Former Mayor Joe Ceballos of Coldwater, Kan., was born in Mexico and came to the United States when he was 4 years old.Clayton Steward for The New York Times
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.
“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.
‘Just as American’
Decades before he appeared at the county courthouse as a defendant, Mr. Ceballos said he went to that same limestone-trimmed building on New York Avenue on a high-school field trip.
His teacher, Gail Boisseau, said she showed a group of seniors around, taking them to the spot where they would pay their taxes and introducing them to courthouse employees.
When they got to the county clerk’s office, she and Mr. Ceballos each recalled, the person working there asked if students who were at least 18 would like to register to vote. Mr. Ceballos said he filled out the form. Federal and state laws require that voters be United States citizens, and Kansans must check a box saying that they are citizens when they register to vote.
“Nobody ever told me that I couldn’t vote or register to vote,” Mr. Ceballos said during a recent interview inside the City Council chamber where he once presided over meetings. “And so, as a young man, yeah, I did it. I registered.”
The county clerk, Bri Uhl, said her office had no record of Mr. Ceballos’s registering to vote before 1999, when he would have been in his late 20s. Mr. Ceballos’s lawyer, Jess Hoeme, said in an email that “Joe is confident he was registered and had voted prior to the renewal or re-registration in 1999, but I’m having a hard time proving it.”
Mr. Ceballos was born in Mexico and came to the United States when he was 4 years old, he and his lawyer said. He moved around as a child before ending up in Coldwater, just north of the Oklahoma border in west-central Kansas, as a teenager in the 1980s. For all but a few months since then, Comanche County has been home.
Mr. Ceballos, who received a green card in 1990, said he had never been back to Mexico. And though he used to help local law enforcement as an informal Spanish interpreter, he said his knowledge of the language had faded.
Mr. Ceballos wears cowboy boots, drives a Ram truck and speaks with a slight Southern Plains accent. He cheers for the Dallas Cowboys, rides a Harley-Davidson and has a cavernous workshop next to his house that is stuffed with tools, car parts and an old Pepsi machine.
He said he did not follow national politics closely, but agreed with much of what the president had said about energy policy and illegal immigration. Mr. Ceballos said he voted for Mr. Trump in the last three presidential elections.
“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.”
Over time, Mr. Ceballos became part of the fabric of Coldwater, a place where most people seem to have known most everybody else since childhood. He married twice, raised children and bought a pasture just outside city limits, where he tends to a herd of cattle. Each year, he hosts a mud run for large trucks, drawing spectators from across the region.
Court records show that Mr. Ceballos was arrested in 1994 and convicted of misdemeanor battery for his role in a fight involving several people. Someone was shot and wounded during that fight, according to those records, though Mr. Ceballos was not accused of shooting anyone. He and his lawyer described that case, as well as a 1995 case that led to a conviction for misdemeanor criminal damage to property, as related to the end of Mr. Ceballos’s first marriage. Kansas court records available online do not show any arrests of Mr. Ceballos in the last 30 years.
As he made a life in Coldwater, where 90 percent of the residents are white, Mr. Ceballos became a regular voter, always choosing Republicans. He worked for years in Coldwater’s public works department, then landed a job as a lineman with a utility company, where he is still employed.
His neighbors elected him as a City Council member, then as mayor, a position in which he focused on keeping up basic services while managing a tight budget. He said the job paid $500 a month. One of his signature issues, he said, was maintaining the pavement on Coldwater’s aging streets rather than converting them to dirt roads. He resigned as mayor soon after the charges were announced.
His work in city government earned good reviews. Britt Lenertz, who took over as mayor for a few weeks after Mr. Ceballos resigned, said that “whenever it came to anything that he could do to try to improve the community, he wanted to be a part of it.”
He was known for checking in with the city clerk almost every day to see if anything needed his attention. For Christmas, he arranged to cut down a cedar tree at a nearby lake and install it in the middle of Coldwater’s ultrawide Main Street. And when Rick Beeley posted a few years ago in the local newspaper that he was hoping to retire from his role decorating Main Street in U.S. flags for patriotic holidays, Mr. Ceballos was the only person who responded and volunteered to take on that job, he said.
