The judiciary holds too much power and Congress should curb its authority, Wyoming’s federal delegation argued in response to Equality State lawyers and retired judges who called on them to defend “American Rule of Law” from attacks by President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk.

In an April 11 letter, Rep. Harriet Hageman and Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis said the federal judiciary has drawn scrutiny on itself. “Unelected judges imposing their policy biases on our nation without democratic legitimacy are the root cause of today’s controversy,” they wrote. 

The politicians largely sidestepped the central tenet of an open letter signed by more than 100 Wyoming lawyers and retired judges and published late last month. That letter had called on Hageman, Barrasso and Lummis to condemn an increase in personal attacks and calls for impeachment led by the president and his allies on federal judges who issue court decisions they dislike.

The Wyoming jurists who signed that missive focused on Trump’s calls to impeach specific judges who ruled against his policies, and social media posts by Musk calling a judge’s ruling an “attempted coup,” among other criticisms. 

The letter also cited threats of violence against judges, a phenomenon U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has said is on the rise. It also noted Trump’s efforts to target law firms he doesn’t like. “These attacks are part of a growing effort to discredit, not just judges, but seemingly the American Rule of Law,” the letter stated. 

The delegation’s response does not mention the president, Musk or threats of violence against judges. 

Instead, Barrasso, Lummis and Hageman wrote that “the country is witnessing a healthy debate right now about the appropriate role of judges,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by WyoFile. The federal lawmakers also cited legislation they were cosponsoring to eliminate judges’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions on actions by the federal government. 

“I think the delegation sort of missed the point,” former Wyoming governor and longtime attorney Mike Sullivan told WyoFile on Monday. “This was not a partisan effort. This is a legitimate, serious and what I think is a constitutional concern about the judiciary and the rule of law.”

Last week, House Republicans including Hageman passed the No Rogue Rulings Act, which would curb judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. Republican lawmakers did so in response to a series of court rulings against aspects of Trump’s agenda — particularly elements of his mass deportation effort that judges found could violate peoples’ civil rights, and parts of the Musk-driven effort to cut budgets and staffing levels across the federal government. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has introduced a similar measure in the Senate.

“Both the legislative and the executive branches are rightfully using their constitutional checks and balances to address judicial overreach,” Hageman, Barrasso and Lummis wrote in their letter.

In their letter, the Wyoming jurists told Lummis, Barrasso and Hageman the U.S. Constitution called on them to defend the judiciary from attacks, even if those attacks come from other branches of government. 

“As our elected federal representatives—and as required by your own oaths—we thus urge you to publicly condemn these threats, affirm judicial independence, and remind Americans that appeals—not violence, intimidation, or invitations to lawlessness—are the constitutional remedy for undesired court decisions,” the letter read. 

Though the delegation in its letter described a bipartisan drive for judicial reform, the No Rogue Rulings Act did not draw any support from Democrats in the House and will likely die in the Senate, where it won’t be able to garner 60 votes, according to a report in Politico.

Lummis, Barrasso and Hageman expressed pique at the letter authors’ choice of an open letter. Among the letter’s more noted signees were former Gov. Mike Sullivan; retired Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justices Marilyn Kite, Michael Golden, Michael Davis and E. James Burke; retired U.S. District Court Chief Judge William Downes and former Wyoming Attorneys General Gay Woodhouse and Patrick Crank. 

(WyoFile board member Susan Stubson also signed on. She was not involved in the production of this report, and neither she nor any member of the WyoFile board have authority to direct news coverage or news content.)

Many of those attorneys are retired from public office and working in private practice, if not retired entirely. The jurists appear to have sought a public discussion, concluding their letter with: “We welcome your earliest public response to these very serious concerns.”

But the federal delegates said the more than 100 signees should have reached out as individuals.

“We are disappointed you failed to express your concerns with us directly before rushing to publish your letter,” they wrote. “A robust discussion about addressing the challenges and concerns facing our nation would be more beneficial than attempting to score political points through the press.” 

WyoFile reached out to signees of the original letter but did not receive a comment on the delegation’s response by early Monday afternoon. This story will be updated if that changes. 

Sullivan noted that the Wyoming attorneys published their letter in the wake of a highly unusual statement by Chief Justice Roberts, who protested Trump’s call for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg. Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment after the judge issued a ruling momentarily halting one of Trump’s most controversial deportation policies. Judges are not politicians, Sullivan said, “and when they come down in a way that doesn’t agree with your position they shouldn’t be demeaned or defamed or threatened with impeachment.”

Those signing the letter have an obligation to maintain judicial independence, as does the delegation, the former governor said.

“This is a group that believes this ought to be a public discussion,” Sullivan said. “We have our own constitutional obligations as members of the bar, practicing before the judiciary, and we shouldn’t just sit back and let this happen. 

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Nearly five weeks ago, lawyers representing Wyoming’s abortion providers sought an emergency court hearing to temporarily halt new restrictions that have effectively shut down Wyoming’s only abortion clinic.

That hearing has finally been set for next week. And when it happens, a new judge will oversee matters — the third jurist assigned to the case since it was first filed Feb. 28.

Documents filed last week in Natrona County District Court show the case is now assigned to a judge who retired from the bench last year: Thomas T.C. Campbell. The documents do not indicate a reason for the change, beyond stating that “good cause exists to assign [the case] to another judge to preside over all further proceedings.”

Before his retirement, Campbell had served as a district court judge in Laramie County. He will take over a case that was twice assigned to Natrona County District Judge Dan Forgey and once to Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens.

Opponents of Wyoming’s two recently passed abortion laws filed suit at the end of February in Natrona County District Court. They asked Forgey to pause enforcement of both laws — one instituted more regulations on clinics and the second mandated ultrasounds and a 48-hour waiting period — while the lawsuit proceeds.

Plaintiffs sought an emergency hearing and temporary restraining order, saying the more onerous regulations that came with requiring abortion clinics to be licensed as ambulatory surgical centers forced the state’s lone facility — Wellspring Health Access in Casper — to stop offering services. In the first five business days after the law went into effect, the clinic said it referred 56 patients to other facilities for abortion-related care.

The plaintiffs say Forgey did not respond to their emergency request in a timely manner, prompting them to refile a nearly identical case in Teton County. While Natrona County is home to Wellspring, patients in Teton County use the clinic’s services, but have been turned away since the new laws went into effect, according to a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

When the case moved to Teton County, it landed before Owens, who had presided over a legal challenge by the same group of plaintiffs to a pair of abortion bans passed by the Wyoming Legislature in 2023. Owens in November ruled those bans violated the state constitution, and that case is now before the Wyoming Supreme Court.

Attorneys for the state, who are tasked with defending the new abortion laws, challenged the move to Teton County, saying it amounted to “forum shopping,” the practice of filing a case with a court that a litigant believes will be more favorable to them. They also said Forgey couldn’t schedule the emergency hearing until he received proof that the defendants had been properly served. 

