More than 400 folks showed up for three protests aimed at President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, recent mass federal layoffs they say are illegal and South Africa billionaire Elon Musk’s unelected or appointed role in the government on President’s Day 2025.
The protests took place at Memorial Park in front of the Chelan County courthouse and on the sidewalk out front of Wenatchee City Hall, where organizer Robyn Ballew called for citizens to boycott LocalTel for giving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) a place to operate.
“I actually would like to see LocalTel first of all to stop allowing ICE to have their office in a location that they own,” she said. “Because it is a privatized location they have the right to say no.”
However LocalTel Communications does not own the building. The former owners of LocalTel, Dimitri Mandelis and his partners, own the building under a holding company called LocalTel Federal Building LLC. LocalTel Communications was sold to Ziply Fiber in 2024 and like ICE, is one of many tenants of the building owned by Mandelis and his partners.
More than 100 people showed up for that protest, which was titled “Allies of Immigrants United” and you can watch a short video from that and an interview with Ballew above.
About 300 people showed up for the protest at Memorial Park before that, including recently-terminated US Forest Service rangers, trail crew members and other workers.
Kyle Warden, the former lead wilderness ranger at the Wenatchee River Ranger District in Leavenworth, found out he and all of his employees had been terminated Sunday morning.
He was carrying a saw he uses to clear timber with an American flag attached, and said the news of his abrupt termination is still sinking in.
“I devoted the last 10 years of my life to this. I was acting as the wilderness manager helping fill in in different roles,” he said. “We were all working way outside of our paygrade going above and beyond because our staffing was already cut.”
That means no one to clear trails of logs and debris for hikers and search and rescue, no one to clean up trash and no one to contend with the trail toilets. Those are basically latrines with wooden boxes on top and with 100,000 visitors to The Enchantments annual – they fill up fast.
He and other rangers are also out on the trails doing basic wildfire risk education and putting out campfires they find still going.
“We’re usually the ones coming across those abandoned campfires and putting those out,” Warden said. “That’s my big concern, is that there’s not going to be anybody to do that anymore and a fire that close to town would be really bad.”
What really does not make sense to Warden and other rangers is the fact that they weren’t even paid out of the federal budget.
“So our program was funded through state grants and rec fee dollars, specifically the Enchantments permit dollars, so we didn’t rely on any allocated funding from Congress. We were self-supported pretty much,” he said.
You can listen to my full interview with Warden here.
Xander Demetrios joined the Wenatchee River trail crew in 2019 and Jaelle Downs has been with the Cle Elum ranger district since 2018, as a wilderness ranger. They were also terminated last week.
Downs said they were told their employment is “not in the public interest,” and she says that’s frankly not true.
“Our Alpine Lakes Wilderness is a Congressionally-designated wilderness, which means there’s all sorts of protections put in place to preserve that super-fragile environment and it’s a resource for for everybody for the public,” she said. “And places like that rely on people like me to be out there literally cleaning up human waste off the ground.”
There are no other agencies or non-profits that clean out trail toilets and dig new ones, Down’s said.
“Without us there, they’re just going to overflow,” she said.
People are also most likely going to find a lot more closed gates when they want to go enjoy public lands, Demetrios said, because there won’t be the resources to manage trail use. The default will be to for people to simply lose access, he said.
As for justifying their termination as a cost-cutting measure, Downs also pushed back on that.
“People think this is some kind of attempt to save money but most of our recreation programs in the state have been self-funding by seeking out and applying for grants,” she said. “We don’t actually get a lot of direct federal money to pay for the people doing the actual work so it really doesn’t save any money.”
As for what they’ll do next, both said they don’t know.
“I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “It’s kind of day-by-day.”
You can listen to my interview with Downs and Demetrios here.
Rita Cooper organized the “No King’s on President’s Day” protest that merged with the demonstration in support of recently-terminated federal workers at Memorial Park.
“I organized this because I wanted a chance for everybody to just stand up and fight back against the oligarchy,” she said. “We’ve had too many times where everybody likes to push people around in this town and tell you don’t have a voice.”
Her partner Greg Bianchi added that the protest isn’t about party politics, or about playing one side off against another. It’s about pushing back against billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are profiting by dividing people across the country.
“This is not partisan,” he said. “I don’t understand why it’s a game to people to think that it is.”
You can listen to my interview with Cooper and Bianchi here.
Ballew, Cooper and Bianchi say there will be more protests and demonstrations in the future.
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