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Immigration enforcement has been a defining feature of the second Trump administration, and in Montana the story has largely played out in isolated pockets around the state.
In Gallatin County, local prosecutor Audrey Cromwell and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen are in an ongoing dispute about local cooperation with federal immigration officials that’s currently before the state Supreme Court.
In Helena, questions are swirling around a facility near the airport that federal immigration officials are using to hold detainees. Officials in the state capital also butted heads with the attorney general after the city attempted to restrict police cooperation with federal immigration agents.
And Cascade County is home to the only jail in the state with a federal contract to hold immigration detainees for more than 72 hours. That’s where undocumented Froid resident Roberto Orozco-Ramirez spent many of his 100-plus days in detention before being released in mid-May.
As immigration enforcement action surged in southwest Montana last week, the journey of one immigrant in particular connected the people and communities that have so far composed the scattered outposts of immigration news in Montana.
On June 29, 20-year-old Bozeman resident Jose David Cortes Torres was pulled over while driving in the city and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which alleged that he had entered the country illegally in 2023. His arrest was one among a flurry of ICE operations in Gallatin Valley last week, and coincided with a sharp surge in immigration-related arrests nationwide.
Cortes Torres was transported to the Helena holding facility, where he remained for more than 24 hours, including time in a 10-by-20-foot room with approximately 17 other people, where Cortes Torres was forced to stand for more than six hours straight, according to court filings.
From Helena, he was transported to the Cascade County detention facility, where he was held for roughly a week. Federal judge for the District of Montana Brian Morris ordered his immediate release July 7, agreeing with Cortes Torres’ attorney that his detention violated his due process rights.
Orozco-Ramirez’s May release was granted by the same judge, and for similar reasons. In a recent hearing, an attorney for the U.S. government called the two cases “legally indistinguishable.”
Last week’s ICE operations in Gallatin County felt like a turning point. The state of Montana has not been a hotbed of ICE activity over the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, even as higher-profile immigration enforcement operations in other parts of the country have dominated national news.
But the tenor has changed. Community members are now reluctant to leave their homes out of fear they’ll be arrested on the street.
One Bozeman area business owner who employs Latino immigrants told me earlier this week that some of his employees came to live and work in southwest Montana specifically because they felt safer being outside of ICE’s main areas of focus.
“The tables have turned so quickly, they’re like, ‘where do we go now?’” the business owner said. “They’re in constant fear of what’s going to happen.”
—Victoria Eavis
Say What? 🤔
Gov. Greg Gianforte announced in a July 8 press release that he recently co-signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a proposal issued in March by President Donald Trump that aims to reduce the rising utility bills that some Americans are shouldering amid booming data-center development.
More specifically, Trump called on AI companies and especially large data centers known as hyperscalers to “protect American consumers from price hikes due to data center energy and infrastructure requirements, and lower electricity costs for consumers in the long term.”
The state’s press release argues that the pledge “promotes responsible investments for data center developers while protecting ratepayers’ energy costs,” largely by encouraging developers to “build, bring or buy all of the energy needed for building and operating data centers.”
But Ari Peskoe, who studies how data centers affect utility customers’ bills, says the pledge carries no regulatory or enforcement weight.
Peskoe, the director of Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, described Trump’s pledge as “essentially a press release.” It places no specific obligations on the president, Peskoe wrote in an email to MTFP, adding that oversight for the types of safeguards outlined in the pledge are handled by government agencies like Montana’s Public Service Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“Ensuring the pledge is met can only be achieved through contracts or tariffs filed at the Montana PSC and FERC,” he wrote.
The PSC is in the midst of reviewing one such tariff — the “large load tariff” that NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest utility, has proposed for calculating electricity bills for data centers and other large new power users.
And pledge or no pledge, Gianforte has no particular say on Public Service Commission decisions.
“The Montana PSC commissioners are elected,” Peskoe added, “and are therefore not beholden to the governor.”
—Amanda Eggert
Following Up ↩️
The former editor of the Anaconda Leader, a twice-weekly newspaper that closed its doors last month, recently filed articles of incorporation for a new media nonprofit.
James Rosien, one of the two Leader journalists who lost their jobs last month, is calling the new organization the Anaconda Community Media Company. The acronym is a nod to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which played a foundational role in establishing and shaping the southwestern Montana town.
ACMC plans to build a revenue model reliant on subscribers and advertising. Rosien told Montana Free Press this week that the nonprofit aims to generate $150,000 a year from subscribers. He hopes about 2,000 locals, or roughly 1 in 4 county residents, will sign up. The organization is also shooting for about $300,000 in annual revenue from advertisers and sponsors.
ACMC plans to publish under the name Anaconda Weekly Review. But it will be months, at least, before anyone in Anaconda can get their hands on the new newspaper. Rosien plans to start publishing in print by fall. He intends to launch the website version and name the nonprofit’s five board members next month.