In a hearing last month, Owens concluded the latest case belongs in Natrona County, where the lone clinic affected by the new laws operates. The plaintiffs quickly refiled the case there, where it was assigned again to Forgey on March 24, court records show. The following day, Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justice Kate Fox requested the case be assigned to Campbell. That request did not explain the reassignment or why an outside judge was needed. Beside Forgey, three other district judges serve in Natrona County.

A hearing on whether to pause enforcement of the new abortion laws is now set for April 8 at the state courthouse in downtown Casper. Lawyers for the abortion providers say those laws — like the bans passed in 2023 — violate Wyomingites’ constitutional right to make their own health care decisions.

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A group of more than 100 Wyoming lawyers and retired judges this week urged the state’s congressional delegation to condemn escalating attacks on the judicial branch and its independence by President Donald Trump and his allies.

Writing in an open letter delivered Wednesday to the delegation, the legal professionals cited a chorus of criticism and threats against judges and judicial authority that’s crescendoed through the first two months of the Trump administration, as the president has sought to assert more power over the federal government while dramatically remaking federal agencies through cuts and layoffs. 

Specifically, the letter cited Trump’s calls to impeach a judge he deemed a “Radical Left Lunatic,” billionaire Elon Musk’s repeated use of his social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) to attack court rulings he’s called “evil” and “an attempted coup,” and social media users who’ve even called for judges to be beheaded or hanged.

“The judiciary lacks the Executive’s bully pulpit or the Legislature’s power to defend itself. It does not have its own social media platform. Judges are not permitted to publicly discuss their decisions. The Judicial Branch must therefore rely on the other branches of government to respect and defend its constitutional role,” states the letter, which was addressed to Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis and Rep. Harriet Hageman. “We do not see that happening. 

“As our elected federal representatives— and as required by your own oaths—we thus urge you to publicly condemn these threats, affirm judicial independence, and remind Americans that appeals—not violence, intimidation, or invitations to lawlessness—are the constitutional remedy for undesired court decisions.”

Attacks on the judiciary haven’t been limited to public statements and social media posts, the signees wrote. They noted that some Republicans in the House of Representatives have filed articles of impeachment against federal judges. As of earlier this week, GOP lawmakers had pursued impeachment against six judges who’d ruled against the Trump administration in court, according to a count by Reuters.

Those and other threats, the signers went on to write, are part of an effort not to discredit judges alone, but the rule of law.

“We understand there is an appetite among sizeable members of the electorate for radical change at any cost, but the growing reckless disdain for the independence and security of our judiciary must be resisted by anyone sworn to uphold our Constitution,” the letter reads. “That includes us, and it certainly includes you. Silence in the face of such threats from those with a duty to uphold the Constitution will be properly seen as complicity.”

The letter signees include former Gov. Mike Sullivan; retired Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justices Marilyn Kite, Michael Golden, Michael Davis and E. James Burke; retired U.S. District Court Chief Judge William Downes and former Wyoming Attorneys General Gay Woodhouse and Patrick Crank. 

The letter signers hope the delegation will be “allies” in upholding the constitutional structure central to the nation’s democracy, retired state district judge Tim Day told WyoFile.

“We really hope that our congressional delegation will do the same, and that they won’t sit on their hands, and they will identify these as dangerous actions and dangerous words.” 

Motivations for signing 

The letter is not political, and it aims to ensure the courts remain independent of political influence, Day said. Undermining the independence of the judiciary, disregarding legal decisions and not defending the separation of powers paves the way for oppression, he warned.

The U.S. Constitution anticipated such threats, he noted. 

“It’s exactly the kind of thing that our founding fathers put in the first three articles of the Constitution because of what happened with the colonies with England,” Day said. “They were oppressed. So they didn’t want that to happen again.

“We’re asking our congressional delegation, two of whom are lawyers, to acknowledge that these are basic foundational tenants in our Constitution, critical to our democracy and the proper functioning of our government, with separation of powers and checks and balances.” 

Sullivan, a lawyer who served two terms as Wyoming’s governor, also hopes the delegation will “recognize the need to step up and respond.” He said his decision to sign the letter reflects “a concern about the administration’s policy on the rule of law and judges and lawyers and matters associated with the rule of law, and I thought it reflected well upon the concerns, and was happy to sign it.”

After Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg for issuing an order that sought to halt deportation flights, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement. In it, Roberts stressed that two centuries of precedent have established that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” That proper response, he added, was the normal appellate process.

American governance, as envisioned by the country’s founders, relies on respecting the judiciary as being just as critical to a healthy democracy as the other two branches of government, explained Kite, who served on the Wyoming Supreme Court for 15 years, including four as chief justice.

If you undo the Constitution just to get things done, you no longer have a free and open democratic society, she said. 

“The rule of law isn’t what you want it to be,” Kite said. “It is what is established in the laws, and the laws are interpreted by the courts, and that’s been the case for 250 years.”

When asked about his motivations for signing the letter, Kite’s former colleague on the state’s high court, Michael Golden, recalled his decades practicing law, including four years in the Judge Advocate General’s Office and another 24 on the Wyoming Supreme Court. Golden said he believed strongly in the state and federal constitutions, along with the rule of law, and was alarmed by actions now taking place in Washington.

“If we lose respect [for] our courts, if we lose sight of the rule of law and our Constitution, then that will be what destroys our country,” he told WyoFile. “And that just speaks to the very heart of what we’re concerned about.”

Retired state district judge Peter Arnold was more blunt about his motivations for speaking out — and whether it will influence Wyoming’s congressional delegation.

“I signed the letter about which you contacted me because I strongly disagree that it is proper to speak about judges the way Trump is,” he wrote in an email to WyoFile. “I am not naive, I understand the pressures faced by our legislators and doubt the letter will do much good but I would be remiss if I didn’t express my beliefs publicly to our legislators.

“In my mind, Congress has a constitutional responsibility to publicly disagree with Trump,” wrote Arnold, a Republican who served on the Laramie County GOP General Committee and who was censured by the panel for raising the same issues. “Again, it is naive for me to expect much but to do nothing is not an option.”

Congressional delegation

WyoFile emailed questions about the letter to Barrasso, Lummis and Hageman early Wednesday evening. As of publication time Thursday afternoon, none had responded.

But in previous comments, speeches and letters, the lawmakers gave some insight into their views on the recent attacks on judges. 

On Feb. 10, for example, the delegation held a tele-town hall and were asked about what Republicans could do to stop Democrats and judges from blocking parts of Trump’s agenda.

Hageman, a lawyer herself, accused judges of “clearly acting politically” and suggested the administration expedite appeals or even outright ignore judges.

“When you have a judge who issues the decision saying that the Secretary of the Treasury is not allowed to access the documents of the Treasury, you’ve got a rogue judge,” Hageman said. “And I think that you may see the House moving forward with some ideas of what we’re going to do in that regard.

“One of the things that I think is going to happen, and what this administration needs to do, is really work to expedite the appeals on these absolutely outrageous decisions. It’s another form of lawfare, and it is just another example of how our system was broken with these rogue judges that have been appointed by Obama and Biden especially. They’re gonna have to go through the process. I wish I had a different answer for you. 

