Local power still matters

I live here. You (presumably) live here.  We stand in line at the grocery store with city workers, teachers, dishwashers, kids in hoodies and retirees counting coupons. Kansas City isn’t a slogan or a headline to us—it’s a functioning organism.

And lately, that organism has shown a pulse. A spine. A refusal.

That matters, because the federal machinery has been circling again—quiet walkthroughs, coded language about “capacity,” the familiar smell of logistics masquerading as policy. We’ve seen what that prelude leads to. Minneapolis heard the same music before the volume got turned up and the neighborhood soundscape changed forever.

Here’s the difference—and it’s not small: Kansas City area leaders didn’t sit on their hands.

They moved.

KCMO’s city council didn’t wait for a ribbon-cutting or a press release. They slammed the permitting door and passed a ban on non-municipal detention facilities—five years of legal friction where ICE expected a smooth glide path. That’s not symbolism. That’s municipal muscle. Zoning, permits, land use—the boring tools that actually stop things from happening.

You cannot build or operate a detention center in this city without local approvals. City leaders used that leverage immediately. That’s what resistance looks like when you understand how power actually flows.

And it didn’t stop at city hall.

County officials across the metro—burned before by federal overreach and private prison shell games—have been louder, sharper, and more precise than they were a decade ago. They’ve demanded clarity. They’ve asked who pays, who oversees, who answers when something goes wrong. They’ve refused to treat “federal” as synonymous with “untouchable.”

This is the lesson Minneapolis paid for in advance: If you don’t force the questions early, you live with the consequences late.

Leavenworth learned it the hard way and then did something rare—it adapted. City officials there dragged a private detention operator into the daylight and into court, insisting on permits, hearings, public accountability. The result wasn’t a dramatic moral victory. It was better than that: a delay, a slowdown, a requirement that detention justify itself under local law instead of swaggering in under federal cover.

That fight matters. It sets precedent. It tells ICE and its contractors that the Midwest is no longer an open floor plan for human warehousing. Local governments can’t abolish ICE. But they can make expansion expensive, slow, and politically radioactive.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

Let’s not romanticize this. Some sycophantic state-level actors are still feeding the beast—deploying resources, signing cooperation agreements, lending legitimacy to an enforcement regime that thrives on proximity to local power. That tension is real. But it makes the city and county pushback even more important, not less.

Because when ICE expands, it does so through cracks: bureaucratic indifference, jurisdictional confusion, leaders afraid of looking “soft.” Kansas City’s leaders—at least for now—have chosen a different posture. They’ve chosen friction.

And friction can be the enemy of mass detention.

This isn’t hysteria. It’s memory. Minneapolis didn’t fall because people didn’t care; it fell because too many officials waited for certainty while the machinery was still warming up. Kansas City’s leaders appear to have learned that lesson. They’re acting while the doors are still unlocked, while the blueprints are still proposals, while the language is still evasive enough to challenge.

That deserves acknowledgment—and public backing.

Because resistance doesn’t always look like protest signs and megaphones. Sometimes it looks like a denied permit, a zoning code, a judge insisting on process, a council vote taken before dawn. Sometimes it looks like adults in public office deciding that this city will not quietly become a node in someone else’s detention network.

We should be proud of that. Cautiously. Vigilantly.

And we should keep watching—because the only thing ICE respects more than authority is persistence.