Why a Trump-voting town battled for 109 days to save their neighbour from ICE

Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.

• The heavy price America has paid for Jeff Bezos’s ambition
• The US is becoming impossible to live in
• I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate
• This is how the world will look after Trump
• I’ve seen what ICE has done to Minnesota. Farage wants to import that to the UK
• The men who want to stop women voting
• Trump isn’t damaging America. He’s reinventing it’

Of the many challenges Roberto Orozco-Ramirez faced during his 109-day incarceration in an immigration jail in Montana, uncertainty proved to be the hardest.

Would he be deported to Mexico, the country he had left as a child? He worried that the diesel engine repair business he’d worked so hard to establish in Froid, Roosevelt County, would be for nothing. He worried he’d be separated from his family as a result of Donald Trump’s tough immigration policy. And, most of all, he worried about his four children, all US citizens, and his wife.

“The hardest thing was not knowing what was going to happen,” Orozco-Ramirez, 42, tells The i Paper. “Am I going to get back home or have to leave the country?”

But there was one thing he was not fully aware of during his incarceration. Outside the prison walls, a campaign to free him and support his family was gathering pace and had attracted national attention.

The Froid townspeople were determined that their neighbour, who volunteered as a baseball coach at the local high school, would not suffer the same fate that had befallen countless thousands of people detained and deported by agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during the President’s second term.

What made this all the more striking is that Froid, with a population of barely 200 people “where everyone knows everyone” as one townsperson said, is located in a part of red America that has strongly supported Trump and his policies. In 2024, the President beat Democrat Kamala Harris by 58-38 to win Montana.

Trump had placed a tough-on-immigration policy at the centre of his campaign. At the Republican National Convention, his supporters cheered while holding banners that read: “Mass Deportation Now!” While some of its figures are disputed, the government claims the policy has been successful. It says as many as three million so-called “illegal aliens” have been detained by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and either put on deportation flights or opted to “self-deport”.

The first indication that the people of Froid had taken it upon themselves to stand with Orozco-Ramirez and his family came when federal agents started parking outside his home, his business, and his children’s school.

Braving temperatures as low as -30°C (-22°F), a group of local women positioned themselves alongside the agents’ cars with signs that read: “Stop bullying our community” and “America wants families like the Orozcos”.

When Orozco-Ramirez had to appear at the Cascade County Detention Centre in Great Falls, several dozen people made the 14-hour round trip to support him in court. Dinners, silent auctions and other fundraisers were held to support the family and pay for an immigration lawyer. The organisers intentionally tried to keep politics out of it.

The Montana Free Press reported that, at one fundraiser in February, a laminated sign was taped to the community centre walls that said: “Tonight is about helping our friends, and community members through this difficult time. There will be plenty of opportunities to talk politics at a later date. Thank you everyone for your kindness and generosity this evening. #OrozcoStrong.”

When Roosevelt County Sheriff Jason Frederick looked into why federal agents had Orozco-Ramirez in their crosshairs, he learned that he had originally entered the US as a child with his parents, who claimed they were escaping gang violence. He’d been deported in 2009. Now, there was an outstanding arrest warrant for his illegal re-entry into the country. By this point, he had been living in Froid for 14 years.

Alarmingly, the sheriff had discovered that the authorities, who’d already pulled over Orozco-Ramirez’s oldest son, Roberto Jr, were planning to detain him with the help of an armed out-of-state “tactical team”. Frederick told the media he had spoken to the agents and secured a verbal agreement that if Orozco-Ramirez handed himself in, he could be held at the local jail and also meet a lawyer. In January, he posted on Facebook that the actions were being driven by outside agencies and without the direction of local officers.

“The man and his family have been productive members of the community and have had no negative interactions with local law enforcement since they moved here over a decade ago,” he wrote. “The man posed no danger to the community at any point during this incident.”

As it was, federal authorities backed out of any deal they made and rapidly transferred Orozco-Ramirez to Cascade County Detention Centre in Great Falls, about 325 miles (523km) away.

Keith Nurlund was among those who offered to help. He said he had once needed assistance himself when one of his daughters required costly medical treatment, and the town had supported him then. In addition to helping raise money to cover the Orozco-Ramirez family’s rent and groceries, they needed funds for a lawyer.

Nurlund and his wife, Brittney, were part of a group that printed and sold “Orozco-Ramirez” sweatshirts. As word got out about the situation, donations poured in from across the nation. Nurlund, a registered independent who voted for neither of the major parties in 2024, says he assumes plenty of people in Froid voted for Trump as the “least bad of two bad options”.

While Trump had vowed to focus on the “worst of the worst”, nobody in Froid attached that label to Orozco-Ramirez. Nurland says his oldest son played basketball with one of his children, and when Border Patrol agents appeared at the school, it was deeply upsetting. “We came together as a community,” says Nurland.

Another supporter, Martin Qualley, 70, has driven the Froid school bus for years, picking up and dropping off the family’s children. He told The i Paper it made him angry when he saw border agents parked outside the school “basically harassing people”.

Qualley says the whole town knew the family. “They’re good people, extremely good community-minded people,” he says. He started posting on social media to try to let people know about what was happening: “Pretty soon we had a big following.”

With the help of a lawyer, the community of Froid secured two legal victories in court: firstly, the dropping of the illegal entry charge and then Orozco-Ramirez’s release from jail after a federal judge ruled his detention was unconstitutional.

“Such indifference from the executive branch to the constitution’s guarantee,” wrote Judge Brian Morris. In May, Orozco-Ramirez was released from jail to loud cheers from the family and friends who had gathered to bring him home.

Orozco-Ramirez is now back in Froid, hopeful for his future even as uncertainty hangs over what happens next. He tells The i Paper he’d never expected so much support from so many people, and his surprise and excitement when he found out about the campaign. “It gave me hope. That’s how I kept going,” he says.

Laura Christoffersen, a lawyer and another supporter, says she is pleased the community came together, but fears for people who don’t get such backing and end up as statistics in the playbook of Trump and his hardline immigration adviser Stephen Miller.

“This is a very small town in north-east Montana. Every person knows every other person, and every person who lives there has a vital role in our community,” she tells The i Paper.

She adds: “I think you have to be able to see people as real people, as human beings, before you give a darn. That might be a sad commentary on America.”

It is difficult to obtain an accurate figure for the number of people arrested and deported during Trump’s second term, in part because of alleged unwillingness on the part of the government to provide reliable data. Groups such as the American Immigration Council have reported a large upturn in arrests, and NBC News has suggested a total of up to 450,000.

In December 2025, the DHS said 2.2 million so-called “illegal aliens” had left the US.

A spokesperson told The i Paper: “In President Trump’s first year back in office, more than three million illegal aliens have left the US because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.

They added: “As of 17 May, we have now deported nearly 900,000 illegal aliens and arrested over 900,000 illegal aliens.”

Orozco-Ramirez says he would like to tell the President that the government has to obey the laws, too. “You cannot run things by running over the law.”

He says he hopes life will return to normal and is “absolutely” optimistic that he will be granted asylum.

“I don’t know what the judges are going to say,” he says, “but I feel I have a really good chance.”

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.