Leaders with strong ties to the agriculture industry and the Republican Party don’t criticize Trump’s immigration policies. But they do say Kansas and its consumers will be poorer if the state’s 80,000-some undocumented immigrants are pushed out.
by Roy Wenzl and The Wichita Eagle
Do we need our immigrants?
We put that question to key business, economic development and agriculture leaders in Kansas.
Most people they serve or work with live in counties where 2024 election results show a distinct preference for President Trump and other Republicans.
But what business leaders told us may surprise voters.
“We have a choice,” said Matt Teagarden, CEO of the 5,700-member Kansas Livestock Association. “We can import workers. Or we can import food.”
Most declined to criticize Trump’s immigration policies. All said their first immigration priority is a secure border.
But they emphatically said we need our immigrants. Even more than we have now, with legal pathways to work, if not citizenship.
“We’ve tried for years to figure out a way to create an expanded path for legal status — not citizenship, but guest worker programs,” Teagarden said. “Citizenship is the piece that gets folks fired up, so we’ve focused instead on getting legal status for the current workforce.”
Over and over again, business, economic development and ag leaders told us:
Immigrants help keep inflation and grocery prices down. They help keep our food chain safe. Most said mass deportation would cripple the livestock and construction industries, and raise inflation.
Newcomers certainly benefit from being in this country, immigration advocates contend. But those who live alongside them might not realize how they benefit from immigration too.
One leader we spoke with is Alan Cobb, retired as president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce; in 2016 he served as candidate Trump’s national director of ballot access in all the states. He said that if Congress fails to create an easier pathway to worker permits, Kansas should do it on its own.
Progressives can be skeptical of such statements, arguing that Trump’s supporters are getting exactly the harsh immigration crackdown they voted for in the 2024 election.
But in the eyes of ag industry people we talked with, such rebuttals tend to miss just how little the Democratic Party has offered rural voters while opening up the floodgates to immigration under the Biden Administration.
Republican concerns about Trump’s immigration moves are well-summarized in the findings of a national study done last year by Rice University, a study the authors wrote was “generously supported by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation.” That research paper, “Feeding America: How Immigrants Sustain U.S. Agriculture,” concludes that migrants are crucial to U.S. food security.
Even Trump’s own U.S. Labor Department has acknowledged that a drop in illegal immigration is threatening domestic food production and risking increased grocery prices for consumers. The agency also said U.S. workers can’t make up for the loss of immigrants.
One person we talked with about this is Dan Kuhn, a north-central Kansas farmer who has spent years hiring seasonal workers from Mexico to help him grow produce and thousands of decorative pumpkins.
He sells most of his crops at his Depot Farm Market just north of Courtland. We saw that he has a friendly relationship with his workers, in part because he took the trouble years ago to learn Spanish. “I don’t know what I’d do without these people,” he said. “I’d have to close it all up.” He didn’t think he’d find replacements from the rest of the U.S. population.
Around him, he said, farmers who use seasonal workers are worried about losing their workers; worried also about how tariffs have taken away their crop markets. The two things in tandem hurt them, losing both the labor that processes their beef and crops and their markets.
Trump’s back-and-forth with the ag industry has been contentious at times. The president lashed out at farmers and ranchers after being criticized for asserting that the U.S. needs to import more beef from Argentina.
In early December, his administration announced $12 billion in one-time payments to farmers being hurt by tariff hikes.
More and more producers express worry about their local workforce and world markets being damaged, said Lona DuVall, president and CEO of the Finney County Economic Development Corporation.
“The producers are hearing from their constituents about this,” DuVall said. “They still don’t blame Trump for this. But they want it fixed.”
We interviewed roughly 40 people for this story, including roughly 20 Latinos, some who voted for Trump. Many said they feel hunted now — even citizens. They say they live in a shadow world, where they, their friends or family fear being handcuffed and deported.