“I will tell you one thing that I’d like to consider, if I was the Secretary of Treasury … I might just say, ‘This is my agency. My responsibility is to take care of these records. I absolutely have to have access to them,’ and dare the judge to hold him in contempt. That’s what I might consider.”

Hageman went on to say that such a step — disobeying a judge and daring them to hold a person in contempt — is not something she’d normally recommend. But she went on to suggest there were times when it would be necessary to do just that.

“And I just, I think at some point you got to tell these judges, ‘You really do not have the power that you think that you do. You want to hold me in contempt of court, have at it, baby.’”

More recently, Barrasso took aim at “activist district court judges” in a speech earlier this month from the Senate floor. He accused those judges of “protecting criminals, terrorists and corrupt bureaucrats from the accountability that voters demand.”

“Let me be clear. When partisan, unelected district court judges try to micromanage the president of the United States, it isn’t judicial review,” he said. “It isn’t checks and balances. It is purely partisan politics — and it is wrong. Radical district judges will not succeed in blocking Republicans from getting America back on track.”

Lummis has been publicly supportive of many of Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government. On Wednesday, Trump endorsed her for reelection.

WyoFile editors Tennessee Watson and Rebecca Huntington, along with writer CJ Baker, contributed to this report. 

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It’s been three weeks since Stephanie Bearstail died under suspicious circumstances on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and the 18-year-old’s family is mourning her as they wait for answers from federal investigators.

Bearstail was a passionate softball player and determined student eager to graduate high school and enter college — she had recently expressed interest in becoming a radiologist, her parents Nikki and Kevin Ferris told WyoFile in a phone interview this week. As a senior, she was already taking courses at Central Wyoming College. 

Their only daughter was also a certified goofball, a little boss of the house and her three brothers, and a bright light in the lives of the family and many others on the reservation. 

“Even we were surprised how many people knew her,” Nikki Ferris said. “We knew of her friends, but we didn’t know how many she had.” 

On March 15, those friends and others — as many as 200 people, according to news reports — walked to a fence line along the side of Wyoming 137, a road that cuts across the reservation, running from near the Wind River Casino outside Riverton west to Fort Washakie. That’s the area where authorities say Bearstail somehow exited a moving vehicle on a windy March night. 

At the demonstration, Bearstail’s supporters wore red — the color that has become a symbol for the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women that plagues communities on and off the reservation. They carried signs that read “Justice for Steph,” some of which still hung weeks later on the barbed wire fence that threads between the sage brush. 

Bearstail’s death, her mother said, “just blindsided all of us.” 

The Ferrises declined to share details, saying they do not want to publicly reveal information that could complicate the job of investigators. But they have reason to believe their daughter was a victim of violence, they said. 

“The main thing that I think of every day is I just wish somebody would come out and tell the truth about what happened,” Nikki said. “I don’t understand how anyone could know what happened and not say anything.” 

Bearstail grew up and lived her entire life in Fort Washakie, where her father was involved in law enforcement and today is a judge on the Wind River Tribal Court. 

The night of March 4, Bearstail did not return home by her 10:30 p.m. curfew. The parents could remember only one other time their lively but studious daughter had been late for her curfew, they told WyoFile. They grew worried, and within an hour, left home to look for her. 

The parents tracked their daughter’s phone location, which placed her in the area between Riverton and the small reservation community of Arapahoe. “She did need help, and we were trying to find her,” her mother said. 

On the drive, they received word she had been hospitalized, and so they headed to SageWest Hospital in Riverton. They were able to spend time with Bearstail before she died, but their daughter was unable to speak or share what happened to her, they said.

The Wyoming Highway Patrol, which maintains a list of highway fatalities from around the state, published an entry to the list about a week after Bearstail’s death, according to news reports. The entry states: “An unknown SUV was traveling westbound on Rendezvous Road. The SUV passenger allegedly jumped out of the vehicle while it was in motion for unknown reasons.” 

The entry does not say where investigators learned of the allegation that Bearstail jumped from the SUV. Authorities haven’t identified the driver. The Wyoming Highway Patrol directed WyoFile to the FBI for comment on the case. The FBI has said only that the case remains under investigation. The Fremont County Coroner’s office is conducting the autopsy, which hasn’t been finalized, a representative of that office said this week. 

Using the limited information from the highway patrol fatality database, news organizations ran headlines stating that Bearstail “allegedly jumped” from the car to her death. Those reports disturbed the family, the Ferrises said, because taken in isolation, the information suggests Bearstail was responsible for her own death. 

The headlines, Nikki said, served “to deflect off what happened to her.” But Bearstail’s community appears dedicated to keeping focus on her case and on the issue of domestic violence, which they believe led to her death. Other community events are in the works, the Ferrises told WyoFile. 

Native American women fall prey to violence, murders and unexplained deaths at disproportionally higher rates compared to other demographics in the United States. 

Many of the cases go unsolved, and reformers have pointed to the complicated jurisdictional nature of reservations — where local, state, federal and tribal law enforcement sometimes overlap in areas that are often economically depressed and, in the West, geographically isolated — as leading to a lack of accountability for perpetrators of violence.

That does not appear to be the case here, as the FBI swiftly took control of the investigation. “In this case, the FBI, they were [at the crime scene] that morning,” Nikki said. “They got involved quickly.”

Bearstail was the second oldest of the couple’s children. Her younger brothers, ages 15 and 13, have tried to return to school, but on some days have had to go home or haven’t been up for going at all, their mother said. 

“They’re not doing OK,” Nikki said. “It’s really hard.”

Since her daughter’s death, Nikki has made a steady stream of posts to social media, calling for justice, expressing her raw grief and remembering her daughter. There are videos of Bearstail running track, and of her dancing — full of life. 

As the Ferrises have received messages sharing swirling rumors about the night Bearstail died, they’ve implored people to take what they know to the FBI. But to date, all the family has been told by officials is that an investigation is active, the parents said. 

The FBI “said it would take time,” Nikki said in the March 25 interview. To her knowledge, “they’re still out there investigating,” she said. 

In a statement to WyoFile sent Wednesday evening, an FBI spokesperson for the Denver Field Office said the agency “appreciate[s] public interest in this incident and encourage[s] anyone with information to contact the Bureau of Indian Affairs/Wind River Police or the FBI.”

The agency could not offer a time frame for when it would conclude the investigation, the statement read. “We methodically and thoroughly address every element of the incident,” spokesperson Vikki Migoya said. 

Correction: This story was updated to correct a misspelling of Nikki Ferris’ name. —Ed.

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The same Teton County judge who tossed Wyoming’s two abortion bans last year dismissed on Friday a separate lawsuit filed in Jackson that sought to block two new Wyoming abortion laws, saying the case belonged in Natrona County, home to the affected Wellspring Health Access clinic.

Ruling from the bench after a hearing that lasted more than 90 minutes, 9th District Judge Melissa Owens said that “any injury that occurred, occurred in Natrona County.” The ruling means that Wyoming women who have not had access to abortion services since the de facto ban went into effect Feb. 28 will have to wait until the case is presumably refiled and then considered by a different judge.

In the five days after one law went into effect, Wellspring referred 56 patients to other clinics for abortion-related services, almost all of them out of state, according to court papers.

