Discrepancies between two reports detailing the immigration arrest of a Laramie County resident are the result of a copy-and-paste error, Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak said in a Sunday social media video after a complaint alleged his office had issued a false report and withheld evidence critical to an ongoing immigration case.
“I want to deeply apologize to the Cheyenne Police Department and also to the law firm for wasting their time,” Kozak said.
An initial report erroneously said the Cheyenne Police Department gathered video of the arrest, while a corrected report stated the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office possessed the video. After identifying which agency had the body camera video, the plaintiffs allege their public records request for footage of the arrest went unfulfilled.
That request “went to the county attorney to deal with,” Kozak said on social media. The county attorney, according to Kozak, asked for a letter from the law firm confirming that it is representing the detained man. But the county “never received that letter, thus [the plaintiffs] did not receive the video,” Kozak said.
The county attorney did not return WyoFile’s call inquiring about the lawsuit before publishing time.
The lawsuit filed last week alleges that Kozak’s office blocked access to evidence and issued a false report related to the immigration case of Mario Fabian Valenzuela Robles, a Mexican citizen and long-time Laramie County resident who has three minor children with U.S. citizenship. A deputy from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office detained Valenzuela Robles in April after a traffic stop.
The plaintiffs are Denver, Colorado-based law firm Lichter & Associates, also referred to as Lichter Immigration, and Kevin Lewis, a Laramie County resident retained by the firm as an investigator. They are represented by Cheyenne attorney Drake Hill, a former Wyoming GOP chairman and the spouse of former Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Cindy Hill. Drake Hill has also served as the attorney for Honor Wyoming, a conservative political group. Lewis was a staffer in Cindy Hill’s office when she was state superintendent and has also been associated with Honor Wyoming.
An initial report of Valenzuela Robles’ arrest, which the sheriff’s office gave to Lewis, stated that the arresting deputy’s camera was off, that a Cheyenne police officer helped with the traffic stop and that the Cheyenne Police Department collected and stored video footage of the arrest. A revised report that Lewis also received, by contrast, states that the deputy’s camera was on and that the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office had collected and stored video footage.
Lewis and the law firm stated in their complaint that they were also met with resistance when they tried to get body camera footage of the arrest.
As they were trying to gather information, the immigration proceedings that could lead to Valenzuela Robles’ removal “were moving at a very fast pace and the records were vital to his defense,” the complaint states. Valenzuela Robles is currently out on bond while his habeas case, seeking to determine whether his confinement is lawful, is pending.
Corrected arrest report
Kozak declined to comment on the accusations when the lawsuit was filed, stating only that the complaint’s narrative about the discrepancy between the reports was “not accurate.”
But in his Facebook video, Kozak explained that the deputy who wrote the report mistakenly copied and pasted a line that said he responded to assist a Cheyenne police officer. The deputy made the error while copying the “video camera advisement” from a previous report.
A Laramie County Sheriff’s Office supervisor eventually “caught the error” and had the deputy correct the report, Kozak said. The sheriff said that the office has also “corrected the method in which those video advisements go in the reports so this does not happen again.”
Body camera footage
A Laramie County Sheriff’s Office staff member told Lewis, the investigator, that he would need to prove he represented Valenzuela Robles to view records related to his request, including video footage, according to the complaint.
Laura Lichter, the founder of Lichter Immigration, provided a letter for Lewis stating that the firm had retained him to investigate Valenzuela Robles’ situation. The letter is included in the lawsuit’s exhibits. Lewis said he hand-delivered the letter to the sheriff’s office and to the county attorney. Lichter Immigration itself, however, didn’t directly provide the letter to either office.
While the plaintiffs obtained the arrest reports, Kozak said the footage of the arrest wasn’t released because the county attorney didn’t receive a letter from the law firm confirming that it represented Valenzuela Robles.
“I think this is easily resolved if the law firm would provide a letter saying that they are in fact representing the defendant, and then the county would release that camera video,” Kozak said. The video, he added, “is an accurate representation of what the deputy wrote in the corrected report.”
Lichter and another attorney with Lichter Immigration are listed as Valenzuela Robles’ representatives in his habeas case.
“All those reports were given to the law firm,” Kozak concluded. “The only hold up is the body camera video, which should be corrected soon enough.”
Another immigration lawsuit
The Laramie County Sheriff’s Office is facing another immigration-related lawsuit over its agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In May, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint accusing Kozak and his office of violating legally required procedures and exceeding their legal authority when entering into three 287(g) agreements last year.
ICE has three types of 287(g) contracts — Jail Enforcement, Warrant Service Officer and Task Force — that allow local and state law enforcement to conduct immigration enforcement, expanding the federal agency’s reach.
The Trump administration revived the most controversial of these three agreements, the Task Force model, in 2025 after the Obama administration had phased it out in 2012. Kozak’s office is one of two law enforcement agencies in Wyoming — the other being the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office — that have all three enforcement agreements with ICE.
