Fear is driving Wyoming politicians, immigrants in divergent directions

FROM WYOFILE:

Debate and legal filings show state politicians view illegal immigration as an economic threat. Interviews with immigrants show the limits of politicians’ insights into the issue’s realities.

At first glance, Jose and Sara are the kind of couple Wyoming politicians like to talk about most. Jose is a welder who works in the oil fields. Until recently, Sara worked at a coal mine.

The couple has helped power the nation, as elected officials often proclaim when touting the state’s energy industry and its workers. And in doing so helped power the state, whose budget leans heavily on tax revenue from the energy sector. They have lived for nearly two decades in Sweetwater County, building community, raising their children and sending them to local schools.

But there’s a wrinkle to this Wyoming story. Jose and Sara are in the country illegally. So elected officials aren’t exalting their lifestyle in speeches in the Wyoming State Capitol or patting them on the back. Instead, through draft legislation, court filings and public remarks, immigrants, even some who are here legally, say Wyoming politicians are putting targets on their backs.

Sara and Jose are not the couple’s real names. WyoFile granted them anonymity so they could speak freely without drawing the attention of federal authorities. Another person in this story also used a pseudonym so that she could talk about members of her family who do not have legal status in the country.

In state politics, as in Washington D.C., illegal immigration is increasingly cast as a near-existential threat, one that drives crime and impoverishes the nation. This legislative session lawmakers have pushed harsh new enforcement measures that they justify with depictions of a flood of dangerous illegal immigrants, often in an echo chamber without opposing voices. Living in the shadows, unable to vote, unfamiliar with the workings of the Legislature and unwilling to draw too much attention to themselves, Jose and Sara think their side of the story goes unheard.

“We came to do the hard work,” Jose said. He’s proud of the labor he and his immigrant colleagues have put into the state’s energy sector over the decades he’s been in Wyoming.

“There are jobs that a lot of people aren’t up for working, and so there’s the Latino,” he said. “When it rains, when it snows, when it gets hot, always there’s the Latino. Working.”

Wyoming residents do not pay a personal income tax, but Jose and Sara both pay state sales taxes and federal income taxes like anyone else drawing a paycheck.

Or at least they used to both draw paychecks.

Sara has recently stopped going to work. She grew too scared of discovery, she told WyoFile. The coal industry is packed with fierce supporters of President Donald Trump, and she worried someone might find out she wasn’t a legal resident of the United States and report her to federal authorities.

Now scared to leave the house, she’s bracing for the worst. She’s afraid she’ll be stopped, found out by law enforcement and deported. She’s afraid her children, even the ones born in the United States, will be harassed. The Trump administration has already challenged the long-held constitutional understanding of birthright citizenship.

Officials in Sara’s adopted state support that endeavor: Wyoming is one of 18 Republican-led states to file a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship.

Mostly today, as the rhetoric directed toward immigrants like her grows ever sharper, Sara is afraid of a future in Wyoming dominated by fear.

“I don’t want to live in fear,” Sara said. “There’s a lot of families like us, in the same situation.”

‘Military-aged male adults’

On Feb. 10, the House Judiciary Committee took testimony from four Wyoming Highway Patrol troopers who deployed to a flashpoint along the Texas border with Mexico. In that hearing, lawmakers and law enforcement together painted a picture of those who come into the country illegally that stood in stark contrast to the story shared by Jose and Sara.

Gov. Mark Gordon sent the troopers in August 2024, as tensions ran high between Texas and the federal government. In a press release announcing the deployment, Gordon said the troopers were going south because Wyoming was “committed to closing the open Biden-Harris border.”

The deployment in fact came amid a sustained drop in illegal border crossings, which had reached a record high in December 2023, according to Pew Research Center, which compiles data on the number of apprehensions of unauthorized migrants by U.S. Border Patrol agents. By August 2024, however, increased enforcement by the Mexican government and actions by President Joe Biden’s administration had brought those encounters to the lowest levels of Biden’s term, and to a level below the high mark of the first Donald Trump administration, according to experts.

The Mexican National Guard began to patrol its side of the border in the winter of 2024, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, told WyoFile. Two months before Wyoming troopers’ August deployment, Biden implemented a rule that capped the number of people the country would grant asylum to daily. That spurred a sharp drop in attempts to enter the country outside established ports of entry, Putzel-Kavanaugh said, and drove migrant families, in particular, to wait in Mexico until they could receive a hearing with border patrol authorities.

But whatever the statistics, the troopers told lawmakers that on the ground the border remained a troubled place, where smugglers and migrants kept Texas law enforcement constantly busy. They described constant vehicle pursuits, large-scale warrant services and dangerous traffic stops looking for smuggled migrants.

“The problems that Texas is facing are massive, the amount of police work that is there is infinite,” Trooper Ethan Smith told the committee.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Art Washut, R-Casper, asked the troopers what types of border crossers law enforcement was encountering most.

“Primarily military-aged male adults,” Smith said.

Describing men crossing the border as military-aged or fighting-aged has grown more common among conservatives. Critics of the labeling say younger men are also the demographic most likely to take risks in search of opportunities to earn money — risks like leaving their homeland and illegally crossing into the United States.

Crossing the border is physically taxing, limiting the number of older adults who try it, Putzel-Kavanuagh said. Historically, men have been more common border crossers than women and have generally sought to establish themselves in the United States before bringing up other family members, she said.

Wyoming should consider procuring the type of bulletproof vests, drones and surveillance equipment the 12 troopers saw deployed by their counterparts in Texas, Rep. Lee Filer, R-Cheyenne, said during the meeting. He expressed fear that a threat was massing in Colorado, given its more liberal policies toward undocumented immigrants.

