In east Idaho and west Wyoming, some immigrant families seek help with passports, visas and other paperwork through the nonprofit Immigrant Hope Wyoming/Idaho. Lori McCune founded the organization in 2016. That was the same year she cast her first of what’s now three votes for President Donald Trump. Some in her life find that puzzling. But she’s part of a big network of Christians who have long tried to help their neighbors.
Inspiration for what’s now McCune’s life work followed what was and remains the area’s largest immigration raid.
In late August of 1996, the weekend before a busy Labor Day, uniformed agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), descended on town and knocked on the doors of restaurants, hotels and homes.
Local and national news articles reported that around 150 people were detained and around 100 people transferred for deportation. An editorial in that week’s Jackson Hole News reads “some foreigners with valid work permits say even they were detained.”
McCune remembers the immigrant raid well, and went to the Teton County jail to help. Over a decade of mission work in South America made her fluent in Spanish to help translate and help people write down, for example, where they’d left their vehicles or which family to call.
When she moved to Driggs, Idaho in the ’90s, large-scale Mexican immigration to the Jackson Hole area was relatively new, about 10 years old.
McCune credits that raid as a turning point in her career.
She realized that “maybe there was something that could be done,” she said.
McCune started filling out paperwork for H-2B visas, a program for temporary, nonagricultural jobs, from her basement office, which doubled as a classroom where she taught English. And 20 years after the raid, she formalized low-cost help in a local branch of the nationwide nonprofit Immigrant Hope.
Ben Johnson, the executive director of the national Immigrant Hope organization, said that getting any help established in the rural Jackson area was a “huge benefit.
“I think the next nearest immigration provider was hundreds of miles away,” he said.
Trump’s distinctly aggressive immigration enforcement might lead one to assume the dedicated immigrant advocate is politically left-leaning or a Democrat, but she is a Republican and voted for Trump all three times, 2016, 2020, and 2024. That’s a contradiction to some in her life, including some nieces.
And while she’s not a “big fan” of the president, she said, “the principles of the Republican Party are things I still stand on.”
McCune represents a voice that’s not often in the soundbites of today’s immigration reporting. But she’s part of a big network.
Immigrant Hope’s entire mission is deeply rooted in faith; it is a program created by the Evangelical Free Church of America, a conservative denomination. So McCune’s voting record is not a contradiction to Johnson. Churches, he said, can help people engage with what he calls a “broken immigration system.”
“There’s lots of ways to get involved and do good. Even if you might not agree politically,” he said.
Data show there’s a reason people might see tension between McCune’s voting record and life work. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that Christians are twice as likely as Americans of other religions, and twice as likely as those with no religion, to say that a growing population of immigrants has been a change for the worse.
But there are always people who don’t fit in neat boxes, says Elisabeth Trefonas, longtime Jackson immigration attorney.
“We triage our battles as human beings, and we need to be a little bit more gracious with one another,” she said. “Putting the rhetoric aside, human-to-human we really agree on so much.”
Though they have some different political views, Trefonas says she and her longtime colleague likely share many opinions.
“If you look through our community at any of our service providers and our teachers and our counselors, you’ll find a DACA or green card recipient that immigrant hope was the key player in assisting,” she said. ”
McCune sees immigrants as a population that both political parties take advantage of. And she points to past Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan who granted legal status and work authorization to some immigrants and their families en masse.
Trump was elected on the promise of the largest mass deportation in history. Since then, NBC News reports, border crossings have “plummeted, ICE arrests have doubled and the number of people in detention is at an all-time high.”
Immigration enforcers have also separated thousands of families, seen detainees die in custody, killed protesting American citizens and deported people that do not have criminal convictions in the U.S.
That aggression has left McCune torn.
“I’ve never been a big fan of Trump,” she said, “but I thought he was trying to stand on Republican principles. But sometimes what people say they are going to do and what they do are different.”
Unlike the very public raid in 1996, tactics now in Jackson Hole tend to be more discreet. As of last year, a new state law means undocumented immigrants can be arrested for driving with an out-of-state license. Many have wound up in jail after being pulled over for traffic violations, according to several Jackson attorneys.
In Teton County, McCune has also seen new holding policies from Sheriff Matt Carr, a Democrat, that have increased transfers from his jail to ICE.
With close friends in the immigrant community for over 30 years, McCune said that fear among the immigration community is more constant than it has ever been.
“I would say that the immigrant community is pretty terrified,” she said.
