Unchecked prison sex abuse, Christian nationalist influence and police welcoming ICE — a year of investigative reporting in Idaho

In 2025, InvestigateWest reporters uncovered a culture of abuse within Idaho’s women’s prisons that has enabled sexual abuse by guards. We also tracked the ways Idaho officials are helping the Trump administration escalate its mass deportation campaign and the influence of a Christian Nationalist group that has pushed some of Idaho’s most controversial legislative proposals. 

Check out some of our best reporting about Idaho this year:

Guarded by Predators

In Idaho’s prison system, women are sexually abused by prison staff and punished if they speak up. That’s what InvestigateWest's Whitney Bryen and Wilson Criscione found repeatedly during interviews with dozens of current or former incarcerated women and in police or prison records. The findings of their investigation revealed a systemic failure to stop staff sexual abuse in prisons a decade after Idaho announced it would adopt the federal standards of the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Since the series was published in October, the Idaho Department of Correction has said it will propose a change in state law that would make it easier to charge predatory guards with a crime — a change that appears to be supported initially by some lawmakers. Idaho Gov. Brad Little ordered a review of some of the cases InvestigateWest exposed, and the prison system reversed a finding to validate the allegations of one woman featured in the series whose case had previously been marked “unsubstantiated” without a proper investigation. 

Christian nationalists’ growing influence in Idaho politics 

As the Christian Nationalist movement has gotten a national boost from high-profile politicians like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in Idaho, an influential policy group is pushing its Christian vision for government through legislative proposals and court fights. As Daniel Walters reports, the Idaho Family Policy Center has been behind controversial proposals to require Bible-reading in schools and restrict access to abortion, puberty blockers and controversial library books. The organization, which has the support of an Idaho pastor who has promoted theocracy, also recently launched a legal center to defend its policies and like-minded Christians. 

Idaho officials welcome immigration crackdown

Idaho Gov. Brad Little and a number of local sheriffs have eagerly joined the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, signing up to jail immigration detainees and transport some to federal facilities. Rachel Spacek reported on how Kootenai County’s sheriff has shared the home addresses of enforcement targets with ICE, while Owyhee Sheriff Larry Kendrick’s allegedly racist remarks has immigrant advocates worried about racial profiling in the farming region. Spacek also found that a number of undocumented immigrants detained during an October raid outside Boise have been held at facilities in other states and without the opportunity for a bail hearing, making it hard for their family and attorneys to track them down and advocate for their release. And as Daniel Walters reported, at least one Republican lawmaker, state Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, and her Southeastern Idaho potato farm became a target after a GOP activist reported her farm to the ICE tipline and took to social media to urge others to “report her, too.” 

Two killings, no explanation

In 2024, Cody Whiterock was shot and killed by Bureau of Indian Affairs officers in Owyhee County, Idaho, south of Boise. For more than a year, Whiterock’s family had heard almost nothing about how he died from the agency that killed him. And for Whiterock’s family, this wasn’t the first time the BIA killed a family member and then kept it quiet: In 2020, they had also shot and killed Whiterock’s cousin, Kirby Paradise. Indigenous affairs reporter Melanie Henshaw dug into both cases, uncovering new, previously unreported details of the fatal police shootings — the circumstances of which have become a familiar story for Native American families even as the BIA largely escapes public scrutiny. 

One family’s crisis under Idaho’s abortion ban  

In a state with one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, Desi Ballis in 2024 got horrifying news: She might need an abortion to save her own life, and she’d have to leave Idaho to get it. Reporter Kelsey Turner details the harrowing experience that ensued, and the complicated internal questions it brought up for Desi and her husband, Morgan, a county sheriff in Idaho. Their story, which took place in a brief gap in time when Idaho’s abortion law was in full effect, offers a window into what reproductive health care looks like when nearly all abortions are a crime.