DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says ICE ran no worksite operations in southwest Kansas this week. The USDA's own slaughter report shows the nation's meatpackers killed 45,000 fewer cattle Monday through Friday than the week before, and the drop came as agents worked the streets around Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal. Both things can be true, and together they raise a question the beef industry would rather nobody ask.

What Happened in Southwest Kansas This Week?

Reports of federal agents in Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal started circulating on September 22, according to the High Plains Journal. Those towns hold four major beef packing plants employing more than 10,000 people, according to the Kansas News Service. Reuters reported that ICE officers stopped motorists to ask about citizenship and parked near meat plants and a large dairy. Liberal's vice mayor told Reuters that few employees showed up at the National Beef plant there on Thursday.

The three cities put out a joint statement saying their police departments "were not notified in advance" and had no operational information. Nobody has published an official arrest count. Residents told Reuters they believed dozens of people were detained.

Mullin Says These Were Criminal Targets, Not Workplace Raids

On Thursday, Mullin answered the pressure directly. "ICE is not conducting worksite operations in Kansas," he posted on X. He said agents had targeted "heinous criminals including murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers and illegal aliens with final orders of removal," and he posted photos of five people he called "some of the worst arrested by ICE in Kansas."

Sen. Jerry Moran told constituents the secretary gave him the same message privately. Mullin "assured me these warrants are only for the purpose of arresting individuals who have been charged with criminal activities," Moran said in a statement published by KWCH. Reuters said it could not immediately confirm the immigration status or criminal records of the five people Mullin pictured.

The USDA Report Shows How Hard the Beef Plants Were Hit

We went to the primary source. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service publishes a daily estimate of cattle slaughtered under federal inspection, and its final report for Friday, September 25 puts this week's Monday-through-Friday cattle kill at 476,000 head. The week before, it was 521,000. That is 45,000 fewer cattle, a drop of about 8.6 percent in one week.

The daily figures show the timing. Monday through Wednesday, packers were only about 4.5 percent behind the prior week, at 299,000 head against 313,000. Then Thursday fell to 90,000 head from 107,000 a week earlier, and Friday fell to 87,000 from 101,000. Reuters reported the Thursday and Friday drops of 16 and 14 percent. The part that got less attention is that the losses sped up late in the week, which fits workers staying home once word spread. Thursday was the operation's third day.

Why the Hog Numbers Matter

There is an easy objection. Cattle supplies are tight this year, and the same USDA report shows the year-to-date cattle kill running 7.7 percent behind 2025. Maybe this week was just more of the same. The numbers say otherwise. Against the same week last year, this week's cattle kill was down 14.7 percent, roughly double the yearly trend. Thursday alone was 22 percent below a year ago.

Now look at the other lines on the same page. Hog slaughter for Monday through Friday was 2,407,000, essentially the same as the prior week's 2,404,000. Young chicken slaughter was up about 3 percent. The drop was specific to beef, which is exactly where southwest Kansas matters. Reuters noted that Kansas ranks second nationally in commercial cattle processing, and two of the country's four big beef packers, National Beef and Cargill, run plants in Dodge City.

One caution belongs here. The USDA figures are national estimates rounded to the nearest thousand, and they do not break out individual plants or states. They cannot prove every missing head came out of Kansas. They do show that a beef-only slowdown hit the national numbers the same week ICE showed up in the beef belt.

If the Workers Are Legal, Why Did They Stay Home?

The Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association and Texas Cattle Feeders Association issued a joint statement on September 24, quoted in full by the High Plains Journal. They said the operations were having "a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table." They reported that thousands of fed cattle bound for processors had been delayed, and they warned of higher beef prices.

Take the groups at their word and the math gets awkward. By Mullin's account, agents were serving warrants on criminals and people with final removal orders, not checking badges at the plant gate. A legal, documented worker has nothing to fear from that. Yet enough people stayed off the line to knock 45,000 head off a week's national kill. Either a lot of lawful workers panicked, or the workforce in these plants depends on people without legal status more than the industry says out loud. Nothing we found settles which, and nobody in the industry has offered numbers.

Meatpacking has been here before. On December 12, 2006, ICE raided six Swift and Company plants, including one in Cactus, Texas, about 90 miles southwest of Liberal, and arrested 1,297 workers. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, several hundred were also charged with using the identities of U.S. citizens, even though Swift had enrolled in the federal Basic Pilot program that checked Social Security numbers. CIS reported that many second-shift workers quit after the raid for fear agents would return. The same kind of absence showed up this week without a single plant raid.

Kansas Republicans Want ICE to Call the Sheriff First

Sen. Roger Marshall did not back away from enforcement. "Open borders in the last administration vastly increased the number of dangerous illegal immigrants in our country," he said in a release quoted by the High Plains Journal. His complaint was about process. Local officers "were not given advance notice or the level of cooperation we would expect," he said, and he relayed sheriffs' concerns directly to DHS.

Finney County and Garden City said local police tried late into the night of September 22 to reach federal agents for "deconfliction," the routine step where agencies share plans so officers don't cross paths blind. They got "minimal to no success," the county said, per the High Plains Journal. That is a fair complaint. Coordination with local sheriffs protects agents as much as it protects residents.

Mullin Is Now Taking Fire From the Right

The "no worksite operations" line did not land well with the voters who elected President Trump on mass deportations. The Gateway Pundit collected a flood of angry replies, and commentator Nick Sortor accused Mullin of declaring Kansas worksites off-limits to ICE. Their argument is simple. If a plant is running on illegal labor, the law does not carve out an exception because the product is beef.

In fairness to Mullin, he never said worksites were exempt going forward. His post described what ICE was and was not doing in Kansas, and no written policy change has been announced. Still, the timing looks bad, since it came the same day three cattle groups went public with their complaints. Our earlier reporting showed ICE's monthly arrest numbers hit a record in August, and the administration can't keep that pace if whole industries get a quiet pass.

What Happens to the Price of Your Steak?

The cattle groups and the meatpackers' union both predicted higher beef prices, and the risk is real in the short run. Beef is already at record highs after drought shrank the herd to a 75-year low, Reuters reported. A lost week of processing means backed-up cattle and fewer boxes of beef heading to stores.

The bigger question is the one the USDA numbers forced into the open. An operation that DHS says targeted criminals, not workplaces, still pulled roughly 8.6 percent out of the national cattle kill in a single week. If that is how fragile the beef supply is, the problem started long before ICE arrived in Dodge City. The industry owes the public a straight answer about who is working those lines, and DHS owes Kansas an arrest count.

Top photo: Markwayne Mullin is sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security by Attorney General Pam Bondi in the Oval Office as President Trump looks on, March 24, 2026. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)