Former Coldwater mayor told to report to ICE following illegal-voting plea

Joe Ceballos, the Coldwater mayor who was charged with a crime for mistakenly voting in several recent elections, has been ordered by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report to an ICE building in Wichita on Wednesday for detention.

Being taken into custody could lead to his deportation, his attorney, Sarah Balderas, said Tuesday. “The only things that will change things now are divine intervention or political intervention,” Balderas said.

Ceballos entered the U.S. from Mexico when he was 4 years old. Now in his mid-50s, he barely speaks Spanish, has no family in Mexico and will now have to figure out what to do about a number of things.

“I’m worried about my cows,” said Ceballos, a part-time farmer. “I wonder who will take care of my cows.”

His wife, Jayne, “is going to be beside herself.”

“I’ll be doggoned. This hardly seems fair,” said Dennis Swayze, a rancher, now in his 80s, who helped the young Ceballos move to Coldwater. Starting out as a ranch hand, he went on to become not only mayor of Coldwater but also a fixture in the community for charity and work as a city employee.

An ICE spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment. But in a news release last month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, cited the Ceballos case as a success story for the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to ensure only Americans vote in American elections. It also mentioned a 1995 battery conviction for Ceballos.

Ceballos plans to turn himself in at 11 a.m. on Wednesday to the ICE field location near Central and Woodlawn in Wichita. Balderas told Ceballos that ICE will hold him in detention until a court hearing is arranged. At that hearing, a judge could grant bond.

“He is technically not here illegally, because he’s here legally with his green card,” said Sarah Balderas, Ceballos’ immigration attorney. “But because he did something that made him removable, this became more of an issue.”

That “something” was that Ceballos, not suspecting any trouble, tried to renew his green card with the federal government last year, as he has done several times since his arrival in the U.S. But this time, when they asked, he told them, not realizing the consequences, that yes, he had voted in elections.”

That led to state charges filed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas attorney general.

Ceballos pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct and agreed to pay a fine, ending the state case.

Ceballos avoided felony charges and jail time with the plea deal. But federal detention and deportation remained possibilities.

One of the ironies of the situation is that Ceballos and many of his friends in Coldwater have historically been Republican voters, who tend to support tougher enforcement of immigration laws. Ceballos said he’s voted for Kobach, and President Trump, and all Republicans on his ballots, for many years.

Swayze, a Republican voter himself, said he considers Ceballos’ detention request an “injustice.”

If Ceballos is deported it will be to a country he hasn’t lived in for half a century.

“I’ll be there with him tomorrow,” said Jess Hoeme, Ceballos’s attorney for the state charges. “And I’ll do my best not to start a fight. This is a nightmare.”

Hoeme said he plans to apply for a governor’s clemency on the state charges for Ceballos. That won’t do much to mitigate the federal case, “But we are trying to help him any way we can.”

“I wish our members of Congress could do something to help,” he added. “But they’ve never returned any of my calls. God forbid they do something averse to Donald Trump.”

About a hundred of his friends and admirers showed up at the state hearing, Ceballos said.

It was Balderas who told him, on Monday, that ICE had visited her law office in Wichita, and hand delivered the notice to appear for detention.

She pushed back, she said. “Why aren’t we doing this the normal way, where you guys just send a letter to him weeks before, and we work with you?” she said she asked then.

They ignored this, Balderas said.

“It is unusual they are doing it this way with him,” she said. “I don’t know why they decided to just suddenly do this with so little notice.”

It’s cruel, she said. “But that’s just the way things are now. There’s no mercy.”

This case started about 38 years ago when Ceballos and several of his Coldwater classmates went on a school tour of the local courthouse in Coldwater when he was 18. Gail Boisseau, a special-education teacher then, led them. “And it makes me sick what I’m seeing now,” she said on Tuesday.

There, the class toured offices. The county register of deeds asked if anyone old enough to vote wanted to register right there. Ceballos and others stepped forward; Ceballos said that because his green card said “permanent resident,” that he thought he could vote legally

“Joe is scared. We are all so scared. This is not the way the United States is supposed to work,” Boisseau said. “What’s happening now shows us the worst of the United States. Why can’t we show the best of the United States?

“If they do this to a guy like Joe, they’ll do it to anyone. I feel so vulnerable now.”

This story was originally published by the KLC Journal