Two doctors, two abortion care providers and an individual woman filed a nearly identical suit in Natrona County when one of the new laws went into effect, challenging its constitutionality. That law imposes a series of new regulations on abortion clinics by mandating they be licensed as “ambulatory surgical centers.” A second, which went into effect days later, requires abortion patients to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound and a 48-hour waiting period before receiving abortion medications.

The plaintiffs sought emergency court action on requests for a temporary restraining order and an injunction. But when a Natrona County judge did not respond to their emergency request in what they perceived as a timely manner, they dismissed their case there and filed the carbon-copy action in Teton County.

“We could not get any type of response” 12 days after filing the action, five business days after the last communication from the court, said Marci Bramlet, an attorney representing the plaintiff doctors. One of her clients, Dr. Giovannina Anthony, has an OBGYN clinic in Jackson and refers clients to Wellspring, the only clinic in the state that provides procedural abortions.

Wellspring has ceased offering those services because of the new laws and has turned away at least three clients from Teton County, Bramlet said. She rejected an argument by state Senior Attorney General John Woykovsky that the group was “forum shopping.”

In November, Owens decided two other anti-abortion law challenges — those involved outright bans — in favor of nearly the same suite of plaintiffs.

The Teton County filing was “not because of what we were hearing,” Bramlet said, but “because we were hearing nothing.” Her clients did not believe their case was being taken seriously and, meantime, “injury is ongoing and could be catastrophic.”

Woykovsky said Natrona County District Judge Dan Forgey couldn’t act until he received proof that required court papers had been served on defendants there. Owens appeared to agree there was no foot-dragging on Forgey’s part, that the doctors had waited only a few days before dismissing one suit and filing the other.

Regardless of Judge Forgey’s timing, Bramlet said her clients had a right to dismiss their action as they saw fit and refile it anywhere in Wyoming, given that the new laws cover the entire state. Although Woykovsky’s court pleading was for a change of venue back to Natrona County, Owens saw it as a request for dismissal and acted thusly.

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Wyoming this month paid to settle a lawsuit brought by a hemp farmer whose crop was seized by law enforcement agents based on erroneous allegations she grew and trafficked marijuana, court filings show.

The state paid farmer Debra Palm-Egle $150,000 to settle the case, she told WyoFile on Monday, out of which she had to pay fees to her civil attorney. A lawyer for the Wyoming Attorney General’s office confirmed the amount.

Minus attorney fees, the remaining settlement payment was not substantially more than the $54,000 she spent on criminal defense attorneys in 2019 and 2020, she said. Felony charges brought by the state at that time threatened to send the senior citizen to prison for decades. 

“It needed to be done,” Palm-Egle said of her lawsuit, and she hopes the settlement will make investigators and prosecutors proceed with more caution on such clearly flawed cases in the future. 

“Maybe it will help them stop and think,” she said.

Barring any new twists, the settlement ends a long-running court saga that began with a 2019 raid and property seizure and played out across state and federal courts. The Wyoming Supreme Court weighed in on two separate legal questions stemming from the case.

Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agents clad in tactical gear and brandishing assault rifles raided Palm-Egle’s family farm in Albin, near the Nebraska border, in November 2019. Investigators had received a tip from a neighboring farmer that Palm-Egle was growing marijuana, and DCI agents who visited the farm claimed to spot what they believed to be that illegal plant hanging in a barn. 

During the raid, investigators confiscated 700 pounds of the plant — a big bust, had it in fact been marijuana. But over a five-month investigation, DCI’s testing of the crop ultimately revealed it had a THC level in line with hemp production. They charged Palm-Egle, her son and two employees of the farmers with conspiracy to manufacture, deliver or possess marijuana; possession with intent to deliver marijuana; possession of marijuana and planting or cultivating marijuana. All but the last are felonies. 

But the crop could never have been effectively sold as a narcotic, the farmers argued in court, as its THC concentration was far too low to have any of the psychotropic effects of marijuana, which is in various respects legal in most states but not in Wyoming. Palm-Egle’s defense team also pointed out that she was a well known lobbyist for hemp farming in Wyoming, who had worked with lawmakers to legalize the crop and posed with Gov. Mark Gordon at a bill signing. 

DCI agents never interviewed Palm-Egle or her son during the investigation. After the raid a judge barred Palm-Egle from leaving Laramie County, even though her principal residence is in Colorado. She wound up living on the farm for nine months. Palm-Egle, who has multiple sclerosis, said the judge’s order interfered with therapies that help her avoid vertigo and other side effects of the disease.  

“It was very traumatizing,” she said, “plus the threat of going to prison for 30 years. You can’t feel comfortable. You can’t feel safe.”

But once the case reached a trial court, the prosecution didn’t get far. A Laramie County judge tossed the case following a preliminary hearing, finding the prosecution could never prove the farmers intended to grow marijuana, not hemp. 

Legal fallout rippled out from there. 

In 2021, the Wyoming Supreme Court went on to censure the prosecutor, David Singleton, then a Laramie County senior assistant district attorney, after the Wyoming State Bar investigated an allegation that DCI agent Jon Briggs had lied on the stand and Singleton had allowed him to do so. Singleton paid an $800 fine and admitted he had violated the Wyoming judiciary’s rules of professional conduct by failing to correct testimony from Briggs he knew was false.

The Wyoming Attorney General’s office sought to protect Briggs, asking the state Supreme Court to redact his name from their decision on Singleton. The justices rejected that request. Briggs was subsequently investigated by the Wyoming Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, which cleared him of any wrongdoing. He remains an investigator with DCI, an agency spokesperson said late last year. 

Singleton, the former prosecutor, is today a Cheyenne Municipal Court judge. The city council appointed him to the court the same year as the censure.

Palm-Egle filed her federal civil suit in May 2022. A federal judge found that the law was unclear on whether Wyoming residents could sue law enforcement for damages caused by negligent criminal investigations, and asked the Wyoming Supreme Court to weigh in. In a 3-2 March decision, the state’s high court ruled Palm-Egle’s case could advance, and the matter returned to federal court. 

A DCI spokesperson on Monday told WyoFile the agency would not comment on the settlement in the case, which named Briggs as a defendant. Attorneys on the case for the Wyoming AG’s office did not respond to a request for comment by WyoFile’s deadline. 

After paying her attorneys, Palm-Egle plans to spend the money she won remodeling her barn, she said — a project she had been saving money for and had to pause in order to pay for her legal defense. 

“It’s going to look gorgeous,” she said. 

“Thank God, it’s over,” she said of her legal battles. “This has been a long fight, and I’m grateful that I’m finished with this and I hope that no one else goes through this in the state.”

The settlement was finalized and the case concluded at the tail end of the Wyoming Legislature’s 2025 general session. Ahead of that session, the Joint Judiciary Committee — the group of lawmakers that focus on the state’s criminal justice and civil courts — had sponsored a bill that would have closed the door on future lawsuits like Palm-Egle’s, which accused DCI agents of conducting a “negligent” investigation. 

