census, after meatpacking companies began building large plants there in the 1980s, first employing Vietnamese and Laotian refugees and later migrants from Mexico and Central America.
Hamilton, who called the raids a “disaster” and said Kansans were “fed up” with Marshall being a “mouthpiece for the president,” will be the first Democratic senator to represent the state since 1932 when he takes office in January. In his victory speech, he recalled a woman from Dodge City who told him some parents were too afraid to pick their children up from elementary school. “This was not OK,” he said.
Trump has sent mixed signals on immigration since his party’s midterm drubbing. He told “60 Minutes” that his deportation campaign may have been “too tough,” then promoted Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration strategy, to be his next chief of staff.
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, said in a statement: “We will continue to enforce our nation’s laws and remove illegal aliens from American communities.” A White House spokesperson said Trump’s “commonsense immigration agenda has delivered the most secure border in history.”
For residents of Dodge City, the aftermath is still unfolding. Karla Flores and her husband Alfredo Arrieta were pulled over by immigration agents shortly after leaving a Walmart on the day the operation began. They were deported to Mexico after five weeks in ICE custody; their two youngest children have joined them, while their eldest, aged 17, is living with Flores’s brother.
In the weeks after the raids, a local nonprofit delivered hundreds of meals to affected families and helped register residents to vote. “We thought we were untouchable,” said Amy Soberanes, a 25-year-old Mexican American business owner who pressed city commissioners for answers in October, adding that she had never seen people so politically energised. “Our community wants people to be held responsible for what happened.”
Sources: Reuters — “After ICE raids, southwest Kansans swung to a Democrat. Now they want accountability” (https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/after-ice-raids-southwest-kansans-swung-democrat-now-they-want-accountability-2026-11-13/)
