By Natalia Alamdari Flatwater Free Press
IMPERIAL -- In a dusty show barn, kids march out their prize-winning swine as an auctioneer sings out competing bids.
Outside, shrieks pierce this hot August night as families spin in loops on carnival rides.
Every year, the Chase County Fair & Expo draws 10,000 people to this county of 3,764. They come for the classic rite of summer. And for the fair's annual concerts.
This year, for the first time, county fair organizers hired a Mexican band to perform, figuring it made sense in a community whose Latino population has grown sixfold since 2000.
But in the hours leading up to the Aug. 14 concert, only 300 tickets had sold, low for the grandstand that holds 3,500.
Many local Latino residents had decided to stay home, afraid of what could happen.
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"The rumor was that this was bait," Imperial resident Cynthia Almanza said while waiting for the concert to start. "That ICE was going to show up."
And, the local rumor mill alleged, the county sheriff had been the one to make that call.
Versions of this story burned through Imperial and surrounding towns this summer, Almanza and other residents told the Flatwater Free Press.
The suspicion grew so strong that one Imperial police officer asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Did the sheriff contact you?
Chase County Sheriff Kevin Mueller said in an emailed statement it was a "false and harmful rumor" that he "made a racist comment" during a fair board meeting discussing security needs for the concert.
But it was true that he called ICE, he said in an email.
"I did place a call to ICE," Mueller wrote. "About a week later, someone returned my call ... by that time, I had already determined that we had sufficient security in place through the Fair Board and the State Patrol."
The idea that ICE agents could show up at the fair took root in people's minds.
Almanza had friends who skipped the show. "It terrified lots of people," she said.
"It made me question if I should even be here," said Judith Beltran, another concertgoer, who heard the rumor after arriving for the show from Denver.
In the eight months of Trump administration crackdowns, rumors of raids and government vehicle sightings flood Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats in immigrant communities. Some families are retreating from public life, including some who have legal status, advocates say.
It's keeping kids from attending school, they say, and parents from going to work.
And in Imperial, it left some wondering: Is the county fair safe?
***
The Chase County Fair Board approached Rodolfo Aragon in April with a question: Would he join the committee to help book a Latino band?
The board was trying to make the fair more inclusive, Aragon said, and wanted "to thank people for being a part of the community."
Aragon moved to the area 21 years ago to work for the feedlot Imperial Beef. He encouraged his brother to join him. They're one of many families from Chihuahua, Mexico, drawn here by feedlot jobs or farm work at Frenchman Valley Produce.
In 2000, only 5% of Imperial's residents were Latino, according to census data. Now, nearly a third of the city's residents are.
"The whole community has really shifted in the last two to three decades," said Tyler Pribbeno, the city administrator. "Imperial has sustained its population ... we would have been much smaller, probably the size of Grant, if we didn't have all these people coming in" to live here.
The fair board first suggested a smaller act to draw this ever-growing Latino crowd, maybe a local band that didn't play at the main grandstand.
But the newly recruited Aragon and the concert committee wanted to go bigger. After all, Johnny Cash and Alice Cooper played the Chase County Fair.
In May, they hit the jackpot, hiring La Fiera de Ojinaga, an accordion-driven norteño band from northern Mexico with more than 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Then, Aragon started hearing a rumor. White residents were telling their Latino friends: You might not want to be at that concert. People in the country legally worried about attending, scared that they could get detained because of their skin color, Aragon said.
The most out-there version of the rumor he heard: The fair board had planned the concert as a trap.
"We can't control fear. We can only control what we can control," said Ryan Stromberger, president of the fair board. "It's unfortunate that they felt that way ... Obviously we had no ill intentions, otherwise we wouldn't have booked it."
Much of this fear stemmed from the May fair board meeting held weeks before fair leaders announced the last-minute concert addition.
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City police and the Sheriff's Office attended to discuss concert security. They appeared to single out the Mexican concert as a specific worry.
The law enforcement officers "voiced concerns about disturbances during Thursday's night concert," meeting minutes read. "They want to know about security precautions for concert nights."
The discussion lasted about 20 minutes, according to meeting minutes.
There is no audio recording of that meeting. Stromberger said discussion focused mostly on whether law enforcement agencies had the manpower to accommodate an extra concert night.
But that discussion continued among law enforcement officers outside the meeting room, said Chris Bustillos, an Imperial police sergeant present at the meeting.
After that meeting, the rumors started to spiral, several Imperial residents said in interviews.
Mueller, the county sheriff, said that talk that he "made a racist comment during a fair board meeting" is false.