The immigrant community in Kansas includes far more than Latinos. Many newcomers hail from Asia, but Latino immigrants, particularly from Mexico, are by far the largest group.
DuVall worries that the thousands of immigrants and legal refugees who power our packing plants might leave if made to feel more unwelcome.
Immigrants we spoke with told unsettling border-crossing stories. All, including the Trump supporters, described past racist encounters: “Go back to your own country.” But they also said racists are a minority, and that their overall problem with anti-immigrant whites is that they “base their decisions on not knowing anything about us,” as the Wichita Latina activist Emira Chaparro put it.
The business people we spoke with about immigration policies gave us lists of wants from Washington: Except for border security, their priorities differ significantly from Trump current’s path
“We already had somewhere between three and 4,000 open positions in our community before this started,” said DuVall.
A particular category of immigrant, international refugees, are crucial to Kansas employers. Since 2011, the International Rescue Committee has placed at least 5,000 refugees in the state, — 2,500 in Wichita. Most came here, vetted by the U.S. State Department, to escape murderous regimes; from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Their placement here is under threat because Trump reduced federal assistance. Trump also wants to stop immigration from 19 countries.
“We would have significant challenges if those folks all disappeared. And that’s just Finney County,” DuVall said.
Debbie Snapp, the executive director of Catholic Charities of Southwest Kansas, said her program to assist thousands of just arrived workers temporarily lost $250,000 — federal money she’d already spent on refugees. She tried to make up for this by sponsoring a rummage sale in April — which raised only $5,000. Months later, the federal money was restored — for now. But going forward, she said, “We expect it to be a lot less.”
Also losing federal support was the International Rescue Committee in Wichita, which has helped thousands of international refugees learn language, job and cultural skills before going to work in Wichita or elsewhere. Yeni Silva-Renteria, the director, said nearly all the refugees fill jobs here quickly “because companies really need them.”
Losing immigrants and refugees, Snapp said, would devastate the southwest Kansas economy. “If you stand in the parking lots outside those packing plants at shift change time, it looks like the United Nations has just let out,” she said. What’s happening now, she said, “is cruelty.”
Anger and its consequences
Two of the roughly 40 people we spoke to — Ryan Baty and Damon Young — are conservative in politics, devout Christians, and successful in business and leadership. Young is a former chief business officer of the Kansas Leadership Center, publisher of The Journal. He’s a former board member of the Kansas State Chamber of Commerce and the Wichita Regional Chamber, which he calls “two of the most conservative, pro-business chambers in the state.” He even has experience in the construction industry, where at one point he had to fire undocumented workers.
Baty, a Republican Sedgwick County Commissioner, owns The Mattress Hub stores.
They and other leaders know what many Republican voters say: That Trump is right to deport illegal immigrants. “People are pissed off,” Baty said. “They knew what he would do. They voted for change, and they don’t care what it looks like.”
But he and Young also think the 758,802 Kansans who voted Trump in November don’t want higher grocery prices, housing costs and inflation. The risk is costs would rise if Trump mass-deports its 80,000 non-citizen Kansans.
Trump and Republicans are in charge for now, Baty said. “So, however this plays out, Republicans will have to answer for it.”
Trump may already be answering, though quietly. While he still denounces non-citizens as “criminals,” and “illegal aliens,” and though Congress gave Homeland Security $170 billion in 2025 to deport immigrants — a massive increase — he hasn’t mass-deported Kansans.
Republicans told us the 80,000 number never should have been allowed to grow that large. They’ve felt betrayed and ignored for decades. The resulting anger, white and Latino Republicans told us, is profound, with people saying they’re willing to endure financial losses to deal with the border.
Common sense will get us out of this ditch, business people told us.
How our mess got messy
It wasn’t voters who created what is now a threat to our economic well-being, Young said. And it wasn’t immigrants.
It was politicians. “Both sides are to blame,” he said.
