General Discussion

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/us/kansas-mayor-vote-immigration.html



When the charges were announced a few weeks before the hearing, the municipal politics of Coldwater suddenly became national news. Many conservatives from outside Comanche County framed the case as an example of rampant voter fraud. Before the first court hearing in December, the Trump administration drew attention to the case, pledging to seek Mr. Ceballos’s deportation if he were convicted.

“This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a news release that included a photo of Mr. Ceballos and of his signature on a voter registration form.

Yet inside Coldwater — home to 700 people, zero stoplights and vanishingly few Democrats — the prosecution was widely seen as a personal attack on a pillar of the town. Most of them, Mr. Ceballos included, had voted for President Trump, and some said they supported his immigration policies. But they knew Joe, a fixture in Coldwater since he was a teenager. And they wanted the government to back off.

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“I still strongly believe in Trump’s immigration laws about, ‘Let’s get the bad guys out of here.’ You know, they’re murderers, they killed people, they molested people, let’s get them out of here,” Mr. Ceballos said in an interview. “But I feel like I don’t fit that category. And I feel like that’s how they’re treating me.”