On a bright Saturday afternoon in late January, a small fleet of fat-tired bikes circled up in front of the community center in Driggs, Idaho, near the Wyoming border.
The group’s leader, Aaron Couch, pulled his brakes through giant pogie mittens and delivered some directions: don’t obstruct traffic, stay visible to cars.
This is one of hundreds of memorial rides happening around the world for Alex Pretti – the second Minneapolis resident shot and killed in January by immigration officers. Pretti was also a biker, like Elissa Gramling, who used to live in Minneapolis and shopped at the same bike shop as Pretti.
She now lives in Wyoming and – like Couch – says she’s been telling her Congresspeople she wants them to seek more accountability for what she sees as “executions.”
Wyoming’s Congressional delegation issued statements after being prompted by the Jackson Hole News&Guide. They called the Minnesota killings tragic, but placed the burden of deescalating tensions on the local officials there to cooperate with the feds.
Gramling said the responses had “really disappointed."
“Especially after seeing Republicans in other states actually speak their conscience and actually join with what’s right,” she said.
The bike ride is a quieter gathering than one just a block away, where over 250 people filled Driggs’ small main street corner, or the 300 people who rallied in downtown Jackson.
Other protests popped up in towns across Wyoming, such as Cody. In Rock Springs on Jan. 29, police responded to a crowd of people attempting to block the cars of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents. In Casper, U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman abruptly ended a Jan. 27 town hall after facing heated crowd questions about the shootings.
That atmosphere of frustration has led to lots of questions for Rosie Read, legal director and founder of the Wyoming Immigrant Advocacy Project.
“The number one question I’m getting right now is what can we do?” she said.
She encouraged people to speak up through letters and protests, while acknowledging disappointment might be an expected outcome for the liberal pocket of the Tetons in staunchly conservative Wyoming.
“I just don’t think directing that outrage at our Representatives is going to yield the kind of change that people who are really upset about this want to see,” she said.
So far, town councilors and county commissioners haven’t issued formal statements either in support of the immigrant community or federal immigration enforcement. Just two people have written recent public comments to county commissioners on the subject, according to Board Chair Mark Newcomb.
“I do recognize the sheriff as an autonomous elected official and have passively supported his stance,” Newcomb said, “but to be honest, I have not dug into it.”
He said topics that would escalate concern to the commission included if ICE agents entered a home without a judicial warrant, or if the sheriff wasn’t acting legally to protect the community.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does have a regular presence in Teton County – at the county jail.
Before last year, Sheriff Matt Carr refused to hold non-legal citizens without a criminal warrant. The ACLU of Wyoming had sued the county before for holding people too long for a 24/7 sobriety program. Carr made public statements about wanting to avoid that while maintaining community trust.
“We’re not here for the immigration business,” he told a room of business leaders last year. “We’re here to keep our community safe and to keep it functioning.”
But last winter, state lawmakers tried to pass a law to make it illegal to not honor civil detention requests from ICE. The bill failed, but Carr’s policy caught the attention of Hageman. She called him out directly in a newsletter.
Carr quickly changed course. Now, non-legal citizens are held long enough for ICE to pick them up and transfer them to federal detention.
By the end of last year, the steady pace of ICE had resulted in around 100 people taken from Teton County, according to Carr. He did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
But even with Carr up for reelection this year, Read says the county sheriff’s office is not where she’s advising advocates to focus.
“I hate to sound so cynical,” she said, “but it feels about as productive as calling a representative.”
She sees power in documenting ICE activity, keeping eyes on local actions of federal agents.
“This groundswell of vocal opposition to federal immigration enforcement and their tactics [like] disappearing people and going after kids,” she said, “ all of that is so critical.”
She acknowledged that Sheriff Carr is walking a fine line.
Unlike in Minnesota, towns or counties that refuse cooperation with ICE, also known as sanctuary cities, are illegal in Wyoming.
As of January, Wyoming Highway Patrol, seven Wyoming counties – not including Teton – and all of Idaho law enforcement have much tighter official agreements with ICE, also called 287(g)s.
Antonio Serrano with the ACLU of Wyoming is tracking that trend.
“I think that there’s a lot of sheriffs who are excited to be part of this system that is separating families and destroying lives,” Serrano said.
Wyoming is a different place than most of the country, he said, and advised those swimming upstream politically to seek one-on-one conversations, sharing stories with people in power and looking to non-white and immigrant leaders in the state.
“The way that you talk with elected officials really matters here,” he said. “Protests is great, I love it. But also sometimes you have to approach them from a diplomatic angle.”
Blocking traffic or other acts of civil disobedience are big city tactics that can backfire. He advised following the leadership of people of color and immigrants.
“Brown people [are] going to face the repercussions of that,” he said, “they’re the ones who are gonna get hammered for that.”
Back in the streets, like-minded rural Westerners largely haven’t been talking pressuring county officials or sheriffs.
For a memorial bike ride, that’s also not really the point, Couch said. Cyclists are accustomed to coming together for rides whenever another member of the community dies, often from being hit and killed by a car.
In that way, Couch said, memorializing Pretti’s killing is not political.
“It’s a ride in unity together,” he said. “I think that it’s pretty obvious that it was wrong.”
