Parts of the Flathead Valley north of here have had a reputation for being a haven for white nationalists. A dispute between a local real estate agent and the mother of the white nationalist Richard Spencer in nearby Whitefish prompted a white supremacist website to rally attacks on the area’s Jewish residents and call for an armed neo-Nazi march through the streets of the town.
To the south, residents of Ravalli County loudly voiced their concerns as well. The county commission sent a letter to Montana state and congressional officials claiming that the federal government could not adequately vet the families. Hundreds packed a public hearing that would normally attract a couple of dozen people, and they expressed fear that the refugees would bring martial law to the community.
“I think there is a threat from some of those groups but not the individual refugees,” the Ravalli County Commission chairman, Jeff Burrows, said in an interview. “But it’s possible,” he added. “We just don’t know.”
Bob Pechy, a 56-year-old resident of the county since 2006, said the resistance was rooted in race.
“You see a black person, it stands out,” Mr. Pechy said outside a strip mall in the town of Hamilton. “People around here, they’ll treat them just like anyone else, but overall they don’t want to see a large immigration of people that aren’t the same color as them.”
Missoula’s mayor, John Engen, said refugees had not brought crime, but they had resolved a labor shortage in the community.
Mr. Trump’s community veto order is “designed to make stuff hard and designed to allow people in jurisdictions far away from me that have no idea what Missoula, Mont., is about to send me hate mail,” Mr. Engen said. “It’s about intimidation. You got nothing better to do than to push around the mayor of Missoula, Mont.?”
To supporters like Mr. Engen, the Congolese are filling a void of cultural diversity in a town that is nearly 90 percent white. In the 1980s, Hmong refugees from Laos settled in Missoula. The children of immigrant families are usually the few students of color in city classrooms, while their parents work long hours at businesses eager for the help.