What I learned after protesting ICE on a street corner in Hays, Kansas

A masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent knocks on a car window on Jan. 12, 2026, in Minnesota. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Two years ago, when I moved to Hays, I knew that I would be moving to a town mostly populated by right-wing conservatives. Despite being an avowed lefty, this didn’t bother me.

My closest friend and his entire family are quintessential American conservatives. Over the years, we have been on countless camping trips and vacations. They introduced me to guns, taught me to shoot and took me on my first deer hunt. Late at night sitting around the dying embers of a campfire, our conversations would inevitably turn to politics. We sometimes found common ground, but even when we didn’t, it didn’t seem to matter because our shared passion for the outdoors and what we had accomplished during the day.

Over time, I found myself warming to one of their most firmly held positions. I began to think that the American right — an armed citizenry constantly on guard against government overreach — might actually be a good safeguard against authoritarianism taking hold in our country.

My belief in this idea has dimmed and brightened over the years. Following my experience at a protest in Hays, I fear that it may have been extinguished for good.

The protest took place on Sunday, Jan. 11, at the corner of 27th and Vine in Hays. The goal was to protest the expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to express outrage at the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent in Minneapolis the week before.

The turnout was small, with no more than 20 people, but the passion and frustration were palpable.

One woman’s sign quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!”

Another read, “I’m a bitch are you going to shoot me too?” referencing words spoken by an ICE agent after Good was shot.

Many passers-by showed their support for the protest with a thumbs-up or an enthusiastic honk. Others signaled their opposition with a shake of the head or an exaggerated scoff behind a closed window. Some were bolder with their disagreement.

One middle-age woman, her face flushed red, leaned out the window of her pickup and screamed, “F***ing cockroaches!”

Several gave us the finger, though in a timid fashion, their hands barely rising above the windowsill, while others waited until the light changed green to shout something as they sped away, their words lost in the noise of traffic.

As is often the case in the modern world, much of the community dialogue about the protest and the events that inspired it unfolded online. The Hays Post published two stories about the protest on its Facebook page, generating nearly 1,500 comments between them. Sifting through hundreds of dissenting comments from right-leaning Kansans, I found none of the libertarian, revolutionary zeal that I always quietly admired about the right.

Instead, I discovered a longing for authority and a celebration of state violence.

Many declared Renee Nicole Good the “f*** around and find out” champion. One man posted an AI rendering of a fountain in the likeness of Good, with a hole in her forehead and water spouting out. Another posted a meme showing Good’s body slumped over in her car after being shot. The caption read: “lived her life as a leftist, died leaning right.”

The callous and at times even celebratory attitude toward death is vile. More troubling still was a central theme running through the hundreds of comments: the suggestion that protesting ICE is un-American and that any resistance to ICE agents amounts to a forfeiture of one’s life.

Many of these commenters undoubtedly see themselves as patriotic Americans cut from the same cloth as revolutionary figures of old like Paul Revere, Thomas Paine or Samuel Adams. The irony, of course, is that their condemnation of the protest in Hays and their blanket calls for submission to authority — a couple of people actually wrote “Comply or Die” — bear far more resemblance to a loyalist position than a revolutionary one.

One can imagine what these commenters would say were they transported back in time to 1775 following the Boston Massacre.

“They were obstructing official business, what did they expect!?”

“They threw snowballs at the redcoats. Sorry, they brought it on themselves!”

Judging by their blind deference toward ICE, most of these folks would have sooner turned out their pockets to every passing redcoat or have eagerly prepared bierocks for those demanding quarter than they would have protested for the rights later enshrined in the Third Amendment.

Conservatives today insist that ICE is saving America and only targeting criminals.

This faith persists despite mounting evidence that countless U.S. citizens are being harassed, assaulted, detained and in some cases deported by ICE. If defenders of this system are unaware of these facts, their ignorance is itself damning.

If they are aware and accept such abuses as acceptable, they should remember Benjamin Franklin’s words: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

These defenders of ICE fail to consider what will happen to the organization when it has completed its objectives. When every undocumented immigrant has been purged from the United States, will an $11 billion law enforcement agency simply dissolve, or will it find a new class of people to police and deport?

If anything is true about money and power in America, it’s that once granted they are rarely given back.

The naivete of imagining that this unaccountable, masked, paramilitary force will act differently from its historical predecessors is alarming. Even more alarming is the thought that some Americans might not want it to. As one Kansan wrote in response to our protest: “I’m passed the point of wanting to deport illegals. I want to deport the people who want them here too.”

At the beginning of this column, I wrote that my belief in the American right as a bulwark against tyranny had been extinguished. But I also believe that it can be relit. It is not too late for right-leaning Kansans to actually defend the values that so many see fit to advertise on bumper stickers, flags and T-shirts.

Sam Foglesong is a scholar of African Studies and a writer who lives in Hays. Through its opinion section, 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.