“President Reagan answered the question of whether we need our immigrants. He gave them amnesty.” (In 1986, for three million immigrants then, with the Immigration Reform and Control Act).
It was a response that sought to strike a balance.
Reagan’s amnesty mandated a stronger crackdown on illegal immigration — but proposed a humanitarian element: He spelled this out in a 1984 presidential debate: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” He said that two years before he sold amnesty to Congress, and said it to Congress members at that time; the bill, with his backing, passed with bipartisan support.
“Since then we’ve had six presidents who did nothing like that,” Young said. That’s part of why (Republican) voters became so angry, he said. They felt like the government had broken trust with them for not doing anything.
Doing nothing also created “something we’d not seen before — the growth of an immigration culture within our larger American culture.”
“Those two cultures are now closely woven together — in beautiful and dependent ways. That’s a thing you cannot pull apart even if you want to, not without serious business and cultural consequences.”
Baty concurred. “Have you ever toured the big National Beef plant in Dodge City? They slaughter 10 to 12,000 cattle a day. When you walk up over the plant floor, you see hundreds of employees doing the work.
“And they don’t look like” the 73% of Kansans who are non-Latino whites.
Unintended consequences
What would happen if those people left? “The economy would shrink,” said Jeffrey Passel, Pew’s senior researcher for immigrant and labor force data.
Passel also brought up one other thing we might lose if undocumented non-citizens leave. “They pay Social Security taxes,” he said. And they pay that money into a system they can never draw from because they don’t have valid Social Security numbers.
Nationally, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in the year 2022, according to ITEP, a non-partisan, nonprofit tax policy organization. Of that, $25.7 billion were Social Security taxes — roughly enough to pay for benefits for 1 million people.
Those immigrants also paid $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes.
Tax policy leaders have warned for years that Social Security is drifting toward insolvency, that the white working population is aging and that white birth rates are declining. Meanwhile, Passel said, “the people coming in are mostly young working people, with their families. Most are employed.”
This is a point brought up repeatedly by Latinos. Undocumented workers keep Social Security solvent though it will never serve them unless they gain citizenship.
“We knew when we came here that that’s what the situation was,” said Claudia Amaro, an undocumented Wichita journalist. “But it’s still wrong to say we come here to take benefits.”
What national numbers show
The Pew Research Center, which analyzes demographic and labor force trends, reports that 33% of workers who hang drywall are undocumented. Roofing workers: 32%. Painters and paper hangers: 28%. Agricultural workers: 24%. Construction workers (besides drywall): 24%. Maids and housekeepers: 24%. Tile installers: 23%. Masons: 21%. Landscaping: 18%. Carpenters: 18%.
Mass deportation would shrink those industries, Passel said. Prices would rise.
Business leaders also brought up something not often mentioned in partisan bickering: They want that legal pathway on humanitarian grounds.
“These are people that pay taxes, send their kids to our schools, buy groceries and do all these things and are part of our communities,” said Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union.
“Many households have mixed status,” Teagarden said. “The kids might be fully legal, but one or both parents might be in question.”
Who they are not
Most immigrants don’t fit the negative stereotypes held by many voters.
Sarah Balderas, a Wichita immigration lawyer, said her hundreds of clients are not “takers.”
“My law firm’s office cleaning crew has a tough job every night because the undocumented people who come to us all track in debris on their shoes from work sites — paint flakes, gravel, little dirt clods. They come to us straight from their job sites. They are working people.”
If they got deported, several of our sources said, they would likely not be replaced with American citizens.
“Nobody from a city wants to move to western Kansas and work in slaughterhouses,” said John Doll, a former Garden City mayor and a retired Republican Kansas state senator. “It’s absurd to say those workers could be replaced by citizens. If they leave, southwest Kansas with its meat-packing plants will become a series of ghost towns.”
“They call it unskilled labor, but in Kansas it’s the farthest thing from that,” Levendofsky said. “It takes time and effort to get really good at those jobs. If you don’t have people harvesting the produce, milking the cows, cutting up meat — you’re going to have a problem. And gaps in the food system.”
