ICE agents shouldn’t troll courtrooms. A Kansas judge was right to object.
Ryan Kriegshauser appears at a June 21, 2024, meeting of the State Objections Board to defend Kyler Sweely from concerns about his residency in a state House race. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
What happened after a judge expressed displeasure with the presence of ICE agents in her municipal courtroom last month was yet another sign that our democracy is fraying.
But it wasn’t the judge at fault. It was the heavy-handed response from the state’s top federal prosecutor, who accused the judge of improper conduct and warned city employees not to interfere with or even “disparage” federal immigration officers.
You may have missed this story from Manhattan, Kansas, because it broke on New Year’s Eve, when many of us were celebrating the death of 2025. Barely three days later, we sobered up to the news that our military had struck Venezuela to snatch an alleged drug criminal and his wife and import them to the United States.
But the judicial dustup that began at the Municipal Court building on Colorado Street in the Little Apple may say more about American democracy at ground level than the Maduro affair.
On Dec. 4, Magistrate Judge Sarah Smith Barr paused her opening remarks in a hearing against a woman accused of DUI and leaving the scene of an accident to look at the ICE agents and tell them they “should not be there.” That’s according to reporting by the Manhattan Mercury, which quoted a letter to the city from Ryan Kriegshauser, the U.S. attorney for Kansas.
From the reporting, it was unclear how Barr knew the pair were with ICE.
The plainclothes agents followed the woman out of the courtroom and arrested her in a hallway after the hearing, the letter said. Barr identified the pair as ICE agents to the 20 to 25 people remaining in the courtroom.
Kriegshauser’s letter accused Barr of improperly injecting political overtones into the proceeding and said her remarks were “inappropriate and potentially dangerous,” according to the newspaper. Suggesting ICE agents had no business attending municipal court hearings was improper, the letter said. It was within the discretion of agents to attend public court hearings in seeking lawful arrests and removal of “illegal aliens.”
The letter did not name the woman whom the ICE agents arrested.
The Mercury noted there was no record of what was said in the courtroom at the time of the hearing and that Barr declined comment. The paper also examined the court docket for Dec. 4. It listed 53 individuals, but none was a woman charged with drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident. Neither the court nor Kriegshauser’s office would identity the woman, the newspaper said.
Barr did not respond to a message from me asking about the hearing. But assuming Kriegshauser’s letter is accurate, Barr’s action falls short of what judges in other states have been disciplined for. A Wisconsin judge who had helped a Mexican migrant dodge ICE agents by allowing her to slip out through a side door was found guilty of obstruction last month. A Massachusetts judge who was accused of helping a migrant evade ICE in 2018 was the subject of a federal indictment and a state ethics complaint.
Federal prosecution of state or local judges is rare, and when it does happen it’s typically been associated with bribery. A bribery scandal rocked the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1965, for example, set off by a confession from the former chief justice, imprisoned for tax evasion, that he and others had taken bribes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars for the past 25 years. In the era of Trump, attention has been redirected to “activist judges,” especially in states where sanctuary laws are in tension with federal immigration policies.
But Kansas is not a sanctuary state. In 2022, a law aimed by the Legislature at the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City’s “Safe and Welcoming City Act” went into effect, banning sanctuary cities statewide.
During the first Trump administration, immigration agents started making arrests at courthouses, which had been long recognized, along with churches and other sacred areas, as “protected spaces.” Courthouse arrests were again prohibited under the Biden administration, but after Trump took office for his second term, in January 2025, Department of Homeland Security policy on courthouses was steadily rolled back, although a federal injunction kept some restrictions on places of worship. Local ICE field offices may now use their discretion to conduct immigration enforcement in and around courthouses.
Thus, many ICE arrests are made at immigration courts across the country, including in Kansas City, Missouri, where individuals are detained and then deported after showing up for what they believe is a routine immigration hearing. Although migrants are guaranteed due process by the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to conduct lightning deportations largely unfettered by concerns about rights or racial profiling. With a budget of $28 billion, ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the U.S. government.
The weight of this massive immigration enforcement machine was felt in Judge Barr’s municipal courtroom in December when the pair of ICE agents appeared. The agency is fond of courthouse captures because the location of their targets is known with a high degree of confidence and, because of security at courthouses, few are likely to carry weapons.
The problem is that courtrooms are meant to be safe and impartial places. The presence of ICE agents at a hearing they are not a part of introduces the very element of “political overtones” for which Kriegshauser criticized Barr. It would spark a range of emotions, from approval to fear, likely to disrupt the decorum of the court, if not derail the intended purpose of the proceeding. For that reason alone, Barr was correct in objecting.