“I’m a Vietnam vet — he’s just as American as I am,” Mr. Beeley said.
A day before his court appearance, an advertisement in The Western Star, Coldwater’s newspaper, urged readers to attend the hearing: “Please Find the Time to Show Support for Joe Ceballos!”
“Over many years, Joe chose this community to be his forever home” and “gave of his time and energy,” the advertisement added.
Even Mr. Ceballos’s opponent in November’s nonpartisan mayoral election, Greg Vanderree, had nothing particularly bad to say about him.
Mr. Vanderree, a Republican who said he broadly supported Mr. Trump’s policies on immigration, said he had no idea before the charges were announced that Mr. Ceballos was not a citizen. Mr. Vanderree said he had played no role in reporting his opponent to the authorities, and said he had been hurt that some of his neighbors seemed to think he had.
As far as what should happen to Mr. Ceballos now, he said, there were no easy answers.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Mr. Vanderree said. “He’s not doing anything to harm anybody. But he did — I mean, he flat broke the law. And the trouble is, due to other things, he’s been made an example of.”
‘A Real Problem’
To the Kansas attorney general, Kris W. Kobach, the case against Mr. Ceballos was proof of what he had insisted for years.
“Noncitizen voting is a real problem,” Mr. Kobach, a Republican, said at the news conference where he announced the case against the mayor. “It is not something that happens once in a decade. It is something that happens fairly frequently.”
He said that too little had been done over the years to identify ineligible voters and remove them from the rolls.
“Every time a noncitizen votes, it effectively cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen,” Mr. Kobach said, adding, “if a person who is not a U.S. citizen actually ends up on the ballot for an office, then a U.S. citizen lost the opportunity to obtain that office.”
Concern about election fraud and voting by noncitizens is now a core issue for many Republicans, but Mr. Kobach was ahead of his time in identifying that topic’s political potency. When he was Kansas secretary of state in the 2010s, Mr. Kobach built a national profile by calling for stricter election laws and by prosecuting a small number of people accused of voting illegally.
In fact, voter fraud is rare, and an exceedingly low percentage of ballots are cast by noncitizens in the United States. Mr. Kobach declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed.
Outside Coldwater, the push to prosecute Mr. Ceballos won the attorney general praise from fellow conservatives. But around Comanche County, where Mr. Kobach and Mr. Trump have overwhelmingly won elections, some questioned the decision.
“I think he needs to find out a little bit more what’s going on,” Dennis Byram said of Mr. Kobach, for whom he voted. Mr. Byram, who closed down his hardware store to attend Mr. Ceballos’s court appearance, said “the whole county backs” the former mayor.
Ryan Swayze, a high school classmate of Mr. Ceballos who now ranches just south of the state line in Oklahoma, said “I feel like this is an A.G. that’s drawing attention to himself.”
Still, the defining challenge for Mr. Ceballos and his supporters is that he openly acknowledges doing what he is accused of doing. Yes, Mr. Ceballos said, he voted repeatedly in United States elections without being a United States citizen. And that is illegal.
His defense, essentially, is that he did not understand that being a permanent resident should have precluded him from voting and holding office, and that no one ever told him he was not eligible. He said he engaged in politics not in some plot to subvert the system, but out of a desire to help the place he considers home.
After decades as a permanent resident, Mr. Ceballos said, he decided last year to pursue citizenship. He said he had passed the civics test and was sitting for an interview in Wichita with a federal official when he was asked whether he had ever voted.
Yes, the mayor responded. It was not the answer the government was looking for.
“His eyes got real big, and I was like, ‘Boy, did I do something wrong?’” Mr. Ceballos said.
According to Mr. Ceballos and his lawyer, that exchange derailed his citizenship application, alerted Kansas officials that he had voted as a noncitizen and set off the chain of events that led to his being charged.
A lingering question is what justice might look like in this case. Should Mr. Ceballos be convicted of felonies, as the attorney general is seeking? And if he is, should he be slated for deportation, as the Trump administration has pledged in his case? Or, as so many in Coldwater have suggested, might there be some way to give him a slap on the wrist and move on?