After the Wyoming Supreme Court’s ruling on Palm-Egle’s case, the Judiciary Committee this fall drafted a bill that would have immunized investigators from such lawsuits going forward, though it would not have stopped Palm-Egle’s. But the composition of the judiciary committee changed in January, and the new committee declined to advance the bill. Several lawmakers told WyoFile they thought the legislation would have tipped the statute too sharply in favor of law enforcement. 

It remains unclear whether lawmakers will bring a version of that legislation back. 

Palm-Egle said her son, Josh Egle, has continued to grow hemp in Albin. He has been using the crop to produce herbal medicines to help people sleep, she said.

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As Casper police officers brought Wayne Sanchez into the Natrona County jail for booking on a methamphetamine charge in March 2023, Sanchez began to shake violently. He told officers he’d eaten a significant amount of drugs. 

With Sanchez rapidly deteriorating, the jail nurse told officers she would not accept him and they needed to take the 62-year-old Casper resident to the hospital. 

Officers brought Sanchez, moaning and continuing to shake, to Banner Wyoming Medical Center, where he was examined by a nurse and a longtime emergency room doctor. After an examination that police officers later told Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agents appeared very brief — one officer estimated it lasted only 60 seconds — Dr. Ryan Benson came out of a room with Sanchez and gave his diagnosis.

It was a case of “incarceritus,” Benson said, the two officers told agents, according to a DCI report. In other words, Sanchez was faking it to avoid jail. The doctor “cleared” Sanchez, allowing the officers to take him back to the jail. 

Within 15 minutes, as the officers’ patrol car pulled into the jail’s sally-port, Sanchez had stopped breathing. Though officers and jail staff performed CPR and other life saving measures for 45 minutes, paramedics ultimately pronounced Sanchez dead at the scene. The coroner ruled the death to be from a methamphetamine overdose. Investigators found a plastic baggie and “suspected methamphetamine residue pieces” in his stomach.

Sanchez’s sister, Gloria Fetzer, is now suing Benson, an attendant nurse, Banner, the Casper Police Department, the individual officers and the city in federal court. In a complaint filed Feb. 24, her attorney argued the hospital had demonstrated “deliberate indifference to pretrial detainees’ health needs.”

When officers first brought Sanchez to the emergency room, Benson asked the officers “if it was a real thing or if Sanchez was faking,” they told DCI, according to the report. 

The lawsuit seeks to hold the officers and department at fault for not returning Sanchez to the hospital as his condition visibly worsened, his seizures intensified and he did not respond to their questions.  

The Casper Police Department requested the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, which often investigates in-custody deaths in county jails, to lead an inquiry into Sanchez’s case. Natrona County District Attorney Dan Itzen declined to bring criminal charges against the officers involved, finding no evidence of any law breaking.

The Wyoming Attorney General represents law enforcement officers in civil lawsuits. 

An attorney for Benson, Andy Sears, declined to comment on the case or make his client available for an interview, saying it was too early. 

Benson repeatedly told DCI investigators he would not speak to them until he could arrange to do so with his attorney present. That interview did not happen until April 25, more than six weeks after Sanchez’s March 8 death. It was unrecorded, the DCI report states. Benson told agents that though Sanchez was shaking, he thought the movements were “not involuntary” and he did not believe the arrestee was overdosing. Sanchez’s heart rate was not elevated the way he would have expected it to be on stimulants, Benson said, according to the report. 

Benson told agents he thought Sanchez might be trying to avoid jail. “Dr. Benson stated it is common for patients to claim medical issues until the officers leave the hospital,” the report read.

DCI later interviewed the nurse who attended to Sanchez with Benson. Her account supported his, according to the investigative report. 

Jack Edwards, an attorney for Fetzer, declined to make his client available for an interview but said they were prepared to take the case to trial. “We really think that a Wyoming jury needs to hear what’s going on here and make a determination of whether this man was treated right,” Edwards said. 

A spokesperson for Banner told WyoFile the company doesn’t comment on specific patient cases. 

Arrested for paraphernalia

Casper police officers arrested Sanchez the morning of his death, after a car wreck on the north end of Casper just off I-25. Sanchez had been in the passenger’s seat of one of the two vehicles involved in the crash, in which no one was injured. The person who reported the wreck told police that Sanchez left the area with a backpack.

Sanchez returned to the scene in his Dodge pickup, and told officers he had only left to collect his own vehicle. Officers questioned Sanchez, who one police officer described to DCI agents as looking like a heavy drug user with a “sunken in” face, and asked to search his backpack. Sanchez suggested they search it together, pulled clothing out of the bag and then told officers there was nothing in there, according to the officers.

Ultimately, an officer found a syringe in the bag. According to the officer, Sanchez told them it was an old syringe but might have methamphetamine on it. From there officers searched Sanchez’s truck, where they found a glass pipe they also believed was for using meth, as well as another syringe. Officers performed a field test that showed meth on both the pipe and the two syringes and arrested Sanchez. 

Two officers, Matthew Lougee and Zach Gonzales, who was at the time a trainee under the guidance of Lougee, took Sanchez to jail. It’s not clear at what point he would have swallowed the bag of methamphetamine. In his interview with DCI, Gonzales said Sanchez was compliant, conversational and “appeared fine” until they got him to the jail booking area, where his behavior began to change rapidly.

Sanchez told officers he had eaten “an eight ball,” a term which typically describes 3.5 grams of drugs. Though most often used in reference to cocaine, it could also be applied to meth. Sanchez did not clarify what drug he had consumed, though it’s unclear if officers asked him. 

Finding Sanchez shaking and agitated, the jail nurse told the two Casper police officers she would not admit him, and that he needed to go to the hospital. Along the way, Sanchez stopped communicating with officers, who had to help him to and from the car. 

During the drive to the hospital, Lougee, the trainee, asked Gonzales to “walk [him] through” what was going on, according to DCI’s review of their body-worn camera footage. 

“We’re gonna go get cleared at the hospital,” Lougee said, “then we’ll bring him back here.” Sanchez, the training officer said, “just wasted a large portion of our day.” 

The officers arrived at the hospital around 9:10 a.m. and escorted in Sanchez, who DCI agents viewing the footage saw as “shaking uncontrollably” and “making numerous incoherent noises that may be attempts at words.” 

On their way in, a hospital employee asked them, “is this just a clearing?” Lougee responded, “yes, for jail.” 

According to Fetzer’s lawsuit, Sanchez left the hospital at 9:30 a.m., just 20 minutes later, and was likely dead by 9:38 a.m., dying in the back of the patrol car after being cleared for jail. Officially, he was pronounced dead at 10:19 a.m., according to the autopsy report included in DCI’s investigation.

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It was just after Matthew Shepard was assaulted and tortured in an anti-gay hate crime, then left to die tied to a buckrail fence near Laramie. As a stunned community prepared to remember him at an October 1998 service, editors at the statewide flagship newspaper Casper Star-Tribune gathered to deliberate.

Reporter Jason Marsden, who wrote news stories focused on environmental issues, wanted to pen an opinion column. On his news beats, Marsden had cemented his reputation as a trusted reporter, even as he tackled taboo subjects like legacy pollution from the state’s bedrock oil and gas industry.

