One evening in January 2024, a western Idaho deputy was called into the office to check on a suspicious person parked along the highway. With no other information offered, the deputy asked his boss, Owyhee County Sheriff Larry Kendrick, what was so suspicious.
“She’s Black and she doesn’t belong here,” Kendrick replied, according to the deputy, who has since left the department.
The deputy — one of the few officers of color in the department — was ordered to go find her. The suspicious person turned out to be a woman experiencing homelessness, and the deputy gave her a list of shelters and asked her to move her car.
Three employees on duty that day, including two who were in the office when Kendrick received the call, tell InvestigateWest that the situation put them all on edge because they felt a deputy should not have been sent to such a call.
When the caller followed up with the dispatch center later that day, the caller repeatedly mentioned the person was suspicious because they were Black, according to one of the employees in the office.
Kendrick’s comment singling out the woman’s race was not an isolated incident, according to a review of public records and interviews with five former Owyhee County Sheriff’s Office employees.
Those former employees all asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about retaliation, with some citing instances in which the Sheriff’s Office contacted their new employers to disparage them.
Now, some of Kendrick’s former employees have concerns about Owyhee County’s new agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowing local deputies to arrest and detain undocumented people.
They fear the program, known as 287(g), could embolden Kendrick to harass and target Latinos, who make up nearly a quarter of Owyhee’s residents, including many immigrant farmworkers.
Former employees told InvestigateWest that Kendrick often told racist jokes in the office that made them uncomfortable.
He has told a story about a Chinese person getting killed on a road in Owyhee County using an accent mocking Chinese people, according to multiple employees. Kendrick allegedly suggested to another employee that, at an upcoming campaign event, his staff should ride in a covered wagon while Bureau of Indian Affairs officers from the Duck Valley Reservation, wearing native attire, chase after them on horseback, according to three employees.
The sheriff also allegedly joked with a former employee about calling Black people the N-word, according to the former deputy who was sent to the suspicious person call.
At least a dozen people have resigned from the small office — which typically has around 20 employees — since county commissioners promoted Kendrick from deputy to sheriff in April 2023. Four former employees told InvestigateWest that Kendrick’s behavior toward people of color and women was one of the main factors that led them to quit their jobs.
Last summer, a former employee sent a letter to Idaho Peace Officer and Standard Training, a statewide agency that certifies law enforcement officers, outlining allegations that Kendrick made racist comments and showed biased behavior toward female employees. The agency said the woman’s allegations never resulted in an investigation.
In an email to InvestigateWest, Kendrick said he could not comment on personnel matters but called the employee allegations “ridiculously false.”
“Neither I nor any of my employees, operate with any trace of bias or discrimination. It is my duty to protect the constitutional rights of all citizens, and I take that charge very seriously,” he wrote.
Later, when presented with detailed questions about each allegation presented in this article, Kendrick wrote in an email that the allegations are “all unfounded.”
“The Owyhee County Sheriff and the Owyhee County Sheriff’s office conducts themselves professionally. We abide by all of the Equal Opportunity Employment Laws. We value all of our employees and treat them equally. This will be my only comment on these unfounded allegations,” Kendrick said.
The former deputy who responded to the suspicious person call said he’s worried Kendrick will use the 287(g) agreement to “stop and harass Hispanic people.”
The 287(g) program has long been criticized by immigration lawyers and advocates who say people from immigrant communities will be hesitant to report crimes to local law enforcement that they are witness to or victims of.
“Nobody’s going to want to talk,” Nikki Ramirez-Smith, a partner and immigration attorney at Ramirez-Smith Law in Nampa, Idaho, said in April. “I think the police need some distance from ICE if they want to do police work, which is their job, is to work with victims and perpetrators.”
Allegations of discrimination
Kendrick’s law enforcement career began in 1994 as a deputy with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office. After five months, he left for a brief stint in nearby Tehama County before returning to Sacramento, where he stayed for the next 14 years. The California Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission had not received any complaints about Kendrick while he was employed as an officer in California. He left the department in 2010 for a reason identified as “Other,” according to his California POST profile obtained by InvestigateWest. The Sacramento Sheriff’s Office said any resignation or termination letters are not a public record.
He then moved to Owyhee County and began working in 2013 as a sheriff’s deputy in the county jail.
According to an email obtained through a public records request by InvestigateWest, Kendrick was placed on paid administrative leave in November 2022 while working as a patrol deputy.
“He is not to be granted access to Sheriff’s Office buildings or property while on leave excluding emergency situations,” a chief deputy at the time, Lynn Bowman, wrote in an email to Sheriff’s Office employees. Bowman, who was demoted to a patrol sergeant when Kendrick took office, declined to comment for this story since he is still employed at the Sheriff’s Office.