"We had concerns that an extra night would place additional strain on our resources," he wrote. "Apparently, one member took offense to my comments and began spreading a false and harmful rumor about me ... this allegation is baseless, damaging, and driven by personal agendas -- not facts."
Bustillos said he decided to fact-check the rumors himself.
"I believe our sheriff for Chase County contacted someone either in your office or on the hotline about a Hispanic concert we will be having for our Chase County Expo Fair," he wrote to the North Platte ICE office in an email obtained by the Flatwater Free Press through a records request. "I was just hoping to find out if that is something you or anyone in the ICE office will be attending?"
Replying via email, a Department of Homeland Security agent wrote that the office had "received a call regarding the concerts."
Bustillos said he and the DHS agent then spoke by phone. Yes, the Sheriff's Office had contacted ICE, the agent said. No, ICE agents weren't planning to come to the fair.
Sheriff Mueller didn't return a phone call Thursday seeking additional comment. Instead, he had a Sheriff's Office employee send the Flatwater Free Press his emailed statement. He had previously not returned two other phone calls and an email seeking comment, instead communicating via another emailed statement.
Calling ICE had "nothing to do with the false allegation that I made racist comments," Mueller wrote. "My focus throughout has been solely on ensuring the safety and security of the fair, nothing more."
An ICE spokesperson declined to discuss any interaction with the sheriff.
"Pushing something out about ICE speaking to a sheriff or other law enforcement officers, with whom we partner with on a daily basis, will do nothing but fear monger," spokesperson Tanya Roman wrote in an email.
***
On a Sunday afternoon two weeks before the fair, 20 people gathered in an Imperial United Methodist Church sanctuary. The day's lecture: Knowing your rights if stopped by ICE.
After hearing the fair rumors, Jo Leyland felt moved to act. The retired city administrator started calling nonprofits, hoping to get a pamphlet she could hand out. Instead, staff members from Nebraska Appleseed, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant rights, offered to make the drive to Imperial.
"I wanted to educate people, both with brown and white faces, about what could be done if the worst thing happened and ICE did show up," Leyland said.
After the presentation at the church, Leyland took Know Your Rights cards from an Appleseed rep to pass out at the fair. The city took pamphlets to keep at the library and city offices. By the end of the session, all the paper handouts had been taken.
People are desperate for this information, said Ruby Méndez López, an Appleseed employee. They're grateful to get it. But getting people to attend Know Your Rights sessions can be hard.
"If we publicly post Know Your Rights information, people get really nervous about showing up," Méndez López said. "People start to think it's a trap ... or that they're going to out themselves as someone who has a varied immigration status, or that ICE is going to show up."
At the Imperial meeting, most attendees were white. Méndez López tried to set up a smaller session with migrant workers in town. People were too scared to come, she said.
The fear of going out in public has come and gone in waves, Méndez López said. It was strong at the start of 2025, when President Donald Trump took office. It peaked again after the raid at Glenn Valley in Omaha, when rumors of potential ICE raids in Lexington and Grand Island flooded social media.
No other large raid has yet happened.
"People were just not showing up to work," Méndez López said. "When there's rumors that are unverified, it disrupts people's lives entirely ... it's hard to know what to believe."
On Thursday night at the fair, excitement over the concert mixed with unease and uncertainty.
At one booth on the midway, Lions Club members shouted out bingo numbers in both English and Spanish.
Farther down the midway, a cutout of Donald and Melania Trump advertised a booth selling MAGA hats and T-shirts.
No immigration authorities showed up that night. And fewer concertgoers than usual showed up, too -- roughly 500 people ended up buying tickets to La Fiera de Ojinaga, Stromberger said, far fewer than the combined 6,000 attendees at the Friday and Saturday country acts.
But the hundreds of mostly Latino fans who did attend came dressed in their best cowboy hats, jeans and boots. Some, like Almanza, never thought they would see a day when one of their favorite Mexican bands played their small-town American fair.
Couples paired off and whirled their way around the empty back half of the venue, stepping in time with the band's bouncy drumbeat in the glowing light of the stage.
And when the band shouted out their home state of Chihuahua, cheers erupted from the crowd.
Behind the crowd, a lit-up Ferris wheel looped kids into the sky. Vendors handed out cotton candy and fried Oreos. For a moment, it felt like another night at the fair.
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska's first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter. Natalia Alamdari, the Seacrest Greater Nebraska reporter, covers issues across the state of Nebraska. It is named in honor of philanthropist Rhonda Seacrest and her late husband, James, who proudly led several Nebraska newspapers through Western Publishing for 40 years.
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