Mayor of tiny Kansas town could be deported over voter fraud charges

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Ceballos, who has a green card, came to Coldwater as a teenage ranch hand. When he turned 18, a teacher at his high school took him to the county courthouse to register for the draft and to vote, friends of Ceballos and his family said, adding that it was common for teachers in town to do so at that time.
He was hired as a city employee as a young man and, eventually, ran for City Council. His family hosts an annual mud-bogging competition in town, and friends say he has done electrical work on most of their homes.
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But the day after he was reelected mayor, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, said Ceballos had illegally voted in three elections, starting in 2022, charging him with voter fraud and perjury, felonies that could strip him of his elected office and land him in prison for years. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in Kansas and in all but a small number of localities across the United States.
Ceballos has been voting regularly as a registered Republican since 2020, according to the Comanche County clerk’s office. He could be deported after more than four decades in the country if convicted. He hasn’t entered a plea.
Rooting out noncitizen voters has been a focus of Kobach’s for more than a decade. As Kansas secretary of state, an office he held until 2019, one of his signature accomplishments was a 2011 law requiring residents to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. In 2017, President Trump appointed Kobach vice chair of a national commission tasked with investigating voter fraud, an endorsement that helped carry Kobach to the Republican nomination for Kansas governor the following year.
After a federal court overturned the Kansas voter registration ID law in 2018, Trump’s commission was disbanded without supplying evidence that noncitizens had been illegally voting in large numbers. Kobach lost the gubernatorial race to Democrat Laura Kelly.
Despite those setbacks, Trump has continued to make broad claims about the prevalence of election fraud. Kobach, who began his term as Kansas attorney general in 2023, continues to champion the issue.
“Noncitizen voting is a real problem,” Kobach said during a news conference announcing the charges against Ceballos, which carry maximum penalties of more than five years in jail. “It is not something that happens once in a decade. It is something that happens fairly frequently.”
The charges have thrown the town of Coldwater, two hours southwest of Wichita, into chaos. With fewer than 1,000 residents, Coldwater struggles to sustain a bar or a coffee shop, and a dwindling city budget makes it difficult to fix roads or maintain the 100-year-old sewer line. Residents say they appreciated that Ceballos stepped up to address these issues.
Non-US citizens shouldn’t be voting, residents said, but those interviewed by The Washington Post said they hope prosecutors will decide that Ceballos, who is a registered Republican, simply made a mistake and that the charges will be dropped. Some knew he was born in Mexico but assumed he had gained citizenship long ago, they said. Others said the topic never came up. A few said Kobach appears to be using their town to score political points with little regard for the desires of the people who live there.
“I’m all for closing our borders, I’m all for legal immigration. I’m a Republican at heart, I love President Trump,” said Terry Abel, a family friend who has known Ceballos for years. But Ceballos “100 percent” loves his community and his country, and was trying to help, he said.
Standing outside city hall, Abel’s son Gabe, 15, said he has been disturbed by hateful comments he has seen online as news spread that a Mexican immigrant had not only been voting but held public office in Coldwater. “They’re like, ‘Deport him,’ and all that stuff. It’s just awful,” said Abel, who is close friends with one of Ceballos’s grandsons. “If you really know him, and you know the situation, you would know he definitely didn’t mean to do a bunch of crimes. He’s a really good dude.”
Dave Gerstner, who said he played pool with Ceballos for years, said his friend shouldn’t have been voting if he isn’t a citizen. But sending him to prison isn’t “fair or just” if he didn’t realize he was committing a crime, Gerstner said.
Kobach is prosecuting Ceballos “for optics … rather than, you know, go get some bad guys who are illegals,” he said
Ceballos, 54, declined through a family member to be interviewed. His attorney, Jess Hoeme, said Ceballos didn’t realize he wasn’t allowed to vote and will fight the charges. “He thought he was an American. He’s always been an American. The technicality of citizenship perhaps has escaped him,” Hoeme said.
Ceballos was granted a green card in 1990, when he was about 20 years old, but didn’t apply for citizenship until this February, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
His first court appearance is scheduled for Dec. 3, but in the meantime, Hoeme said Ceballos is “stepping away” from his official mayoral duties “for the sake of the people of Coldwater.”
“He doesn’t want to cause problems,” he said. “His objective has always been to help and do the right thing for the city of Coldwater and Comanche County. And right now he is reeling from … what exactly is his purpose?”