Chapter 1: What prompted the discussion about Border Patrol in Freud, Montana?
Last month, Nora Mabee, a reporter in Montana, was looking around on Facebook for story ideas.
In Montana, particularly in rural areas, Facebook is where a lot of news is shared.
And a post from the local sheriff caught her eye. He said that Border Patrol agents had rocked up outside a business in the very small town of Freud, Montana, to take someone in, and that he, the sheriff, was trying to assist them.
But then, at the end of his post, he added this. It's important to note that this man was not a threat, not a danger to his community, has no criminal history, and has been a great member of this community. Which...
I just haven't seen a statement like that from law enforcement, particularly in a really, you know, conservative area that typically has a lot of support for all types of law enforcement, Border Patrol included.
Coming up on today explained the story of Freud, Montana, a town where most people voted for President Trump and how residents reacted when reality hit home. Support for this show comes from the Working Forest Initiative. The working forest industry is committed to planting more trees than they harvest. More than one billion seedlings are planted in U.S. working forests every year.
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This is Today Explained. I'm Nora Mabee, and I'm a reporter for Montana Free Press. It's Friday at 9 p.m. and we're pulling into Freud. So I drove into Freud on a Friday night with my colleague Lauren Miller. A big Freud sign. Freud is a deeply conservative rural agricultural community. In the last election, 75% of voters there supported President Donald Trump.
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Chapter 2: How did the community react to the arrest of a local resident?
He came to the US at some point illegally. Court documents say that in 2009, he was removed by ICE and deported. At some point, he came back. On January 25th, Orozco Ramirez was arrested by Border Patrol, and Orozco's arrest has really shaken the residents there. In the complaint, it documents that the officers...
wearing plain clothes and in unmarked vehicles, came to his diesel shop and knocked on the door. Later, when I was talking with his sons, they said their dad was immediately suspicious of this because people never knock on the door. This is a place where people, yeah, just walk in. So he was suspicious and he ended up kind of closing the door on them. That's what his wife says.
But then, you know, the complaint also alleges he yelled at them on their way out. And as they were in their car driving away, it says he threw a two by six piece of lumber in their direction. And that's what led ultimately to a charge of threatening a federal officer. Um, That's something, you know, his family disputes.
Then his wife has said that different officers wearing their uniforms and in marked vehicles came back right after that with weapons on them, but that she and her husband actually closed all the doors to the shop and hid in the back and waited for them to leave. They were really scared, and that was 10 days before the arrest.
people contacted the sheriff and basically said, you know, can you intervene? And he tried to act as an intermediary, asking Roberto to essentially turn himself in, thinking that that would lead to a better outcome with law enforcement. People were shocked.
They were surprised to see the national immigration crackdown extend beyond big cities like Minneapolis and Chicago and reach this tiny corner of the state. They said they believed Trump's policy to be about arresting the worst of the worst, criminals, gang members, things like that. And in this town where everybody knows everybody, it's an example of
the tension between the personal and the political, and what happens to a community when they vote one way, but then a personal experience forces them to confront their beliefs.
All right, so this is a town where you know something's up if someone knocks at your door because it's so tight-knit that normally people just walk on in. So how do people in this tiny, tight-knit town react when they learn this man is now in the custody of Border Patrol?
For people in town, this is the first time they are learning about Roberto's status. A lot of people told me they didn't know he was here illegally. You know, they just thought of him as their friend and their neighbor. And yeah, when they hear that he was deported once, it does bring up some complicated thoughts.
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Chapter 3: Who is Roberto Orozco Ramirez and why is he significant to the town?
They're not happy that their neighbors are being picked up. And on top of that, we know from a lot of reporting that many of the people who are being arrested do not even have criminal records. So at a certain point, does Trump try to lower the temperature on the promise? Does he say, OK, we're not going to do a million people a year because we got most of the bad guys. We will pull back.
Do you see him moderating what he said at all? You know, I will say that one important piece of context here that could prevent Trump from really taking this full retreat is that public opinion here is still a little bit mixed and complicated. So his approval rating on immigration is, you know, negative by, you know, between nine and 12 points, depending on what you look at.
But that still makes immigration actually his best issue. you know, his handling of inflation is actually at negative 26% in that approval. And so immigration is still a relative strong point for him. And then also when voters are asked about which party they trust more on immigration, Republicans actually still have an advantage in the most recent polls that I've seen.
So a Wall Street Journal survey taken after Rene Good's killing asked voters about, you know, whether they approved of Trump's handling of immigration policy. They said they didn't. But then they asked them, OK, so which party is better equipped to handle immigration, the Republican Party or the Democrats? And the voters preferred the Republican Party by 11 points.
And so it sounds a little bit like the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.
That was Vox's Eric Levitz. Peter Balanon-Rosen produced today's show. Miranda Kennedy edited. Dustin DeSoto and Andrea Lopez-Crusado checked the facts. And Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
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