Hidden Workers
Cecilia Alcalà, an undocumented native of Jalisco in Mexico, has spent four decades cleaning Wichita’s hospitals, schools, and homes; she speaks limited English. She’s written enough good Spanish poetry to fill a book. She lives in a shadow world, she said, avoiding not only ICE but people who might turn her in.
She is one of an estimated 15,000 undocumented immigrants in Wichita, part of 80,000 statewide, according to data from Pew, which analyzes federal census surveys.
Its numbers concerning Kansas’ undocumented people contradict many myths:
Roughly 55,000 of Cecilia’s fellow 80,000 undocumented immigrants work full-time.
Most of the other 25,000 are their spouses or children. But mass deporting them would upset far more people, because many families have mixed immigration status. And advocates say that all immigrants, including citizens and legal immigrants like refugees, should consider themselves under review by the Trump administration.
Employers in Wichita sometimes withheld Cecilia’s wages. Bosses and strangers sometimes called her an offensive ethnic slur for unauthorized immigrants presumedly crossing into the U.S. from Mexico via the Rio Grande. She showed up anyway, for decades, scrubbing floors, raising children, donating to her church, caring for neighbors. “People walked around me like I was invisible.”
Cecilia fears deportation, so “Cecilia Alcalà” is a substitute name she picked for herself. We interviewed three other undocumented non-citizens and two young DACA beneficiaries for this story, though, and they all said we should use their real names. “I am not afraid,” said a defiant Aida Servin. She raised two sons here who are doing well, she said. Wichita is her home. Every non-citizen we interviewed said they love Wichita.
Latinos for Trump
Many of the nearly 20 immigrant Latinos and Latinas interviewed for this story — some undocumented, but most now citizens — have harrowing border-crossing stories. Aida Servin crawled through a hole that had been fire-torched through a steel border fence. She was a skinny 21-year-old then, terrified from the blast of spotlights and rotor blades pounding down from a border patrol helicopter. And Yeni Silva-Renteria, the International Rescue Committee CEO, at age 10, almost died in the California desert with her mother when she crossed.
While Latinos who support Trump have similar stories, they believe differently.
Martha Heath said she was a civil and criminal defense attorney in Mexico City when she overstayed her tourist visa. She gave up her practice to do odd jobs to stay in Wichita and help her sister save their father, who was dying of kidney disease. She drove without a license for years. “Here I was, an attorney sworn to uphold the law, and I was breaking the law. But my father got dialysis.”
Heath and other Republican supporters interviewed here all said similar things about Trump and why they support him:
That Trump is finally stopping illegal immigration. (That’s true: Border crossings since Trump’s election have dwindled to a trickle).
That Joe Biden’s expanded asylum policies gave not only an open door to millions of new immigrants but gave them benefits that earlier immigrants never got. “People like me, when we came in, we could not get insurance and medical benefits,” Heath said. “But the newer ones got it.”
That Trump is more aggressively attacking the importation of illegal drugs.
They don’t yet see a Democrat alternative to Trump.
“They’re wishy-washy,” Baty said.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump scuttled a bipartisan effort at reform so he could campaign on immigration. He won and most Republicans remain in his corner.
“I like every single thing Trump is doing,” said Dan Heflin, a white business owner in Wichita who has known and worked with Latinos for years. “Every single thing, including about immigration. I feel that way not to hurt Hispanics; it’s because I knew some of them in college and saw that they were all trying to get in the right way.
“But Biden just opened the floodgates. The country can’t handle it. It’s not fair to the country. It’s not at all fair to the immigrants who came before them.”
About 3 million people migrated into the U.S. during Trump’s first term. But under Biden the number exceeded 8 million.
Border security is personal to Baty, and not only because drug crime costs millions spent on the Sedgwick County Jail, which he oversees as a county commissioner. He lost someone to an overdose — an employee at The Mattress Hub. Baty ties that death directly to the border.
