When a Republican Town Fought for the Immigrant Next Door

A small Montana community never thought the crackdown would come for one of their own. But for them, politics never mattered as much as a neighbor they loved.

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news?

It has been a hard couple of weeks for me to watch, and I imagine for a lot of you too. You know what happened in Houston last week. You saw what happened in Maine on Monday morning. More deaths at the hands of immigration officers, their families left to make sense of it.

In the middle of all of this, with all the fear and all the noise, we have to remember something simple. It is easy to be hard on people you will never meet. And that is exactly what they are counting on. That these immigrants stay strangers to the rest of us, faces on a screen for one night, so that when the news comes we shake our heads and say nothing.

But this Sunday, let me take you to a place where that broke down completely.

Up in the far northeastern corner of Montana, around two hundred people live in a town called Froid. Full of farmland, in deep red country. It has voted for Donald Trump in every election he has ever run in.

It is also home to a forty-two-year-old man named Roberto Orozco-Ramirez.

If your truck breaks down in Froid, Roberto is who fixes it. He owns the diesel shop, the one that keeps the school buses and the farm equipment running. He coaches youth sports. He has four sons, all born in this country. He came here from Mexico as a kid, running from cartel violence, and he built a life and a business from the ground up.

Most of the town had no idea he was undocumented. He had been deported once, back in 2009, and he came back.

But this January, Border Patrol vehicles turned up in the small town. Agents sat outside his home and his shop for days. His kids stopped going to school. And when Roberto learned there was a warrant out for him, he turned himself in.

He spent the next hundred days in a jail cell.

Froid is not a town you would expect to fight this. It went for Trump three times over. But when the crackdown took one of their own, the people there struggled with two things at once. What they believe about immigration, and what they know about Roberto.

That argument could wait. But the family down the road could not, so the town got to work.

Three hundred people, a hundred more than Froid even has, packed into the community center for a silent auction. People put up whatever they had to give. Gravel. Hamburger meat. A cattle chute. A tattoo appointment. A twelve-gauge shotgun. The high school ballplayers worked the food line in their Orozco Diesel shirts. By the end of the night they had raised tens of thousands of dollars for Roberto’s family.

When the hearings came, they did not let him sit alone. Neighbors made the long drive across the state to Great Falls, every single time there was a hearing.

And it turned out they had the law on their side. A federal judge ruled that Roberto’s detention was unconstitutional, that the government had locked him up for months without ever giving him the hearing he was owed. After more than a hundred days, he walked out of that detention center and found his oldest son standing there waiting to surprise him.

Then they brought him home. Main Street was lined with cars and trucks, people leaning on their horns in a windstorm, waving him back in.

Here is what I take from Froid. Nobody there had to win the big argument to do the right thing. Some of them shifted a little. Some did not budge at all. It did not matter. When it came down to a policy on one side and a man they knew on the other, the man won.

That instinct is still out there. In small towns, in red counties, in the places no pollster ever calls. It hardly made the national news. But it happened.

A town of two hundred people in the far corner of Montana heard everything they were being told about who belongs here, and then they looked at their friend Roberto, and they chose him.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam