Beginning around Monday, September 21, 2026, ICE officers stopped motorists to ask about their citizenship around Dodge City, Liberal and Garden City, Kansas, small communities where most of the population is Latino, according to organizers and local officials quoted by Reuters. The towns are home to major beef plants run by National Beef, Cargill and Tyson; about 22% of the nation's grain-fed beef supply sits in the region, according to the Kansas Livestock Association and USDA figures cited by the Midwest Newsroom. Residents believe “dozens of people were detained,” Reuters reported; ICE gave local officials no count. Liberal's vice mayor, Janeth Vazquez: “Our community is a ghost town.” She said 120 students missed Meadowlark Elementary School on Wednesday.
The operation did not go inside the plants, but it reached their workers. A United Food and Commercial Workers spokesperson told Bloomberg that employees of Cargill and National Beef were detained in the surrounding community, and that there has been a “significant downfall” in operations from absences. An organizer told Reuters agents were “in the parking lot and trying to pick up people” at National Beef. Residents and officials told the Midwest Newsroom they believe agents were racially profiling community members who are U.S. citizens.
The cattle industry, a reliably Republican constituency, blamed the administration. The Kansas Livestock Association, the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association and the Texas Cattle Feeders Association said in a joint statement: “These ICE operations are having a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving,” and, “These types of disruptions will lead to higher beef prices for consumers.” Nationally, meatpackers slaughtered an estimated 90,000 cattle on Thursday, down 16% from a week earlier, and 87,000 on Friday, down 14%, USDA said; those figures are national and do not isolate Kansas. Ground beef hit an all-time high of $6.92 a pound in August, the Washington Post reported, and last month the administration moved to import 660 million pounds of foreign beef to bring prices down.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE is “not conducting worksite operations in Kansas” and that “ICE law enforcement has conducted operations targeting heinous criminals including murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers and illegal aliens with final orders of removal.” Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, said he had no prior notice before the operation began, according to the Midwest Newsroom, and Sen. Jerry Moran said he spoke with Mullin about it.