Five months into his leave, in April 2023, the Owyhee County Board of Commissioners voted to appoint Kendrick to replace then-Sheriff Perry Grant, who retired after an Idaho Attorney General’s Office investigation into allegations he unnecessarily shared and joked about sexually explicit evidence in a child pornography and kidnapping case. According to reporting by the Owyhee Avalanche newspaper, state Attorney General Raúl Labrador declined to file criminal charges, finding that Grant’s actions were “intolerable” but not criminal.
Over half of the Sheriff’s Office employees who worked under Grant have resigned since Kendrick took office, according to resignation letters obtained by InvestigateWest.
It is unclear why Kendrick was appointed interim sheriff while he was on administrative leave, and the outcome of the investigation that triggered his leave has not been made public. In Idaho, personnel records, including any disciplinary records, are exempt from the Idaho Public Records Act, even for public officials. Owyhee commissioners did not answer multiple emails seeking comment about the matter.
Kendrick later ran for election in November 2024 and won.
According to the department, 12 people resigned from the Owyhee Sheriff’s Office between April 23, 2023, and May 8, 2025.
In resignation letters, three former employees cited discrimination as one of the reasons for their departure.
Former Cpl. Connie Peterson wrote in her May 2023 resignation letter that she was “attacked about my religious beliefs by our current sheriff due to me being Native American.” Peterson started working in the Owyhee County Jail in 2019 and said she was demoted from sergeant to corporal after Kendrick’s appointment.
She recalled a conversation in which Kendrick allegedly disparaged her faith in front of other staff members.
“I feel Sheriff Kendrick demonized my religion and shamed me for my religious beliefs,” Peterson wrote. “I fear if I stay here things will continue to get worse and due to my gender and religious beliefs I have no path forward to future promotions.”
Former Deputy Lindsey Kipper, who was the only female patrol deputy at the time, wrote in an August 2023 resignation letter that despite her eight years on patrol at Owyhee County and gaining Idaho Peace Officer Standards and Training certification as an advanced patrol deputy, K-9 unit handler and firearms instructor, she was passed up for promotions, not given assignments, and was given little direction on her job and responsibilities.
“So I am asking myself is this because I am a female deputy and this administration appears not to value women in law enforcement? I do believe this is a large reason I am treated so differently and feel that an experienced female deputy has no place in this administration,” she wrote. “I believe if a person wants to succeed at the Owyhee County Sheriff’s Office they must not be female.”
A former dispatcher, Yaleena Garcia, also wrote in a resignation letter that she felt employees were not treated equally.
“I also believe that morale throughout the department are at an all-time low,” Garcia’s May 2023 letter said. “I feel that dispatch as a whole is looked down upon and belittled by our peers on patrol, and that there is little to no respect for us dispatchers.”
Most of the dispatchers in the county are women, the employees told InvestigateWest.
One former employee also sent a letter to POST outlining similar allegations that Kendrick was demeaning to women, which the agency said did not result in an investigation.
According to the letter, dispatchers were rarely invited to participate in public events, while patrol deputies, who were all male, were always invited and praised for their work in official social media posts from the Sheriff’s Office.
Kendrick and other high-ranking officers would also talk down to dispatchers and not take complaints about their treatment seriously, according to the POST letter.
Peterson and Garcia did not respond to interview requests, while Kipper declined to comment.
InvestigateWest is not naming the five former Owyhee County Sheriff’s Office workers interviewed for this story because of retaliation concerns.
Two said that since they had left the agency, a Sheriff’s Office representative had contacted their current employers.
One former employee said their boss was contacted twice to disparage their character, while another said someone from the Sheriff’s Office contacted her current employer accusing her of leaking confidential information, which she has denied.
A third former employee said that Owyhee deputies made untrue comments about them during a background check for another job.
The employees all want long-term careers in law enforcement in Idaho. Three of the five employees claimed Kendrick and other high-ranking officers suggested they could seek decertification of employees who share confidential information about the inner workings of the department. A decertification lasts 10 years, meaning a decertified officer cannot apply to be reinstated during that time.
In an email, Kendrick denied the allegations that he had threatened to decertify employees for sharing information about the office.
The rules governing the Idaho POST Council also state that the agency can decertify officers who violate a code of ethics, which requires officers like Kendrick to swear to “never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, political beliefs, aspirations, animosities or friendships to influence my decisions.” POST can also decertify officers for harassment and intimidation.
Several employees who spoke with InvestigateWest also mentioned a December 2023 holiday party for the Owyhee County Sheriff’s Office. It took place a few months after Kendrick was appointed and on the same day as Chief Deputy Steven Crawford’s birthday, so the office also celebrated his birthday at the event.
Kendrick and his wife, Betsy, gave the chief deputy a “Little Black Folk Doll Kit” sold by the Owyhee County Historical Society as a gift. In a video recorded of the gift exchange, which was provided to InvestigateWest, Kendrick laughed loudly as his wife handed over the kit.
