Wyoming Senate sinks immigrant crackdown bill amid questions over legality, impact

CHEYENNE—With a lopsided vote in a nearly empty chamber Monday night, the state Senate dispatched a controversial bill to bring an immigration crackdown to Wyoming.

The measure had drawn outcry from religious leaders, immigrant families and activists. 

Senators voted 20-10, with one person excused, to kill Senate File 124, “Illegal immigration-identify, report, detain and deport.” The two-thirds no vote was less a statement on the nation’s roiling debate over illegal immigration than it was a rebuke of a bill senators characterized as badly crafted and riddled with practical and legal problems. 

The Senate’s taciturn president, Republican Bo Biteman of Ranchester, likely delivered the bill’s kiss of death. 

“My concern here at 8 o’clock at night is the kind of quality we are putting out,” the senator told his colleagues. “Trying to drag bills across the finish line that are so heavily amended and so in need of a lot of work, I don’t think does this chamber justice.” 

As its name implied, Steinmetz’s bill was designed to root out immigrants living in Wyoming who had entered the country illegally. To do so, Steinmetz sought to require local law enforcement to take on federal immigration enforcement, investigating people’s legal status in the country and when possible detaining immigrants until the federal government could retrieve them for deportation proceedings. 

The bill’s language sparked fears it would result in widespread racial profiling by police officers and sheriff deputies around the state. Steinmetz further sought to criminalize Wyomingites who knowingly associate with undocumented immigrants. The bill made it a felony punishable with prison time and hefty fines to knowingly transport or shelter a person who came into the country illegally.

“President [Donald] Trump and other states are taking bold action to crack down on illegal immigration,” Steinmetz said in a statement to WyoFile Tuesday morning. “Wyoming should follow suit.” 

Biteman, like some other Republicans who spoke against the measure, said he did not oppose Steinmetz’s intent, just her attempt at bill writing. “I’m struggling,” he said, “it’s not that I don’t disagree with the subject matter … but we’ve got to do better.” 

Steinmetz’s bill had advanced successfully through two Senate committees. The Senate Judiciary Committee heavily amended the bill — striking language that required Wyoming law enforcement to question anyone they pulled over for a traffic stop over whether they were in the country legally. The committee then voted 5-0 to advance the measure. 

On the floor Monday night, Sen. Dan Dockstader, R-Afton, said law enforcement officials continued to be concerned. 

“There’s also wisdom in just simply checking with your local law enforcement authorities, which I did,” Dockstader said. “A summary statement would be ‘[cooperation between local and federal law enforcement] is probably not broken let’s not try to fix it.’”

The Senate Appropriation Committee also got a whack at the bill, because it would have taken $1 million out of the state’s rainy day account to reimburse counties for costs they incurred training local law enforcement in immigration enforcement functions. That committee voted 3-2 to keep the appropriation intact and advance the bill. 

Both committee meetings drew public opposition from members of Cheyenne’s immigrant community. At the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in particular, people who were themselves citizens but had parents or siblings who were in the country illegally said the bill would criminalize them simply for standing by their family. 

Those opponents were joined by religious leaders, particularly from Wyoming’s Catholic churches, and civil rights advocates. If Steinmetz had her way, those opponents warned, taking schoolchildren on a field trip, welcoming someone into a church or driving a grandmother to see her grandchildren could all become felonies punishable by up to five years in prison, if the passenger or shelter-taker had not entered the country legally.

People supportive of the state’s immigrant community had organized to contact lawmakers, American Civil Liberties Union of Wyoming Advocacy Director Antonio Serrano told WyoFile. 

“Horrible bills like this will energize people to turn out,” he said. “We’re happy for the mixed-status families that call Wyoming home that this bill will not become law. But we’re not going to take a vacation, we’re going to keep organizing because we know this bill will come back.”