Rosien said the first edition will be a big one, filled with coverage of events that happened in June, July and August.
“It’ll be a lost summer, a missing summer,” Rosien said. “But I at least want to make sure that we have something in the paper showing what all happened here, so we can have that record.”
—Zeke Lloyd
Snapshot 📸
By the Numbers 🔢
Amount the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, or CFAC, will pay to remediate 1,300 acres of an aluminum smelting facility that joined the Superfund list in 2016.
Swiss commodities giant Glencore, which purchased CFAC in 1999, will deposit the money in a special account dedicated to past and future costs associated with mitigating arsenic, fluoride, cyanide and other toxic byproducts that decades of aluminum smelting deposited in nearby soil and water. The mitigation will largely be achieved with a strategy that’s sometimes referred to as “waste in place.”
That means contaminated material will be consolidated and then capped, or covered with a material designed to keep the toxins from spreading. CFAC could use clay, vegetative cover or an “engineered” material for the caps. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told MTFP Wednesday that a slurry wall, a type of underground barrier designed to keep contaminants from reaching groundwater, is also part of the plan. CFAC should have its design finalized by the end of this year, according to the EPA.
CFAC was the Flathead Valley’s largest employer during the company’s 1970s heyday, but it’s been out of commission since the plant shuttered in 2009. Federal and state regulators are eager to see the site restored to facilitate economic redevelopment efforts. Tony Haag, president of local nonprofit Coalition for a Clean CFAC, which formed in 2024, said he, too, is eager for remediation to begin.
Read More: EPA inks clean-up agreement with Columbia Falls aluminum plant
—Amanda Eggert
Following the Law ⚖️
Montana’s 4th Judicial District Court has awarded $1.3 million in attorneys’ fees and litigation costs to the plaintiffs in Cross v. State of Montana, a legal challenge to a 2023 state law banning many gender transition-related medical services for transgender minors.
The plaintiffs first challenged the law, enacted by Senate Bill 99, after Gov. Greg Gianforte signed it in 2023. In 2025, Judge Jason Marks ruled the bill unconstitutional. This week’s judgment requires the state to pay for the costs of mounting the constitutional challenge.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Montana, Lambda Legal and Ashurst Perkins Coie represented the plaintiffs.
Malita Picasso, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, celebrated the decision, highlighting that attorneys’ fees are an important source of revenue for the organization.
“Without fee awards, nonprofit legal organizations would have fewer resources to represent families whose constitutional rights have been violated,” Picasso wrote in a press release this week.
Sen. John Fuller, R-Kalispell, author of the 2023 law, told MTFP July 10 that the court “engaged in extraordinary mental gymnastics” when it struck down the law in 2025.
—Zeke Lloyd
Highlights ☀️
In other news this week —
Republican infighting over who gets to define “Republican” got a hearing this week when Lewis and Clark County District Judge Michael F. McMahon put the brakes on an MTGOP plan to require membership dues and loyalty oaths of party members. The lawsuit, brought by Republican lawmakers who claim as much right to Republican self-identification as state party Chairman Art Wittich, continues, Tom Lutey reports.
It can be hard to keep up with all of Montana’s data center news, so Missoula readers are especially lucky to have Katie Fairbanks on the beat. Fairbanks was busy this week documenting the property owner’s withdrawal of support for a proposed data center in nearby Bonner — and then the Missoula County Commission’s Thursday adoption of a temporary moratorium on data center development outside of Missoula City limits.
Victoria Eavis’ Tuesday report from Bozeman, the site of last week’s sudden surge of ICE activity, collected all the necessary official statements, but it dug much deeper than that, showing what an immigration enforcement dragnet looks like through the eyes of its targets.
On Our Radar
Brad — My favorite part of flipping through used record bins isn’t finally finding something I’ve long been looking for. It’s stumbling across something I never even knew existed and suddenly can’t live without. At Rockin’ Rudy’s Record Heaven in Missoula last week, that was sax player/flautist Dave Liebman’s 1974 album “Lookout Farm,” a deeply dated document of post-Bitches Brew progressive/pastoral fusion guaranteed to appeal in 2026 to precisely no one except me in an enduringly odd mood.
Matt — I’m going with a humble book recommendation this week. “The Race Beat” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff is an excellent account of the Civil Rights era told through the lens of the journalists who covered it. And the book won a Pulitzer to boot.
Stephanie — Speaking of books, recently getting a new Kindle inspired me to dive back into John Sandford’s Prey series after more than 10 years. I’ve now made it to book 36, the latest in the series, and while I’m happy to have caught up, I’m already wishing there was another one waiting. If you have any great book recommendations to keep me busy until the next one comes out, send them my way!
Zeke — Why aren’t World Cup fans allowed to keep game balls? The Associated Press couldn’t find an exact answer — FIFA never responded to AP’s emails — but the reporting satisfied my curiosity.
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