Mr. Ceballos, whose preliminary hearing is scheduled for March, said that perhaps he should be ordered to pay a fine, or even spend time on probation. But he feared a felony conviction would mean being sent back to a country he had not visited in half a century — away from his family and his cows and his tidy house on the edge of town with hay bales wrapped in red, white and blue.
Even now, before his case is decided, he said he worried that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might show up looking for him.
“You wake up, like, ‘Are they going to deport me now?’” he said. “It’s always in your thought.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 17, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Kansans Rally Behind Mayor Facing Deportation.
U.S. Deports Nine Migrants in Secret, Ignoring Legal Protections
In a secret deportation arrangement, the Trump administration flew nine people, nearly all of whom had been granted U.S. court protections from being sent back to their home countries, to the African nation of Cameroon in January.
None of them are from Cameroon, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and lawyers for the deportees, and the United States has not made any public deal with Cameroon to accept deportees who hail from other nations.
Several of the men and women deported — whose cases have not been previously reported — told The Times they did not know they were being sent to Cameroon until they were handcuffed and chained on a Department of Homeland Security flight leaving Alexandria, La., on Jan. 14.
Cameroon’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment when reached by phone, and the State Department said it would not comment on its “diplomatic communications with other governments” when asked about the terms of an agreement.
Most of those migrants and their lawyers say they have been detained since then at a state-owned compound in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. They say they’ve been told by local authorities that they cannot leave the facility unless they agree to return to their home countries, from which they fled to escape war or persecution.
As far as is known, the deportations are the first such expulsions to Cameroon. They highlight the extraordinary secrecy that surrounds President Trump’s global deportation effort. Through murky deals forged with willing governments — often in exchange for cash — the U.S. has deported hundreds of people to foreign countries that may not respect the removal protections they have been granted in U.S. courts, returning them to the dangers they fled.
The Times pieced together an account of the secret deportations to Cameroon through phone interviews with four people on the flight and their lawyers, and verified their deportations and protection statuses through government documents that showed most had removal protections. The migrants spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisals.
A 37-year-old man originally from Zimbabwe compared the deportation to a smuggling operation and said he and the other migrants were “dropped like U.P.S. packages” in Cameroon. The man, who had been living in the United States for 15 years, said officials in Cameroon were pushing them to return to their home countries. He said he had left Zimbabwe after being arrested for refusing to join the military and feared for his life if he returned there.
The deportees described feeling traumatized and exhausted by the limbo they have found themselves tossed into. They recounted being forcibly transported by Department of Homeland Security officials from various immigration detention centers across the country — where some had been for over a year — to Alexandria, one of the Trump administration’s busiest deportations hubs, with no information about where they were being taken.
Joseph Awah Fru, a Cameroonian lawyer supporting the migrants in negotiations with the local authorities, said two of the nine who arrived in Cameroon on the flight chose to return to their home countries. Eight of the nine people on the flight, Mr. Fru added, had the removal protections afforded people who can convince a court that they are likely to face persecution if they are returned to their home countries.
Their lawyers said none of the deportees had any history of violent crime.
It was unclear if Cameroon received anything in exchange for accepting the deportees, but by some estimates, the U.S. government has paid upward of $40 million in third-country deportation deals, according to an investigation by the Senate Commitee on Foreign Relations that was released on Friday.
The Trump administration has increasingly relied on deporting migrants to countries other than their own. It is a way to not only deter people from coming to the United States but also to quickly remove people whom it might be challenging to send to their home countries for various reasons, including a lack of diplomatic relations or difficulty getting travel documents.
Critics said it amounted to a circumvention of U.S. court orders. “Sending people to a third country where they are coerced into deportation to the country that we cannot deport them to is flatly illegal,” said Scott Shuchart, a former ICE official who worked in the Biden administration.
Among those now in the Yaoundé compound are people who said they escaped imprisonment for their political beliefs, survived wars and fled countries where their sexual orientations are criminalized. When officials from the United Nations’ International Organization of Migration, which is handling their cases, visited, the deportees say the officials told them there was no support for them to receive asylum in Cameroon. They felt that their sole option was to return to their home countries.
After this article appeared, the International Organization of Migration, which previously had not been able to be reached for comment, sent a statement to The Times on Sunday. It said that the organization had not presented returning to their home countries as the only path open to the migrants in Cameroon, and said that it had referred all those involved to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees to request asylum.
