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At 5:56 a.m. on a Friday in early February, Teton County Sheriff Matt Carr received a phone call from a federal agent.
That call was to alert him, with just a few minutes’ notice, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrived in Jackson and an operation for “targeted individuals” was underway.
By mid-morning, a video circulated online of an officer wearing a uniform with the words “POLICE/ICE,” standing outside the Latitude 43 apartments. The federal agents allegedly had 17 warrants, according to Carr.
Carr would later that day confirm these details to KHOL but said he was wary about the number of warrants, which he described as “unconfirmed.”
That’s because the agent who called him didn’t work directly for ICE. Carr said he has yet to see the warrants.
KHOL’s requests to ICE for copies of the warrants remain unanswered.
Alicia Unger, with Spanish-language news outlet TodoTV, is among the reporters still in the dark about the details of the Feb. 7 operation.
An immigrant herself, Unger said the unknowns have left many in the immigrant community anxious.
“People are afraid and call me [and say], ‘Alicia, what’s going on? What’s happening?’” Unger said.
“‘I don’t have many answers because when I call authorities they say ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” she said.
One big unknown is if the people ICE sought had criminal records.
In the case of someone with a criminal record, ICE sometimes has a warrant from a judge. ICE also performs operations with warrants that agents write themselves.
Those are called “administrative warrants” and are more common, according to Rosie Read, founding director of the Wyoming Immigrant Advocacy Project.
Those are called “administrative,” or ICE warrants, and are not enough to forcibly enter private property to detain anyone.
The number of people ICE sought is still unknown.
Regardless of the warrant type, a number as high as 17 is unusual for a place like Jackson with just over 10,000 people.
“That would have been pretty unheard of under the Biden administration,” Read said. “Even for the first Trump administration, 17 is a relatively large number for this community.”
KHOL has not been able to independently verify which type of warrants or how many the agent had referenced in conversations with Carr.
Jackson immigration attorney Elisabeth Trefonas told KHOL via email that she had reason to believe there was one administrative warrant dealt Feb. 7 but declined to share more.
Finding answers to these figures would be easier if the warrants were judicial, Read said, because the judicial system is more transparent.
Public records, rules and laws require government offices to release requested information. There are, however, security-based exemptions that agencies, like ICE, can use to prevent the disclosure of such documents. .
Without names to search the court system, though, that route is also obscure.
While details are murky, Read says some things can be assumed of ICE’s typical operations.
If visiting a private residence like apartments the agency likely isn’t seeking anyone with a violent criminal record, Read said.
ICE was more likely looking for someone whose primary crime is re-entry after a previous deportation.
For convicted violent crimes, the agency would likely go to a state or county detention center, neither of which happened during the Feb. 7 operation, Carr confirmed.
In Read’s eyes, the Feb. 7 operation exemplifies a shift in the Trump administration’s immigration ethos.
Though deportation peaked under the Biden administration, the administration prioritized deporting those with criminal records, Read added.
For Trump’s administration, just being in the country without proper documentation is enough for detention.
Read said she expects obtaining information like who was sought in an operation to continue to be difficult.
“Obscuring that information serves the greater goal of keeping communities afraid,” Read said.“That is very clearly a tactic of this administration — to try and frighten people so much that they don’t feel safe in the United States and that they decide to self-deport.”
Sheriff Carr said he doesn’t know much more about the ICE operation in February and doesn’t expect to learn more details anytime soon.
“I don’t know if they arrested anybody. I don’t have any idea,” Carr said.
“I feel like we would have heard if people were removed from the community, but I don’t know the answer to that.”
KHOL is pursuing all avenues, including records requests, to figure out who was sought and why.
