It’s Time to Deport Montana’s Housing Crisis

Seventeen illegal aliens were arrested at a construction site in Bigfork earlier this month. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported on X they were “found to be inadmissible to the United States,” a bureaucratic phrase that masks a stark truth: they should not have been here in the first place.

Just weeks before the raid, Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis acknowledged in a meeting with the Montana Veterans Association that over 3,000 alien migrants had been placed in Missoula over the last four years. The MVA, with eyes on the ground and firsthand exposure to the crisis, estimates the true number is closer to 4,000.

In a city the size of Missoula, those numbers are not incidental. They are transformational. They represent thousands of non-citizens competing directly with Montanans for housing, public services, and jobs. And yet, this pressure point is all but ignored in the dominant narrative about Montana’s housing crisis. Instead, we are offered endless sermons about zoning reform, density, and the supposed evils of single-family homes.

Let us state plainly what many know but fear to say: Montana’s housing crisis is not simply a zoning issue—it is an invasion, coordinated and concealed by activists and subsidized by your government.

To understand how we arrived here, we must start with what we do know. Soft Landing Missoula, a local NGO partnered with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), announced at City Club in Missoula that they placed over 500 alien migrants in Missoula from 2016 to 2022. That figure spans both the restrictive Trump era and the early Biden years. If we generously assume a doubling or tripling of placements under Biden—as national immigration numbers would justify—then we estimate another 1,000 to 1,500 alien migrants arrived through official NGO channels since 2021.

But the true number is much higher. National immigration data from the Congressional Budget Office and Goldman Sachs show that over 7 million alien migrants entered the U.S. under Biden, with at least 4.3 million crossing illegally. If even a fraction of one percent found their way to Montana—not an unreasonable estimate—we’re talking about 7,000 to 12,000 new arrivals statewide. In Missoula, that easily supports the MVA’s 4,000 figure.

The Deportation Mandate Should Start in Missoula

This influx is not entering a housing market with room to spare. Missoula’s rental vacancy rate is 2.9%. Statewide, home vacancies sit at 0.8%. Median rent for a one-bedroom is $1,190. A family of four may easily spend over $20,000 a year just to stay housed. And yet, in this environment, thousands of alien migrants have been placed in our communities by design, under the management of activist NGOs and without the consent of those who live here.

The defenders of this policy regime—and it is a regime—will not talk about alien migration. Instead, they offer a coordinated misdirection. The Frontier Institute, Forward Montana, and other ideological bedfellows insist that the solution lies in eliminating zoning restrictions and prioritizing dense urban development. In 2023, they cheered a slate of bills passed by the Montana Legislature that opened the door to ADUs, duplexes, and “stackable” apartment-style units, often on formerly single-family lots. The media called it the “Montana Miracle.”

A miracle for whom? I call it A Bug’s Life.

Their argument goes something like this: If we do not build up, we will pave over our open space. But this framing conceals more than it reveals. It presumes that the demand is simply a natural consequence of economic growth or in-migration from other states—often blamed on conservative-leaning Americans fleeing blue-state decay—but avoids acknowledging the deliberate placement of tens of thousands of alien migrants as a core accelerant of that demand. Their analysis lacks a serious inquiry into how that demand was artificially inflated by a massive injection of alien migration, coordinated by federally funded NGOs like Soft Landing Missoula and the IRC.

We are not simply underbuilding. We are also overloading. And that distinction matters.

Nowhere is the entrenchment of NGO-driven failure more concentrated than at Missoula’s Johnson Street Shelter. Built during the pandemic with COVID-era federal funds, it was never intended as a permanent solution. And yet it became one, until the city announced its closure earlier this month, with depopulation already underway and full shutdown expected by August 2025.

What was billed as an emergency measure became an institutional dependency. The shelter served the non-profit ecosystem more than it served the homeless, feeding a complex of unaccountable service organizations that thrive on continued dysfunction. The result was predictable: rising homelessness, encampments spilling into residential neighborhoods, and increasing disorder.

Missoula’s political class claims this is about compassion. But real compassion requires prioritization. And what we see instead is a system that prioritizes those who arrive illegally over those who have served, worked, and contributed to this community for decades.

While the city shut down shelters and renters faced $1,500 leases, alien migrants continued to arrive during the Biden administration. While veterans are left unhoused, activists secure placements for alien migrants through bureaucratic workaround and legal euphemism. Missoula may not be a sanctuary city in name, but it has become one in effect—operated not by elected officials, but by non-profits that shield the city from accountability.

Deport Missoula’s Soft Landings

On Friday, President Trump announced plans to revoke temporary legal status for over 530,000 alien migrants brought into the country under Biden’s Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela (CHNV) sponsorship program. They have been encouraged to self-deport and warned to prepare for deportation.

Missoula should do the same—and more. It should demand removals, cheer for deportations, and reject the notion that housing policy must accommodate a lawless influx of aliens over its own citizens.

This is not cruelty. It is restoration. If Montana wants to reclaim its housing market, its public services, and its sense of social contract, then we must do more than build. We must remove the pressure. That means ending all NGO-facilitated placements of alien migrants in this state.

Not pausing. Ending.

These NGOs are not independent actors. They are tentacles—extensions of a broader, unelected regime funded by dark money foundations and fortified with taxpayer dollars. For decades, agencies like USAID funneled billions into activist networks that burrowed deep into local communities, bypassing voters and laundering federal policy through charitable fronts.

That era is ending. In its first week, the Trump administration—through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—dismantled USAID and began draining the swamp not just in Washington, but in every town it infected. This is not reform. It is extraction. Ripping it up from the root.

Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming

Uprooting the machine is only the beginning. What follows will require resolve. The NGOs will resist. The activists will mobilize. The foundations and media machines will paint every loss of power and every alien removal as a humanitarian collapse. But it will not be a collapse. It will be a course correction—long delayed, but finally underway.

We have seen only the beginning—the first signs of a national immune response to decades of engineered decay. Torchings. Vandalism. Character assassinations. Attempted physical assassinations. These are not cries for help or compassion. They are the flailing rage of a movement that believed its dominance was permanent. Conditioned by years of impunity and insulated by a now fading culture that rewarded emotional blackmail over lawful order, they now face a world that no longer yields.

Trump’s victory was not a whisper. It was a mandate—for removal, for reckoning, for restoration. Missoula must not merely brace for it. Missoula must embrace it. Support it. Fulfill it.

The left will cry. Let them. Their outrage is not a veto.

Mass deportation is not cruelty. It is the threshold of a golden age—and nothing can stop what is coming.