Marsden didn’t earn his credibility by telling half a story, showing bias or inserting opinion in news reports. So his request to opine triggered an editorial conclave.

Marsden met Shepard at a party where the college student berated the reporter’s newspaper for not covering Afghanistan’s then obscure Taliban as they abused women. Shepard, a slight, gay University of Wyoming student who had attended high school in Switzerland, was wise to civil rights and international affairs.

Shepard’s murder at 21 spurred Marsden to write anew. Assistant managing editor Dan Neal raised the issue of a reporter writing an opinion piece.

“You probably know Jason is gay,” Neal told the editor. “He feels it is important to come out.”

Marsden wanted to tell the world what Shepard’s murder meant to those who lived in the shadows.

“He decided he needed to step out and declare his sexuality publicly,” Neal said in an interview. “He didn’t agonize over it.”

Marsden declared “here I am, too,” Neal said. “The courage was really eye-opening to me.”

Sold out

Marsden, 52, died of natural causes at his Salida, Colorado, home last month after notable careers in journalism, conservation, civil rights and political activism. His op-ed piece about Shepard’s murder, published Oct. 17, 1998, was a high-profile mark along that productive road.

Stephen Busemeyer, another former Star-Tribune editor, recalled how Marsden in 1998 nurtured his column in a garden of love, not on an anvil of hate. As Marsden prepared his column and the state prepared for Shepard’s memorial, a fax arrived in the newsroom from the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. It outlined Westboro’s plans for an anti-gay demonstration at the service.

“Jason gets hold of it,” Busemeyer said of the fax, “holds it in his hand, shaking it.” Despite all the ugliness in the Westboro message, Marsden wouldn’t stoop.

“We must love these people,” he said.

“That’s who Jason Marsden was,” Busemeyer said, “fiercely emotional, intellectual, utterly unafraid.”

Marsden titled his piece “Hatred Will Always Target Light.” “The column ended up on my desk,” editor David Hipschman said.

The piece was about Shepard’s intellectual presence outweighing his slight build, about his spirit and tenacity and about attempts by him and those like him to find a place in “this troubled world.”

“[W]e’re members of the loose-knit community of gay people striving to make our way in this sometimes hostile place called Wyoming,” Marsden wrote. In all, there were only 682 words, but they ended up circling the globe.

“I thought it would be dishonest in some way if I did not disclose that I was gay myself,” Marsden told Colorado journalist and podcaster Adam Williams last spring.

Powerful as the column was, Hipschman wouldn’t leave Marsden standing alone. The editor wrote an accompanying piece calling for support.

He laid out the two columns side by side with a graphic cut-on-dotted-line border. Hipschman urged residents to tape the page to their storefronts and windows. He printed an overrun, then experienced something he had never seen.

“The paper sold out.”

American poetry

Marsden’s route to Salida, a small town in the 70-mile-long Arkansas River valley surrounded by four mountain ranges, the state’s tallest 14ers and wilderness areas, had taken him around the world.

He grew up first on a farm in southern Minnesota, he told podcaster Williams, where he was exposed to the outdoors and nature itself. His father died when he was 8, he said on the “We are Chaffee” podcast, and his mother moved the family to Sheridan to begin a new life in a new environment — the city.

Marsden, whose family had a history of labor-movement politics in Minnesota, excelled in high school. “President of the debate team, state champion, national qualifier several times over, class president, blah, blah, blah … all the academics,” he told Williams. With $65 from his job at Arby’s, he applied for early admission to an elite Ivy.

He had never been to Boston, he told Williams, “but I was aware that Harvard was regarded as a quality institution.” As his intellect germinated, Marsden latched on to that most practical arena of studies: post-WWII American poetry.

Toward what end? “It taught me a great deal about trying to figure out what people are really saying,” he told Williams.

Upon graduation in 1994, Marsden returned to Wyoming to work on Democratic campaigns. When Gov. Mike Sullivan lost his race for the U.S. Senate to Craig Thomas, Marsden became an $8.98-an-hour Christmastime UPS elf.

He had other ambitions. Anne MacKinnon, the Star-Tribune editor at the time, remembers Marsden’s resume. Attached was a “wonderful essay … which was basically about advertising and what it tries to do to people,” she said. MacKinnon took lessons from the essay as she was raising her 2-year-old son.

Marsden moved through the newsroom beats, landing on the environmental desk before the paper sent him to Washington, D.C. to cover the Wyoming delegation. He was there on 9/11.

On that date, the world’s front pages suddenly focused on the once-obscure Taliban that Shepard, now dead for three years, had sniffed out long before.

“The person who was paying the most attention to it, as far as I know, was a little gay boy from Casper, Wyoming,” Marsden said in the Williams podcast.

Wyoming’s lost chance

Soon after 9/11, Marsden left Washington D.C. for Wyoming and the fledgling nonprofit Wyoming Conservation Voters. He was proud of getting the Legislature and Gov. Dave Freudenthal to create the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust.

In 2008, Matthew Shepard’s mother Judy was looking for a leader for the foundation that would remember her son and advocate for others like him. Marsden emerged as an obvious choice.

“It was hard to find people who would talk about Matt and had the same kind of experience,” she said in a telephone interview. “People wanted to be seen and heard. He was instrumental in that regard.”

Marsden began a global odyssey — Mexico, Peru, Norway — to talk to those still hiding. “What we did [was] to give them some confidence to be accepted,” Judy Shepard said.

The international program, supported by the State Department, ended abruptly when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 and cut LGBTQ+ programs.

Despite the foundation’s accomplishments — President Joe Biden in 2024 awarded Judy Shepard the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her advocacy — not everybody has become accepting of gay people and their rights.

When Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009, Wyoming resisted. In key votes, Wyoming’s delegation of U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis and U.S. Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso opposed the measure.

“I was born and raised here,” Judy Shepard said of Wyoming. “It was a balanced state,” but recently “it’s just gone over the cliff.”

The Shepards would not bury their son in Wyoming, fearing desecration of any gravesite. A bench at the University of Wyoming is the only memorial in the state, she said.

Matthew Shepard was interred in 2018 in the columbarium of St. Joseph’s Chapel beneath the Washington National Cathedral alongside Helen Keller and others. Rev. Gene Robinson grew emotional as he spoke that day as Marsden listened in the congregation.

“Gently rest in this place,” Robinson said, “you are safe now. Matthew, welcome home.”

Judy Shepard said her native state let her down. “Wyoming had the opportunity to set the path,” she said. “But they turned around and ran.”

Olympic torch

After leaving the Shepard foundation, Marsden turned back to his passion for conservation and the outdoors, hiring on in 2023 to lead the Greater Arkansas River Nature Association in Salida. He was back outdoors building beaver dam analogs, hiking in the hills and keeping the environment healthy.

“Preserving wild spaces for future generations was something that he relished,” Marsden’s husband Guy Padgett, a WyoFile employee, said. “He wanted to run the best damn little conservation agency that he possibly could. And he was on his way to doing that.”