“He was sober for 14 years and relapsed. It progressed to fentanyl, and we lost him last November,” Baty said, referring to November 2024. This poison has so many people held hostage to their addiction.”
The drug concern is no mere abstraction, said Baty and (Republican) Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter. It costs taxpayers more than $10 million annually in jail medical costs. Many inmates have drug problems; a number of others have mental issues made worse by drug abuses, Easter said. “It’s all directly related to the drugs that the cartels are moving across our borders,” he said.
Most of the Republicans we interviewed don’t like Trump calling immigrants “criminals” and “scum.”
“If I could tell him what I think, I’d tell him there are many deserving people,” said Heath.
“The way he talks bothers me a lot, and sometimes gets me in trouble with my Republican friends when I talk about that,” said Ben Sauceda, the citizen son and grandson of Mexican immigrants. Sauceda, the CEO of a Wichita museum, has campaigned for Republicans for decades and voted for Trump three times.
“Crossing the border is illegal,” he said. “But they are not criminals.”
There’s a difference between not using your blinker when no other cars are around and putting people in danger by “running a red light.”
The right way’
The most depressing thing they hear from citizens, Latinos said, is: “I’m all for immigration but I just want them to do it the right way.”
“Try that sometime,” said Emira Chavira Chaparro, who earned citizenship. “You’ll see.” Her try for citizenship lasted 13 years.
“We know how to fill out paperwork,” Amaro said. “There are 12 million of us. If it’s so easy to do it the right way, then why haven’t we earned citizenship?”
For immigrants, said the artist Armando Minjarez, “The backlog (of immigration applications) is so long that even if you are sponsored by a sibling, it could take up to two decades.”
“I hear this all the time,” said Michael Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City deportation attorney: “‘Why can’t they just immigrate the RIGHT way?’
“And I ask: ‘What does that mean to you, the right way?’
“They’ll go, ‘Apply and get the papers.’
“And I’ll say: It’s almost impossible.”
Minjarez lived without citizenship for eight years before he completed the requirements.
Living like that imposes a deep psychological impact on non-citizens, he said.
“People tell me I drive like an old person, because I always drive the speed limits. I use my blinker no matter whether I’m just turning into a parking lot or out of a driveway, I’m hyper aware, because that’s what I did when I was driving without a license.
“Living in the shadows also means you have to negotiate with yourself every day. How much should you share about your personal life with the people around you — whether it is at your job, if you are part of church? How much do you share with the people in your church or at school, because you never know if they’re sympathetic to you, right?”
Sharma-Crawford said our system — keeping immigrants on the run or waiting for years — looks like “it was either designed by idiots, or designed as a way to exploit people.”
How do we solve this?
Designing a more effective system is easier said than done.
“It’s complicated,” Teagarden said. “What we’ve tried to do over the years is to just have a reasonable conversation about it all.”
That’s hard. “People seem now to push the outrage button … instead of trying to talk things through,” Young said. “And then politicians and groups use that outrage to fundraise.”
“We need to get to know people we disagree with,” Young said. “It’s real hard to hate up close.”
DuVall, the Finney County economic official, said she knows that many voters don’t have a fully rounded picture of how much their immigrant neighbors mean to everyone’s prosperity. She’s studied how to persuade. “It’s just by talking reasonably. And keeping it low-key.”
“Solving this is where the MAGA movement stepped in,” Baty said. “Whether they were right or wrong, the fundamental thing they understand is that what we’ve been doing is unsustainable. It’s not only bad. It’s embarrassingly bad.”
He’s spent his life getting to know Republicans, ranchers — and Latinos, he said.
“I grew up along 25th Street in Wichita (a mostly Latino area),” he said. “Several Latinos married into my family. That’s very much a part of who we are. I have empathy for what immigrants are going through. If the same things had happened to me, I would want to come here too.”