Roughly a million people seek asylum every year, but the U.N. refugee agency acknowledges that “resettlement remains available to only a tiny fraction” of those in need. In 2024, fewer than 5 percent of refugees were able to resettle through the agency’s assistance.
Many of those deported in Cameroon said going back would be life-threatening. A 32-year-old woman from Ghana who fled persecution for her sexual orientation said she came to the U.S. for protection, because she has faced murder threats from members of her family and community. She added the Cameroonian government has treated their deportation there as a matter of transit, urging them to go back to their home countries.
Another woman, a 20-year-old from Ghana who has been in immigration detention for over a year, compared returning to the country to “signing a death warrant.” She said she feels trapped, because her tribe in Ghana has told her they are going to kill her, but she is also tired of seemingly endless detention.
Some people deported by the U.S. to third countries in secretive deals have been returned to the home nations they fled. Eight of nine migrants deported to Equatorial Guinea were sent back to their home countries, including one with an asylum claim, in another unpublicized agreement. In September, Ghana deported at least three people, despite their having removal protections.
Our Coverage of U.S. Immigration
Columbia Protester: A judge has blocked the deportation of Mohsen Mahdawi, a green-card holder and organizer of the pro-Palestinian movement at the university who was arrested during a citizenship appointment last year.
Fatal Car Crash: A public-school teacher was killed when a man fleeing ICE agents in Savannah, Ga., crashed a car into the teacher’s vehicle, according to the police.
Rural Kansas: 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.
Student Protests: In dozens of states, students have staged walkouts over immigration enforcement. In Texas, they’re doing so despite threats from Gov. Greg Abbott against students, teachers and schools.
Deported in Secret: In January, The Trump administration flew nine people, nearly all of whom had been granted court protections from being sent back to their home countries, to Cameroon, which has not made a public deal with the United States to accept migrants from other nations..
One small part of Pete Hegseth’s wardrobe is a big tell
Hegseth’s clothing reveals he believes military rules don’t apply to him
Published
It’s anybody’s guess how long Pete Hegseth will be Secretary of Defense, given the wont-go-away controversy over his use of Signal to share details of an impending attack on Houthi forces in Yemen. Maybe he’ll weather that storm. On the chance that he does, I have a bone to pick with him – less cosmic, but something that speaks volumes about his probity and fitness for office.
It's about the flag, “Old Glory.”
Americans, most of us anyway, cherish the flag and are proud to display it (preferably the right way rather than inverted, as the U.S. Code permits, “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property”). President Nixon seems to have been the first holder of that office to make a practice of wearing the flag as a lapel pin. Indeed, he required White House staffers to do so as well. The practice caught on, and now it’s nearly de rigueur for politicians to wear it on their attire. In fact, it’s grown so ubiquitous that it has become an empty gesture, the sartorial equivalent of saying “thank you for your service” to anyone who now serves or ever did. Overused, it tends to lose meaning.
Enter Pete Hegseth, who has mastered the “full MAGA look,” according to New York Times fashion and style reporter Jacob Gallagher. Mr. Hegseth is clearly into displays, as witness his attention-grabbing tattoos. But his tattoos are his problem – notable now mostly for the fact that they would very likely prevent him from entering the armed forces if he today sought to enlist. In any case, they are hidden from view, except when he or others circulate photos of them.
More disquieting, given his role as top civilian official in the Defense Department, is the poor example he sets when displaying the flag. Video taken during his round of pre-confirmation Senate interviews shows him ostentatiously opening his suit jacket to display a garish American-flag lining. Who does this man’s wardrobe? Geez.
But at least a suit lining is not on perpetual display. So let’s talk about his American-flag pocket square. It seems to be a permanent part of his day-to-day dress-for-political-success attire. Who even knew there was such a thing? A quick internet search reveals that flag-motif pocket squares are readily available from a variety of sources.
