The Immigration Debate Came to Rural Kansas. Locals Stood by Their Mayor.

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

https://archive.ph/xcyKc

The Immigration Debate Came to Rural Kansas. Locals Stood by Their Mayor.
The Mexican-born mayor of Coldwater was accused of voting illegally as a noncitizen. Many of his neighbors want state and federal officials to back off.
By Mitch Smith
Feb. 16, 2026

A standing-room-only crowd jammed recently into the only courtroom in Comanche County, Kan. Residents came on their lunch breaks, trekked in from their ranches and even closed down a hardware store so they could watch.

They were there for the man at the defendant’s table, Joe Ceballos, who just weeks before had been re-elected mayor of Coldwater in a small-town landslide, with 101 votes to his opponent’s 20. There had been no time to celebrate. Hours before the votes were tallied, Mr. Ceballos, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was charged in state court with voting illegally as a noncitizen.

Now Mr. Ceballos, 55, sat in the high-ceilinged courtroom, glancing downward as a prosecutor from the Kansas attorney general’s office rattled off a list of felony charges that could lead to years in prison: three counts of election perjury, three counts of voting without being qualified.

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.

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