The judge apparently did not obstruct agents by attempting to hustle the defendant out a side door or otherwise interfere with the arrest. To note one’s professional and ethical displeasure, as Barr did, is not “disparagement.” The message Kriegshauser sent with his letter was a warning to shut up or else.
The question of justice in a free society is, by necessity, eternally unanswered. To ask the nature of justice is to admit that there is still injustice to be addressed. Attempting to define justice is the realm of philosophers who have devoted careers to exploring the weave of democracy, justice and free societies.
“If a just society requires a strong sense of community,” Michael J. Sandel writes in his 2009 book about justice, “it must find a way to cultivate into citizens a concern for the whole, a dedication to the common good.”
What has eroded in the 17 years since Sandel’s “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” is this concern for the common good. I suspect it has to do with our increasing inability to grasp the important but abstract ideas that have driven American cultural life and domestic policy since the end of World War II. Thinking about justice is hard work.
Just try to imagine justice.
No, seriously. Take a moment, close your eyes, and attempt to imagine what justice looks like. If you’re of a creative bent you might explore whether justice has a sound or a texture. Taste or smell? Sure, why not. But no cheating. You’re not allowed to recall a symbol for justice, such as the famous blindfolded lady with a scale in one hand and a sword in the other.
Can you do it?
Thinking about abstract nouns can give you the equivalent of an ice cream headache. Yet justice is so essential to democracy that it’s something we all should be thinking about right now. The life work of political philosopher John Rawls was linking justice to fairness in a free society, and while we might not have a clear idea about justice, we all know in our gut when something is fair. As a country, we are now engaged in a great struggle over fairness at nearly every level of the public arena.
When I try to imagine justice — and fairness — I get a feeling.
It’s the feeling I get every time I enter a courthouse as a journalist to witness a proceeding. It could be a criminal case where somebody’s on trial for their life, a civil matter where a marriage or a fortune will be decided, or a minor action involving a speeding ticket.
It’s not that I’m naïve enough to believe that courts are perfectly just or that institutions are infallible. No, that feeling of civic reverence that stirs within me is a recognition of the constitutional principles upon which our judicial system is founded, the attempt by imperfect people — judges and lawyers and juries — to aspire to a perfect ideal. I have watched plenty of trials in which justice was more or less served, a few in which it was denied, and just one or two in which I thought the result could not have been more fair. That’s about as close to true justice as we can get in the real world.
Perhaps the most difficult part of believing in a fair and just America is reconciling the aspiration with the reality. People are fallible. Reason and mercy sometimes fail us. Bad laws are passed and oppressive policies enacted. But there is always hope for a correction, as long as there are people willing to speak up and take action.
It took guts for Barr to say what she did.
Courtrooms should not serve as part of the mass deportation machine.
But there’s another reason to keep ICE out of our courtrooms, and that’s the chilling effect that agents might have on the willingness of individuals to report crimes or agree to be witnesses. If you’re an undocumented migrant and you’re being beaten by your partner, wouldn’t you think twice about calling the police if you know deportation awaits at the courthouse door?
Barr, who graduated from the Washburn University School of Law at Topeka and whose grandfather was attorney general of Kansas and on the Kansas Supreme Court, could make a better argument for the sanctity of courtrooms. I suspect she will when the time is right.
Kriegshauser, a Trump nominee who has been U.S. attorney for Kansas since July and confirmed by the Senate on Dec. 19, sent his warning letter to Manhattan’s city manager and commissioners. He said his office is investigating to determine whether Manhattan is a “sanctuary jurisdiction.”
“Make no mistake, my office will take all necessary steps to enforce federal law as needed,” his letter said.
But equal access to the courts is a fundamental principle. Allowing ICE agents to troll courthouses — even municipal courthouses which hear the most minor of offenses — creates a situation in which access is denied entire classes of people. Yes, courtrooms must remain open to the public. But the agents, unlike journalists and other audience members, were not there as observers. They were there as government actors.
The courtroom is the civil cathedral of American government. It should be a place of reverence and a sanctuary from injustice. Of all of our institutions, it must avoid the taint of political influence to keep the trust of the people, for the power of the courts in a free society comes from the trust of the governed. Our trust has been tested time and again in the past year by high court decisions that appear contrary to the ideal of the common good. We must steel ourselves to frustration and keep the flame of a just America burning in our hearts.
The sanctity of American courtrooms must be preserved as a matter not only of justice, but of fairness. The notion that judges should not “disparage” federal immigration agents for shattering the sanctity of our most sacred civic space is dangerous to a functioning democracy.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.