At times during the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, it seemed Wyoming would be left out of the upheaval of his administration’s aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Though exact numbers are unknown, the state has a low population of such folks. A 2023 estimate by the American Immigration Council put the number of undocumented immigrants in Wyoming — a challenging statistic to document — at around 9,800, largely of working-age adults.
Wyoming also lacks a major city with liberal-leaning politics — the type of places where the Trump administration performed some of its most headline-grabbing enforcement actions, like the president’s use of military and national guard troops in Los Angeles or the intensive activities of federal agents in Chicago.
But by summer, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted operations in Teton County and other parts of the state, it had become clear Wyoming was not isolated from the Trump administration’s efforts to dramatically increase deportations. Wyoming’s undocumented population also encountered more hostile policies at the state and local level than it did a year ago, driven by state legislators, Gov. Mark Gordon and some county sheriffs.
The year began with conservative lawmakers in Cheyenne seeking to thrust the state into immigration enforcement, long the purview of the federal government. Lawmakers passed several bills to that end. One new law bans sanctuary cities (though Wyoming has none, technically). Another invalidates driver’s licenses that some other states issue to undocumented immigrants.
The Wyoming Senate rejected one of the more extreme measures, a bill from Torrington Republican Cheri Steinmetz that, as originally written, would have forced state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status during routine police work. Other parts of the bill made it a crime to carry an undocumented person in your car — something opponents said would criminalize large swathes of U.S. citizens, including friends and family members of immigrants.
Senators, worried about unforeseen consequences, tossed the bill in February, about halfway through the 2025 legislative session.
But over the next nine months, officials governing large swathes of Wyoming upped their involvement with immigration enforcement. Gov. Gordon directed the Wyoming Highway Patrol and the state’s National Guard to ink agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to play varying roles in immigration enforcement. Six county sheriffs signed on as well.
The most significant example is likely Sheriff Brian Kozak of Laramie County, who in October announced that he and 25 of his deputies had all joined a federal program where they received training on checking immigration status and detaining people on behalf of ICE. Though Kozak promised deputies would detain people only following interdictions on suspicion of other law breaking, his strong alliance with ICE sparked fears among local immigrant advocates that deputies would engage in racial profiling.
Kozak’s disclosure in late November that his deputies had detained an estimated 30 people for ICE, largely following traffic stops, fueled advocates’ criticism.
But Kozak’s partnership with ICE is popular with Wyoming conservatives. That same week, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus cheered a special operation by Kozak’s department, ICE and the Wyoming Highway Patrol that led to the detention of 40 truck drivers. “Countries have borders. Wyoming is proud to help enforce ours,” the caucus wrote on Facebook.
The post’s unnamed author drew a connection between this year’s new law to outlaw driver’s licenses that other states issue to undocumented immigrants — a priority of the Freedom Caucus — and the enforcement operation. It’s unclear whether any of the truckers arrested during the three-day November campaign were driving with such a license.
In the upcoming legislative session, lawmakers are likely to push for more restrictions on people living in and traveling through the state without legal U.S. residency. Already, the Legislature’s Joint Transportation, Highways and Military Affairs Committee has advanced a bill draft to mirror in Wyoming statute a federal crackdown on the English proficiency of commercial drivers.
Wyoming sheriffs, like Trump and officials in his administration, have pitched the enhanced enforcement as targeting people not only here illegally, but who also have a criminal record, a group they have referred to as “the worst of the worst.” ICE’s arrest data, however, shows that the majority of people being placed in immigration detention by federal agents do not have criminal convictions. That trend holds true for arrest numbers from Wyoming and Colorado, which WyoFile analyzed in collaboration with the Colorado Sun in July.
Over the course of the year, WyoFile spoke to undocumented immigrants who work in the state’s energy industry, its construction industry and in health care. Those workers described stalled asylum cases and logistical and financial hurdles barring access to legal status, despite paying taxes and participating in Wyoming’s economy for years. And as the Trump administration ramped up its deportation dragnet, they also described living in increasing fear.
An exact accounting of who has been arrested and deported from the state is difficult to come by. But WyoFile and reporters at other outlets we collaborated with tracked some people into ICE’s detention system. They included a Mexican laborer who was a 25-year resident of Jackson Hole, a Romanian national with a misdemeanor DUI, a Nicaraguan barber in Cheyenne and a Cuban immigrant who was detained at a regular check-in with ICE in Miami.
The Cuban man, who was attempting to renew his work permit when detained, came to Wyoming through the Natrona County Sheriff’s agreement with ICE to hold people when the federal agency needs more bed space for people it’s holding in the region. He described his 40-day stay in a Casper jail cell, far from home and uncertain at the time what his fate may be, as “hell” that wore on his psyche. Other men placed in the jail with him on July 18 remained there at least through the end of November.
The Cuban immigrant, Josue Rodriguez, was then deported to Mexico, a country to which he had no ties.
Rodriguez’s saga showed how ICE agreements entangle local agencies in the Trump administration’s crackdown well beyond Wyoming’s borders.
In Uinta County, Sheriff Andy Kopp has offered his jail beds to ICE as a lucrative revenue source. He is using the money to raise his deputies’ salaries in tough fiscal times driven, in part, by the Wyoming Legislature’s cuts to property taxes.
This fall, that arrangement briefly drew Kopp’s appearance in federal court, although in a nominal and procedural capacity, after one Mexican national captured by ICE during a sprawling operation in Idaho sued for his freedom. Though Kopp, like other sheriffs and elected officials at the state and national level, has said they want to remove dangerous criminals from the country, the Idaho man doesn’t fit that bill. He appears to have no criminal record and is the father of five children who are U.S. citizens, who were left without his support during his detention.