The U.S. Forest Service declined a call for a public meeting following the June immigration operation where 13 people were arrested in the Pisgah National Forest, angering local environmental advocates.
Advocacy groups, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, MountainTrue, American Whitewater, Friends of Big Ivy, Forest Keeper, Latinos Aventureros, the North Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, and the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association condemned the June Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action at Wilson Creek.
In August, they sent a letter requesting a public meeting to North Carolina National Forest Supervisor James Melonas and Grandfather District Ranger Nicholas Larson.
A USDA spokesperson told NC Local the Forest Service has no plans for a public meeting at this time. Instead, Melonas, who manages the national forests in the state, sent a letter in response to the call.
SELC Senior Attorney Sam Evans said a public meeting would be a first step in rebuilding community trust.
“It's about the community that the Forest Service betrayed here. And that's who they owe,” Evans said.
In the letter, shared with NC Local by Evans, Melonas thanked the groups for their partnership. He explained that the resource management side of the Forest Service is separate from law enforcement.
“As you are likely aware, Forest Service law enforcement is managed independently from local and regional leadership, including myself as the Forest Supervisor and the seven District Rangers,” Melonas wrote. “While this structure is necessary to protect the integrity of criminal investigations occurring on National Forest System lands, it also means local leaders are not always involved in law enforcement operations and planning. As such, neither District Ranger Larson nor I have any additional information regarding this incident to provide.”
Evans called the response “a shell game.”
“It's true that the Forest Service has two separate arms. There's law enforcement and then there's resource management and those are under different chains of command,” Evans said. “It is not possible that the resource management side of the Forest Service, the people that you would ordinarily be emailing with and getting responses from, didn't know about this [operation].”
The Forest Service has a separate chain of command, but the Patrol captain in the region advises the Forest Supervisor on law enforcement matters occurring in a national forest, according to the USDA. The Forest Service law enforcement also works with federal, local and state partners.
The Wilson Creek operation was the first time in recent memory that the Forest Service has worked with ICE in North Carolina. An ICE spokesperson told NC Local the operation was initially requested by the Forest Service.
Melonas did not address the initial contact in his response, instead explaining federal agencies are required to collaborate.
“Although Forest Service law enforcement officers and criminal investigators do not enforce immigration law, they are required to collaborate with agencies that do, as well as with state and local partners responsible for enforcing hunting and fishing regulations, drug laws, and other non-resource-related laws,” Melonas said.
“The idea that you could compare this to sort of routine law enforcement, really, I thought that was fairly offensive,” Evans said.
In the response, Melonas said the partnerships could involve criminal investigations and other safety measures, including checkpoints and patrols.
In mid-August, Great Smoky Mountains National Park officials shared the location and date of a sobriety checkpoint ahead of time on social media.
Questions about commitment to diverse communities
The joint letter to the Forest Service asked Melonas and other officials about past commitments to diversity in the Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Plan, the strategic plan for the management of the over two million acres of national forest in WNC. The letter said the June operation was “inconsistent with the Forest Service’s mission and responsibilities to ensure equitable access to public lands.”
While the Trump administration has changed diversity inclusion language across agencies, Evans said local leadership has a continued obligation to uphold their commitments.
“The same people who are in charge of our forest now during the forest planning process said that this was really important to them. They said that making our forest representative of the local community and making the visitation representative of the people who live around our forests was really important to them. And that, they told us, were their values,” Evans said. “Now when those values are at stake and when it was time to stand up for them, they didn’t.”
Quoting a 2023 Carolina Public Press article, the letter said this “operation appears to have been based on racial profiling, given that Wilson Creek is known for its popularity with Latino visitors.”
“This betrayal does not merely undermine visitors’ sense of safety in one specific location, but rather it undermines the credibility of the Forest Service as willing and able to protect the safety of visitors from underrepresented communities across the forests,” the letter said.
Melonas’ response did not address racial profiling, but Melonas said he shared the joint letter with regional and national leadership.
Latinos Aventureros was one of the organizations that signed the letter. In a public letter, the organization recounted years of collaborative work with the Forest Service and non-profit, A Clean Wilson Creek, to clean up the river.
“The same Brown Mountain Beach Road where our volunteers once walked in bright safety vests picking up trash is now also remembered as the road where law enforcement vehicles lined up and families were separated,” the letter said.
Latinos Aventureros Co-Founder Sandra Salazar said complaints about trash at Wilson Creek since Hurricane Helene created friction in the area.
“There was a debate of whose fault it was: The Anglo community kept blaming the Latino community, and the Latino community was more partial, stating that it was both not just them,” Salazar said.
She said Latinos Aventureros has hosted a number of river cleanup events since Helene.
Salazar said the group feels “used” following the ICE arrests.
In Fall 2024, the Wilson Creek Action plan, created by a committee including Latinos Aventureros, American Whitewater, and Trout Unlimited released by the Forest Service offered several recommendations. The plan said public land boundaries should be better defined and the area needed more parking and signage for public safety.
“I felt like we had a good relationship. But apparently we didn't. It was just, we felt used to be quite honest. Because once we cleaned the river, they ended up doing this,” Salazar said.
The Forest Service declined NC Local's requests for interviews with Melonas and Larson, adding that Forest Service law enforcement also had no additional information to share regarding this incident.
This article first appeared on NCLocal and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.