MATT EDWARDS: Idaho’s Trump Country Refuses to Enforce Law & Order

When it comes to Idaho delivering landslide victories for Donald Trump, my state threw down a 59% in 2016 against Hillary, a 64% in 2020 against the Auto-Pen, and a 67% stomping of Kamala in 2024. Idaho is clearly Trump Country. We also sent a supermajority Republican legislature to back up our Republican governor in Boise with a crystal-clear mandate: secure our borders, protect American workers, and put Idaho families first. So why are we watching a slate of no-brainer immigration bills bleed out in the legislature this session? 

These measures are straight-up Trump-style law and order. They would require every Idaho employer to run new hires through E-Verify so farms, dairies, construction crews, and hotels can’t keep flooding the workforce with illegal labor. They would force public schools to track and report the immigration status of students so we finally know exactly how much this invasion is costing our kids’ classrooms. They would make hospitals tally the uncompensated care and Medicaid drain from illegal patients. They would empower local sheriffs to partner with ICE through 287(g) agreements, check immigration status on arrests, and deport the criminals we never should have been housing in our jails. One would even make it a state crime to knowingly harbor or shield illegals. Basic accountability in a state that claims to believe in self-reliance.

Instead, the bills are dying because Idaho’s legislature remains captured by the same ranching, farming, and dairy lobbyists who’ve spent forty years mainlining foreign labor and ignoring an illegal workforce. What used to be political suicide is now shrugged off. Remember Zoë Baird? Bill Clinton’s first pick for Attorney General had to withdraw in disgrace in 1993. The press dubbed it “Nannygate” after it came out that she'd hired undocumented workers for her kids. Back then, even Democrats treated it as disqualifying. Today in the Wild West of illegal immigration, it barely registers.

Just ask Idaho State Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, a sitting Republican up for re-election. In 2025, her farm worker Sajid Soto, a foreign national with a meth habit, was deported after he strangled his wife in front of their children. When a more conservative voice simply called ICE to enforce existing law, Mickelsen was cast as the victim. Not the Idaho mother and kids who deserved safety. Not the community he lived in. Not the rule of law. She still has her seat, but it remains to be seen if her constituents even care. If re-elected, the message to every Ag operation in the state will be loud and clear: protect the status quo, even if it means shielding violent offenders over Idaho families.

This isn’t confined to the big farms. Construction sites and hospitality businesses across Idaho run the same playbook. The establishment got so comfortable with a do-nothing Congress in D.C. that when America First patriots showed up saying “This is our state and we can actually fix this ourselves,” the old-guard circled the wagons to protect the invaders instead of Idaho citizens.

The costs are crushing and measurable. Illegal immigration is swamping our schools with extra students our taxpayers fund, jamming emergency rooms with uncompensated care, and filling county jails with offenders who shouldn’t be here. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller put it bluntly just this month: the “extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here” through Medicaid scams, hospital visits, and endless public-resource drain “is the primary cause of the national debt.” Idaho feels every penny of that theft, yet our leaders can’t even bring themselves to count it, let alone stop it.

This crisis endures not because Democrats own Washington, but because Liz Cheney-style Republicans have made common cause with open-border radicals to keep America’s borders meaningless at the state level. They’d rather kneel to special interests than honor the voters who give them a supermajority and ability to enact the Trump mandate.

Idahoans didn’t sign up for theater. We voted to secure our communities, defend our wages, and restore the rule of law right here at home. These stalled bills are the test: Do red-state supermajorities still mean anything, or are they just camouflage for the same old donor-class priorities?

Idaho, and every red state watching, this is your warning. Primary season is here. Scrutinize every incumbent. Demand they pass these reforms without apology. Back the America First challengers who will actually enforce the law. And primarily the obstructionists who choose to shield illegal aliens over Idaho families. Supermajorities without backbone are worse than useless.

Idaho built its reputation on rugged self-reliance and plain common sense. It’s time we lived up to it. The rest of the country is watching. Our wives, our kids, and our future depend on it.

Matt Edwards is the Executive Director for Citizens Alliance of Idaho and the host of Idaho Signal. He can be found @TrueMattEdwards on X.