Along the route from newspaperman to conservationist to civil rights advocate and conservationist again, Marsden was among the journalists who met at Cheyenne’s Plains Hotel in 2008 to organize a new form of journalism. Traditional outlets had been laying off journalists “for the entirety of my life,” he said in the Williams podcast.

Rone Tempest, one of WyoFile’s founders, recalls the cadre of Wyoming journalists who gathered for lunch to discuss their project. It would be called WyoFile.

“The first step was how to produce copy,” Tempest said.

One idea was to collect the best writers to pen regular columns. Marsden pitched in.

“He was among the best and brightest we could find,” Tempest said.  “He put more time into it than other people. You could say he was one of the founders — pioneers.”

Throughout his work, Marsden’s brain corralled an untold number of facts which burst forth in games of trivia. He took his talents to television, qualifying in 2019 for Jeopardy!

“It was nerve-wracking,” Padgett said of watching the show’s taping from the audience. “They definitely had rules; ‘Do not try to make eye contact with your contestant.’”

Marsden stumbled on the Scottish caber and the Pacific Crest Trail, which he called the Pacific coast trail. Then he got on a roll. “It was one of the most spectacular comebacks,” Padgett said.

In Final Jeopardy, Jason bet the farm. Fellow competitor Laurel Lathrop, a graduate student from Tallahassee, Florida, did the math and bet enough to beat him on the final clue, even if both got the response correct.

Jeopardy host Alex Trebek read the clue. “To complete one of its regular trips, in 1948 it took a boat across the English Channel; in 1952 it took a plane en route to Finland.”

The clock ticked. Merv Griffin’s composition “Think” jingled in the background. Marsden answered correctly – What is the Olympic torch?

So did Lathrop, who outearned Marsden $32,801 to $30,401.

Something emerged from the broadcast that wasn’t frivolous, however.

During introductions, Marsden told how Matthew Shepard was a friend and how his murder led Marsden to become director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

For one moment, perhaps the most popular person on television spoke in non-trivial terms.

“In this day and age,” Trebek said, “we need more people like you.”

Services for Jason Marsden will be held at 1 p.m., Saturday, March 15, at Salida United Methodist Church. A celebration of life will follow at the Salida Steam Plant, a community events center.

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Wyoming will invalidate the driver’s licenses that some states issue to undocumented immigrants under a new law that Gov. Mark Godon acknowledged has thrust the Equality State into uncharted waters. 

Gordon on Friday allowed the legislation to become law without his signature. Like state senators, who passed the bill to express their antipathy toward illegal immigration despite noting that it might carry negative consequences for the state, Gordon figuratively held his nose while letting the measure cross his desk. 

“Because of the value of asserting Wyoming’s position on illegal presence, I am allowing this bill to go into law without my signature,” Gordon wrote.

House Bill 116, “Driver’s Licenses – unauthorized alien restrictions,” will likely invalidate driver’s licenses from as many as 21 states — lawmakers had previously estimated there were 19 states, but a spokesperson for the governor’s office said state agencies were reviewing a list of 21 states maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures. In those 21 states, lawmakers have chosen to provide driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally in an effort to promote public safety and decrease the number of uninsured drivers on the roads. 

Florida appears to be the only other state to similarly attempt to regulate the driver’s licenses of other states. But that state’s legislation was more narrow in its application. Florida lawmakers banned only driver’s licenses that are issued “exclusively” to unauthorized immigrants. That restriction ultimately resulted in the state voiding driver’s licenses from only two states, Delaware and Connecticut. 

Some undocumented immigrants living and working in Wyoming carry driver’s licenses issued by other states. If they’re stopped by law enforcement and their license is identified as invalidated under the new law, they’ll face a misdemeanor charge that carries a $750 fine or up to six months in prison — the same penalty that exists for driving on a suspended license. 

There’s no data on how many undocumented immigrants in Wyoming use valid driver’s licenses from other states, and it’s unclear how invalidating them might impact the state’s workforce.

Law enforcement chiefs have previously told WyoFile that driving with an invalid license is likely not by itself an offense that would lead officers to detain someone and take them to jail — which could ultimately land undocumented immigrants in federal custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Detention is more likely if the officer suspects the driver of some greater illegal act, such as driving under the influence.

Wyoming Highway Patrol officers will have the discretion to issue a citation or a warning, Lt. Col. Karl Germain, who tracked the bill for the agency, told WyoFile on Monday. “We’re not going to impound their vehicle and we’re not going to detain them,” he said of drivers with invalidated licenses, unless they have outstanding warrants or there’s suspicion of a more severe crime. 

But people would likely not be able to drive on if discovered to be illegally in the country, Germain said — whether that unlawful presence is due to sneaking over the border or overstaying a work visa. Such drivers would have to find an alternative driver to operate their vehicle. 

Except for Delaware and Connecticut, it appears most states that issue the licenses in question give them both to people who have legal status in the country — such as a student visa — and those who don’t. Markings on the license indicate it’s not valid for federal purposes like voting, but don’t say what type of documentation or lack thereof the carrier has to be in the country. Once Wyoming’s bill takes effect in July, law enforcement will likely have to check the immigration status of people pulled over with those licenses. 

As such, Gordon, in his letter, said it was an open question whether the bill could place a level of immigration enforcement on the backs of Wyoming law enforcement. “It is not immediately clear whether [the bill] places Wyoming law enforcement in an exposed role that is much more suited for the resources, training and system of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” he wrote. 

“While law enforcement have access to ICE,” he continued, “the time for ICE to respond to our law enforcement may be minutes, hours, or even days. My hope is that Wyoming law enforcement resources are used to assist in illegal presence operations but not take lead in determining one’s status through credentials both issued and dictated by other states’ laws.”

Like some lawmakers, Gordon also worried about Wyoming’s status in interstate compacts that regulate driver’s licenses and the sharing of driving record data. The Non-Resident Violators Compact that Wyoming has belonged to since 1987 could conflict with the new law, Gordon wrote. The compact allows Wyoming law enforcement to issue citations to drivers from other states and then permit the driver to continue on their travels, knowing the driver’s home state will enforce Wyoming’s citation so that the driver pays any fines or returns for court. 

“Being able to work together with our fellow states is imperative for the safety of all those on the road,” Gordon wrote. “This law could impact Wyoming’s ability to work with other states in this fashion.”

Col. Tim Cameron, the Wyoming Highway Patrol’s director, told WyoFile the compacts were important to his agency’s ability to enforce public safety on the roadways. “I certainly hope this doesn’t compromise that,” Cameron said.

Some senators also feared the new law will lead to more uninsured drivers on the state’s roads, since companies who insure someone with one of the impacted licenses may try to claim they weren’t liable for an accident in Wyoming. 

But, as Gordon noted in his letter, the Legislature has been determined to participate in President Donald Trump’s effort to increase deportations. “Wyoming is united in our determination to secure our borders and protect both the United States and Wyoming from the nefarious actions of people who are in our country illegally,” he wrote at the start of his letter.