“I picked this one out for you, OK? You have to show it to everybody,” Kendrick said.
“Yeah, say it out loud,” Kendrick added as he handed Crawford the kit.
“‘Little Black Folk Doll Kit,'” Crawford said, prompting Kendrick to laugh.
“She’s adorable,” Betsy Kendrick said.
“We’re being very politically incorrect,” the sheriff then said.
One former deputy who saw the video felt the point of the gift was to “make fun of Black people.”
Another former employee said of the exchange: “Why would you give a grown man a doll and then laugh about it hysterically? It is to be racist.”
Kendrick did not answer questions about the gift exchange. His wife, Betsy, acknowledged public controversy about it in a since-deleted February 2024 Facebook post. County commissioners received several public letters about the sheriff’s gift and a USB drive of the video, according to employees and Betsy Kendrick’s Facebook post.
“Me and Larry gave it as a gift along with a Owyhee Moss Agate Sphere now they are calling us racist,” Betsy Kendrick commented on her post.
Commissioners haven’t responded to questions related to the holiday party or the other allegations against Kendrick. Crawford also did not respond to a request for comment.
287(G)
Kendrick identifies as a “constitutional sheriff,” a movement founded on the belief that county sheriffs have the authority to decide which state or federal laws they can enforce.
In an August 2023 letter to Attorney General Labrador, Kendrick asked Labrador not to recognize police officers from California or Illinois after the two states passed legislation allowing immigrants with work authorization and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients to become police officers.
“Allowing foreign invaders to enforce state laws on American soil erodes the constitutional rights of American citizens and makes a mockery of our justice system,” Kendrick wrote.
He said Owyhee County wouldn’t “recognize” any police officers from California or Illinois because of the law.
In February, Owyhee County became the first in Idaho to join a federal program called 287(g), under a model which empowers local law enforcement to stop and question people they believe to be in the country illegally and process them for federal immigration violations if they are also arrested on state charges.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little has also encouraged state agencies to get involved in the program. On June 5, his office announced that the Idaho State Police would be entering into a 287(g) agreement that allows officers to transport undocumented people who were convicted of state crimes from local jails to ICE-contracted facilities while they await deportation orders.
The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the Owyhee County agreement and concerns from former employees.
Owyhee County has over 560 farms and is home to Latino and immigrant farmworkers. Around 25% of the population in Owyhee County is Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The county is also within the geographic bounds of the Duck Valley Reservation.
In 2012, the Obama administration rescinded the 287(g) program deputizing local police to enforce immigration laws, after the U.S. Department of Justice found sheriffs in North Carolina and Arizona had unlawfully profiled Latino residents for immigration enforcement and illegally searched and detained them.
Kendrick told InvestigateWest in April that he didn’t plan to target immigrant workers for enforcement.
“We have three dairies in our county, and yeah, there’s probably some illegals working there, but we’re not after them,” Kendrick said at the time. “We’re after the bad guys.”
But in a Feb. 7 post on X, Kendrick wrote “ICE will eventually get to the dairies once they round up the criminals, cartel members, Chinese, and other bad actors. We will be here to enthusiastically help.”
On Feb. 8, Kendrick’s X account shared an image with text that said, “Instead of the SuperBowl, I’d rather watch 4 hours of Tom Homan deporting illegals,” referring to the Trump administration’s “border czar.”
After InvestigateWest asked Kendrick about those social media posts, he made his X profile private.
The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized the 287(g) program. Rebecca De Léon, a spokesperson for the ACLU of Idaho, argued the program erodes public trust in law enforcement and detracts from priorities like responding to emergencies and enforcing state law violations.
In an April 2022 report, the ACLU analyzed sheriff departments that joined the 287(g) program that year and found the program included many sheriffs who ran on anti-immigrant platforms. ICE also signed and renewed agreements with agencies who had shown patterns of racial profiling, the ACLU wrote in the report.
“The ACLU of Idaho encourages all law enforcement entities in Idaho to put communities first by preserving the Constitutional rights of all people residing in our state. This includes requiring judicial warrants to honor ICE detainers, and avoid engaging in federal immigration enforcement, remaining fully consistent with federal law,” De Leon wrote in an email to InvestigateWest.
The former employees who reached out to InvestigateWest said they’re worried about how Kendrick will administer the program in light of his discriminatory conduct.
“We already knew that he did not like illegals,” said one employee who wrote a letter to state officials about Kendrick’s behavior. “I just worry that he’s going to be targeting people just based on their color.”
Though Owyhee County Commissioner Kelly Aberasturi wouldn’t respond to questions about Kendrick’s alleged racist behavior, he told InvestigateWest that Kendrick had the board’s full support when entering into the 287(g) agreement.
Aberasturi indicated that he’s not concerned about racial profiling: “I just don’t see that as being an issue. I would hope that we are above and beyond racism.”