“I also married into a family who are Kansas cattle ranchers. So I understand a lot about where people come from politically — and yet, like many people in agriculture, I also understand the dependence of our agriculture on immigrant labor. “
We need immigrants, DuVall said. That’s not a stance she takes lightly.
“People’s livelihoods literally depend on me making good decisions. So I don’t allow those decisions to be colored by the whims or labels or the rhetoric of politics.”
Finney County’s 40,000-plus residents are majority Latino — 51% – but most voters are white. Trump beat Kamala Harris in Finney County 6,875 to 3,257 last year. Still, most voters, DuVall said, know that the county’s prosperity depends on immigrants, documented and undocumented, and hundreds more legal Latino immigrants and legal refugee workers.
The rhetoric she sees from politicians and on social media has bothered her.
“Not only will the undocumented folks be challenged to stay in our communities, but even those here legally.”
Employers are more concerned about the rhetoric than about ICE showing up, DuVall said. “I hear people say things like ‘this is an unhealthy conversation that is happening, and my workforce, including those here legally, they’re being impacted by the talk and the rhetoric.’ “
Race and culture
Have race and culture helped drive our divisions?
Every Latino we interviewed said they’d had occasional racist encounters in their lives here, including the Latino Trump supporters. Martha Heath, for example, went to an IHOP for a breakfast to celebrate Trump’s first win in 2016 — and a car with two young women rolled up on her at the curb. “Go back to your own country! Build the wall!” they called out. She and her family giggled a bit, she said, because she actually supported Trump’s border wall.
But most Latinos said the problem they have with white citizens is they don’t know much about Latinos, immigration or that they enrich our culture and economy. “Most of them don’t know anything about us,” Amaro said.
Every Latino we spoke with said they love the United States. “When I first came here, I would walk toward a door and the (white) person ahead of me would stop and hold the door open for me,” Heath said. “That never happens in Mexico City.”
Emira Chaparro crossed the Rio Grande as a girl of 13, perched on the shoulders of another Latino wading the current. Many came here to escape poverty but also violence. Amaro came to the U.S. as a girl after her father was murdered.
Armando Minjarez’s citizen-origin story tells much about how tensions rise sometimes when different races and cultures interact.
He’s a Wichita artist and Latino community leader who grew up as undocumented in that small city of Ulysses. Nothing about race relations there — or in Wichita — is simple, Minjarez said.
He was arrested as a teen one night in Ulysses. “My bosses, a white lesbian couple who ran the restaurant where I worked, bailed me out; they had an understanding of what it’s like to be a marginalized person.”
He could have faced deportation. But a white judge he’d befriended at an after-school program cleared him — after learning the officer had a habit of pulling over brown people.
Minjarez lived around Ulysses white people who professed anti-immigrant views. But they had Latino friends, he said.
“You could hear these guys say things. ‘We need to get them out of here.’ But they’d also say ‘Not THIS one. Or THAT one. That one is a hard worker who helps our community.’ “
DuVall has heard complaints about immigrants.
“But I’m not sure that it’s related to race,” she said. “Instead, there’s this feeling: ‘My family came here long ago and worked hard, and now we’ve got all these new people coming in.’ And with that, there is this scarcity mindset that there is only so much available, so we can’t let new people come in. ‘I’ve got my little piece of this paradise. I don’t want anybody else to be able to move out here.’
“That’s based on a false assumption that the pie is finite,” she said.
“But here, no matter how many people come in, we keep adding more jobs and more economic growth. Our unemployment rate is 2%, and that is, by definition, full employment. Our population can’t keep up with the job growth we have.
“The pie is not finite.”
Roy Wenzl is a veteran Kansas journalist known for his long-form narratives. A member of the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame, he has done work for The Wichita Eagle for more than two decades and has reported some of The Journal’s most-read stories over the past year.
This article was republished here with the permission of: KLC Journal, The Wichita Eagle