The bill drew opposition from Wyoming residents who are themselves undocumented or who belong to families with mixed status — where some people have a legal status and others do not. Those immigrants, and advocates who speak for them, have argued that lawmakers are unaware of both the extent of undocumented labor in the state’s workforce and the challenges of achieving legal residency status. 

“Lawmakers shouldn’t be passing laws when they don’t know what they do,” Antonio Serrano, advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wyoming, previously told WyoFile.

“These are people who have been parts of the community, this has just been their normal life and all of a sudden it’s just taken away from them,” Serrano said of people working in the state who may use the impacted driver’s licenses from other states. “Going to work just got a lot harder,” he said.

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Despite mounting questions, state lawmakers sent a bill to Gov. Mark Gordon that would invalidate the driver’s licenses other states issue to people in the country illegally.

If Gordon signs the measure, it will impact licenses from as many as 19 states where undocumented immigrants can legally obtain a driver’s license. Wyoming neighbors Utah and Colorado are among them. 

The governor has not commented on the bill but has generally expressed support for President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown.

States that issue the licenses most often give them both to people who have legal status and those who don’t, with a distinction printed on the license that says it’s not valid for federal purposes like voting. Once the bill takes effect in July — if Gordon chooses not to veto it, or if such a veto is overridden by the Legislature — people pulled over with those licenses can expect to have their immigration status checked by local law enforcement.

Wyoming Highway Patrol troopers, sheriff’s deputies and police officers have the ability to check immigration status through their dispatchers, who can communicate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to testimony by law enforcement officials during the bill’s passage through the Legislature. Lawmakers received mixed feedback regarding how long those checks could prolong traffic stops, and some skeptics of the bill argued it could lead to people being detained for questionable periods of time while an officer waits on ICE. 

Senators worried, for example, how that might impact tourists who often drive on their home country’s driver’s license. If pulled over for a traffic violation without carrying their passport, would they have to sit and wait while law enforcement checks on their status? 

A host of other questions also loom for a bill that may represent a far more significant legal step for Wyoming than debate in the Legislature would have indicated. 

Wyoming is likely moving into uncharted territory with the legislation. 

Only one other state, Florida, appears to have any similar law on the books, but that legislation was more narrow in its application. Florida lawmakers banned only driver’s licenses that are issued “exclusively” to unauthorized immigrants. That restriction ultimately resulted in the state voiding driver’s licenses from only two states, Delaware and Connecticut. 

Senators bemoaned that they didn’t know the consequences of the legislation even as they advanced it, and before the bill’s final senate vote some raised concerns that it would lead to more uninsured drivers on the state’s highways. Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, called it “a little bit disturbing” that lawmakers didn’t have a clear answer. “I wish this discussion would have happened earlier. We probably could have addressed that,” he said. But Hicks called on senators to pass the bill anyway, then come back and fix any issues next year. 

“In the meantime, we’ve stepped up,” Hicks said, “we’re consistent with what the federal policy is starting to look like.”

Sen. Tara Nethercott, a Cheyenne Republican, expressed sharp concern the bill might spike the number of uninsured drivers on I-80 and other major byways — saying insurance companies will argue they don’t have to pay for damages if the driver is operating with an invalid license. That could leave Wyoming residents who are the victims of a car crash holding the bag, she said. 

“I don’t think we know the answer,” she told WyoFile after the vote. “That’s unacceptable. When the question is presented to the bill’s sponsors, [they need to] go find that answer and have a clear understanding of its impact for the people and drivers of Wyoming. We passed that law without that clear understanding, that’s where the disappointment lies.” 

It also remained unclear what the bill would mean for Wyoming’s status in interstate driver’s license compacts, given that those agreements are predicated on the idea that states recognize the licenses one another issue. 

The bill’s proponents dismissed that concern — and a similar one that Wyoming could run afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which requires states to recognize the laws and court judgments of other states. It’s the states issuing the licenses that broke the law, not Wyoming, they argued.

“I would argue the other states are actively in violation of the compact,” Sen. John Kolb, R-Rock Springs, said. “They’re in violation of the law.” 

But in each of those states the legislatures authorized the driver’s licenses, and in many cases have issued them for a decade or more, according to a database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures. In Utah, for example, lawmakers in 2005 created a class of license for unauthorized immigrants that lasts for a year.

Lawmakers also expressed concerns that they didn’t know how the bill would impact the state’s economy, given that it would make it illegal for workers from other states, both people who entered the country illegally and those who overstayed their legal entry, to drive Wyoming roads.

Opponents of the bill said lawmakers’ rush to punish undocumented immigrants threatens Wyoming’s economy and social fabric. 

“Lawmakers shouldn’t be passing laws when they don’t know what they do,” Antonio Serrano, advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wyoming, told WyoFile. “This is going to hurt Wyoming in so many different ways.” 

Workers in the state’s construction industry have told Serrano they’re thinking about leaving, rather than labor on in a state where they soon won’t be able to legally drive, he said. “These are people who have been parts of the community, this has just been their normal life and all of a sudden it’s just taken away from them,” Serrano said. “Going to work just got a lot harder, taking your kids to appointments just got a lot harder.”

In recent weeks, WyoFile has spoken with two immigrant families with working adults who are in the country without authorization — either by crossing the border illegally or by overstaying work visas. 

In both cases, the adults have for years carried driving licenses issued to them by other states. Under the new law, they will be guilty of a misdemeanor that carries a $750 fine or up to six months in prison — the same penalty as that issued to someone driving on a suspended license. 

“They’re essentially erecting a systematic wall around Wyoming with the passing of this bill,” Rachel Martinez, the president of the Hispanic Organization for Progress and Education in Cheyenne, told WyoFile. “A party that wants less government sure is putting a lot of effort into adding more of it into the lives of Wyomingites, and those who are just trying to come into Wyoming without any ill will,” she said. “People are just literally trying to drive their cars.” 

After an election cycle where an immigration crackdown was a major campaign issue for Republican candidates, pressure on the Legislature to pass a bill on that front has been mounting. 

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which has a voting majority in the House, had made passing the driver’s license bill a priority, as had the Wyoming Republican Party. The legislation passed with 45 yes votes in the House and 22 yes votes in the Senate, broad majorities that, if they held, would be sufficient to override a governor’s veto. 

“There’s immense pressure right now on a lot of bills,” Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, told WyoFile. A “no” vote was likely to become fodder in dishonest literature during a future primary campaign, he said. The longtime senator, who did vote against the bill, suggested he would soon face a campaign mailer that read: “Senator Driskill is in bed with the illegals.”

But Driskill said he was staunchly opposed to illegal immigration, but just didn’t see the bill as countering it, particularly when weighed against the possible risks. People in the country illegally, he said, already face deportation, particularly if they are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime whether that’s while driving or otherwise. 

Driskill worried that agricultural laborers with temporary work visas could face detainment during traffic stops or be deterred from working in the state. 

Nethercott was one of several senators who voted for the bill despite speaking against it during debate.

“We’re sending a message to our sister states that have given driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. And I don’t support [those licenses],”  Nethercott told WyoFile. “But I do support having thoughtful lawmaking that achieves its purpose. I’m not sure the bill does that. But the people of Wyoming will feel better.”

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