Wichita town hall draws huge crowd to hear a Florida(!) congressman | Opinion
The highlight of Sunday’s congressional town hall meeting at Wichita State University came when a Florida congressman said “Hey, Congressman Estes, I’m here with just a few of your constituents, and they have a question for you”:
“WHERE ARE YOU?”
That shouted answer was the joined voices of approximately 1,200 constituents of U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, who gathered at WSU’s Hughes Metropolitan Complex for a town hall meeting — like the ones Estes doesn’t do.
Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, who asked the question, held up his cell phone to record the moment and promised to send it to Estes as a message.
The moment of reprimand came at the end of a two-hour town hall meeting led quite ably by a congressman most of the people there had never heard of until a couple of weeks ago.
At age 28, Frost is the youngest member of the House or Senate, representing the Orlando-based Florida 10th Congressional District.
In recent months, he’s been teaming up with a fellow Democrat, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, to hold town hall meetings and take open-mic questions from constituents in districts where local Republican representatives have been hiding out since Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Sunday’s turnout clearly displayed the pent-up frustration of Wichitans dissatisfied with the way the federal government is being run into the ground under Trump’s leadership.
A big part of Sunday’s meeting was opposition to what Trump is calling his “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Its key provisions are designed to strip millions of Americans of food assistance and medical coverage, to help fund huge tax cuts for billionaires and finance Trump’s costly crusade to rid the nation’s Home Depot parking lots of immigrant day laborers.
The Wichita town hall, sponsored by Leading Kansas, was supposed to be Murphy and Frost together, but Murphy had to stay at work as the Republicans who run the Senate tried to sneak the bill through at night on a weekend.
But Murphy did manage to carve out some time for Wichita, appearing by Zoom at the town hall.
“I am here, stuck in Washington . . . as we are doing battle to try to kill the most immoral piece of legislation,” he said. “Last night, they (Republicans) cleared the first procedural hurdle, so the bill is on the floor.
“But sometime late, late tonight or tomorrow morning, they will have to take a final vote. And they will have to put their votes up on the board, as to whether they are willing to go back to their states and explain why they decided to throw 16 million people off of Medicaid, to explain why they decided to hand another $270,000 (average individual) tax cut to the richest people in the country . . . The reason that they’re doing it in the dead of the night is because they know this bill is deeply unpopular.”
The Zoom link was only one-way, so Murphy’s absence from the auditorium left Frost to field all the questions from the audience solo. And there were a lot of them.
One that caught my attention was when a woman asked what can be done to help immigrants in ICE custody, and Frost painted a grim picture.
By law, congressional representatives are allowed to make unannounced visits to ICE facilities to provide oversight and ensure that detainees are properly treated. But, he said, ICE is dodging that scrutiny and accountability.
“What they’re doing is this, they are now detaining people in the basement of a federal building or the office of a federal building, denying us the ability to go in,” he said. “And they say, well, technically, the law says it has to be an immigrant or ICE detention facility. This is a federal courthouse. We’re detaining people here, but it’s not a facility.”
He said Democrats have introduced legislation to try to close that loophole and also to increase transparency when ICE takes people into custody.
“They’re taking people from the side of the road in unmarked vans, masked up — which, by the way, if you know what you’re doing is right, you wouldn’t feel the need to wear a mask,” Frost said. “Mom doesn’t know where Dad’s at. Dad doesn’t know where Mom’s at. The kids don’t know. The lawyer doesn’t know. “
He said in his district, “They get put in a facility for 24 hours, then guess what? They get moved over to Miami, then they get moved to Texas, and then they’re gone (out of the country) — with zero due process.”
Frost is sponsoring a bill called the Stop Unlawful Detention and End Mistreatment Act.
The bill would require ICE to disclose who’s been taken into custody, where they’re being held, and the legal basis for holding them. It also would require increased scrutiny of ICE deportation operations and conditions in ICE detention.
Overall the town hall was a big success. The turnout was huge for a Wichita event and a lot of people got to ask a congressman unfiltered questions about what’s going on — even if it wasn’t their own congressman.
“Hopefully your congressman is watching at home, and maybe he’ll take a few notes on how to do a real town hall,” Frost said.
It’s a good thought. I’m not holding my breath.
This story was originally published June 30, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect name for the sponsoring organization, Leading Kansas.
