A summer storm of epic anxiety. 250 state bills oppose immigration efforts.

By Clay Wirestone | opinion editor

By Max McCoy

The hail storm that struck a couple of weeks ago was violent.

On Constitution Street, the quarter-sized hail drummed on the roof, ricocheted off our windows and dimpled the hood of the Jeep as if it had been peened with an icy hammer. The barrage came at 10:58 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 5, and it hit Emporia with such precision that you might have thought there was a target painted on the street.

I’m not typically afraid of storms, even though I’ve seen more than my share of death and destruction at Greensburg and Joplin, but this one put a lump in my throat. I didn’t hear the NOAA weather radio warning because I had my headphones on listening to the James Horner score for “Legends of the Fall” while attempting to write that week’s column. I knew it had been thundering, and the wind grew fierce, but the hail got my attention. It was the kind of loud that you feel.

I removed the cans and left the writing desk and went to the front door to peer at the white pellets pinballing across the porch. Kim had heard the radio alert and appeared out of the darkness behind me. I sputtered something about the windows and the cars and the roof, which we’d had repaired after a previous storm.

“It’s just hail,” she said.

We’ve had unusual weather here in Kansas this summer, and it seems to match a collective sense of cultural unease. It’s been too wet or too hot and much too windy. There were too few days that felt normal, not enough meals cooked on the grill, not enough time spent casting a lure or chasing a ball. Now summer was all but gone. My reaction to the hail could not have been sharper had it scattered flaming on the ground, as it does in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie, “The Ten Commandments.”

Democratic lawmakers proposed nearly 250 bills in state capitols this year seeking to limit federal immigration efforts as they sought to push back against what they view as federal government overreach.

In a new report tallying 2026 action, State Futures, a nonprofit coordinating hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states, tracked 242 pieces of such legislation introduced across 32 states. About a fifth of them passed. Most of the measures address the ramped up immigration enforcement efforts that have defined President Donald Trump’s second term.

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