So what’s wrong? What’s wrong is not merely that section 8(d) of the flag code forbids use of the flag as wearing apparel, as a letter to the editor of the Washington Times pointed out, but, more specifically, that a pocket square is a handerkerchief. And a handkerchief’s purpose, other than as a fashion statement, is to keep things tidy when blowing one’s nose. As a result, Mr. Hegseth’s pocket square is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, using the flag as a handkerchief has at least twice led to courts-martial. A hospitalman at the former Naval Hospital in Chelsea, Mass., was charged with, among other things, desecrating the flag by blowing his nose on one. His intrepid Yale-educated defense counsel – having precious little to work with — got the flag charge dismissed, arguing that “but for the accident of physiognomy, the accused’s deed would have been protected free speech” (or – as we say in courts-martial – “words to that effect”).
Years later, in United States v. Wilson, the Army Court of Military Review wrote:
The appellant, a military policeman (MP), while preparing for a flag-raising detail, complained to his fellow MPs that the Army and the United States “sucked.” Another MP told him that he should move to a communist country if he didn’t like it. The appellant replied, “[t]his is what I think,” and blew his nose on the American flag, leaving on the flag “a small wet circle.” After another brief exchange of words, the appellant participated without further incident in the flag-raising detail. For his action the appellant was charged with dereliction of duty in that he “willfully failed to ensure that the United States flag was treated with proper respect by blowing his nose on the flag when it was his duty as a military policeman on flag call to safeguard and protect the flag.”
Rejecting a First Amendment challenge, the court upheld Private Wilson’s conviction and sentence to four months in the stockade, a bad-conduct discharge, and other penalties.
If Pete Hegseth wants to show how patriotic he is, he might consider displaying a different pocket square. If he wants to set a proper example, he must do so.
Is It Against the Law to Wear the U.S. Flag on Your Clothes?
The U.S. flag code sets guidelines for proper and respectful display of the flag. Among the guidelines is that it should not be used as an article of clothing. So is it not wrong for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to wear flag-themed accessories? — Lee, Attleboro, Ma.
There is no question that the flag is the fashion muse of the current administration. Its color scheme has become the de facto everyday uniform of the president (blue suit, white shirt, red tie), along with many members of the cabinet as well as Republicans in Congress, but, as you point out, no one has taken it to Mr. Hegseth’s extreme.
During his confirmation hearing, for example, Mr. Hegseth wore flag socks, a flag belt buckle and a flag pocket handkerchief. Before that, he wore a suit with a flag lining when he visited Congress. In an interview with the conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, he said that he abided by the “three-flag rule,” a self-created edict to wear at least three flag items a day.
This makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the Trump administration, where performance and costume are crucial parts of the package. However, you are correct in noting that the U.S. flag code theoretically prohibits the wearing of the flag, with the exception of a flag pin over the heart.
According to Section 8(d) of the code, “The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding or drapery.” Subsection (i) is even more specific: “It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs.” And (j) states, “No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform.”
That might suggest that the newly christened secretary of war should at the very least eschew his pocket hankies. The idea of blowing one’s nose in the flag is not a great look and probably not the image he intends.
When asked, Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, dismissed the question and emailed, in part: “If loving one’s country enough to represent it head to toe is a crime, then consider Secretary Hegseth guilty. He is a patriot who reveres this country and our flag.”
More pertinently, according to Susan Scafidi, the founder of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University, “a series of Supreme Court cases have established that First Amendment free-speech protections outweigh laws that attempt to prohibit desecration of the flag, including by wearing it.”
This is also true, she said in an email, for the use of the flag in retail fashion, “whether Ralph Lauren’s classic sweaters” — the ones worn by the U.S. Olympic team — “or Willy Chavarria’s critical ‘Falling Stars’ version: upside down, a recognized distress symbol, with the stars falling out.”
In other words, it may seem flippant and frivolous to wear the flag as a souvenir tee, but the issue is one of morality and semiology, not legality.
And whether the look is meant, or received, as a gesture of substantive patriotism — a display of loyalty, which is how Mr. Hegseth and much of the current administration seem to see it — or a way of reducing the country to the superficial, and easily abandoned, level of decoration, the fact that the confusion exists at all is a freedom worth celebrating.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor.
(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.
Bunting of blue, white, and red always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker's desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.
(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.
(f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.
(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.
(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkin or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.
(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.
(k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning. (Disposal of Unserviceable Flags Ceremony)