“Not even 100 miles south of here this is allowed,” Filer said. “They’re allowed to just come in.”

Wyoming, he said, may need to better equip its troopers “to make sure that one, they’re protected, and, two, they’re protecting us.”

Sgt. Brad White told lawmakers about his visit to a state park in the border city of Eagle Pass. The park became the flashpoint in a standoff between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the federal government in January 2024. Abbott ordered Texas law enforcement and the Texas National Guard to occupy the state park, which is next to an international bridge and block Border Patrol from using it to process people crossing the border.

White described Shelby Park as now militarized, with shipping containers used as walls and long coils of barbed or razor-sharp wire strung across the park and in the Rio Grande River. The Texas trooper he was working with told White about a wash of desperate humanity in the park, with areas “knee deep” in clothing and foreign passports shed by people crossing and seeking asylum. People receiving asylum are required to leave many of their belongings behind and carry only things they can fit into a small Department of Homeland Security-issued bag, according to previous news reporting.

White shared one story about a migrant who was not a military-aged adult. One day, he was tasked with interviewing a 13-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been caught crossing the border. Though the girl had begun her border crossing with a group, but told officers she had been abandoned. The girl was lacerated with cuts from the razor wire, White said.

The ‘right way’

Sweetwater County resident Elizabeth, not her real name, first entered the United States when she was 10 years old. She was not smuggled across the border and did not have to avoid razor wire but instead came in on a visa that expired when she was 15.

Today, she’s a mental health worker. When she was studying for her master’s degree at the University of Wyoming, even some of her close friends did not know she wasn’t legally in the country. Now in her mid-twenties, Elizabeth just became a legal resident last year. She achieved that status by marrying a U.S. citizen. In a few more years she can become a citizen herself.

Had she not gotten married, Elizabeth did not see a path to becoming a legal citizen, she told WyoFile.

“You always hear that argument, ‘If you’re going to come here, do it the right way,’” she said. “There isn’t a right way. The only reason I’m here and I have status is because I got married. I have a master’s degree, I speak English, I’ve been here for more than 10 years and it still wasn’t an option.”

Sara echoed that sentiment. She became eligible for a special visa issued to victims of a crime in 2016, after an assault. That program, called a U-visa, could have provided her protected status at least for a time. But she has spent years pursuing it, she said, and thousands of dollars on lawyers.

“What is the right way?” Sara said. “I’ve been in the immigration system for more than 13 years.”

While Elizabeth now has legal status, her 18-year-old sister, who lives in Wyoming as well, does not. Elizabeth is scared that her sister might be caught up in the Trump administration’s widening drive to deport people, though her sister does not have any criminal record. A recent Senate bill brought by Torrington Republican Cheri Steinmetz would have made it a felony to knowingly transport or shelter an undocumented person. That measure would have made Elizabeth a criminal for giving her sister a ride, she noted.

Senators killed Steinmetz’s bill, 20-10, on Feb. 10.

But Republicans, both at the state level and nationally, aren’t moving toward creating any clearer pathways to citizenship. With Gordon and Wyoming’s government in full support, they seek instead to strike at one of the most bedrock routes.

Until Trump issued an executive order to unilaterally end it, citizenship for babies born in the U.S. had been an unchallenged constitutional principle since a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1898.

In a brief calling for the court to uphold Trump’s order, Wyoming Attorney General Bridget Hill and her colleagues argued that the principle was bad for the country. And in doing so, the Republican attorneys general, like lawmakers in Cheyenne, sweepingly cast immigrants as a public safety threat.

“For the past four years, disastrous immigration policies transformed every State into a border state by flooding them with illegal aliens, including criminals convicted of crimes in their home country, violent international gang members, and suspected ISIS terrorists,” the brief read. “Illegal immigration imposes significant costs on the States and their people. And creating incentives for illegal immigration puts lives at risk.”

The brief contends immigrant births drive up Medicaid and other costs — both for the medical care accompanying the birth and for the life of the child. “As American citizens, these children may, for example, participate in state welfare programs, receive state healthcare, and obtain a driver’s license.” The brief does not note that those children will likely grow up to be tax-paying adults with jobs — and like Elizabeth, the mental health worker, some might even take jobs in fields where Wyoming faces an acute shortage.

Even Jose, with his pride in the Latino work ethic, agrees that some people come into the country with criminal intent, and he takes no issue with the government finding and deporting them. But criminals mark the slimmest minority of those crossing the border, he said.

Media and political attention have focused on specific instances of horrific crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. But outside those cases, academic studies and research conducted by immigration advocacy groups have not found any link between migration and increased crime. Studies instead have found that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens. The brief by the Republican attorneys general does not offer any statistical rebuke of those studies — stating only that crimes by undocumented immigrants “have elicited national outrage and bipartisan response.”

Migrants that arrive in big waves can strain a community’s services. But Sara feels she and her children benefit, not burden, the state where they’ve long been working, living and going to school.

“We don’t commit crimes, we pay our taxes and we don’t receive any social programming from the government,” she said.

Documents and burdens

Rosa Reyna-Pugh’s family has been in the United States for a long time. Her mom came to the country in 1972 and today has lawful residency — she received a green card during the 1970s and 80s, decades when green cards were more available. It still took her 10 years. Reyna-Pugh and her sister are citizens. They spent their childhood in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border.

The sisters grew up with immigration agents eating next to them in restaurants and evaluating rumors of deportations and workplace raids, they told WyoFile. A heavy law enforcement presence has been part of life along the Rio Grande River since long before Wyoming troopers deployed there.

That exposure to immigration enforcement has helped them spread calm to friends in Wyoming who are worried.

“We’re not in complete panic, but I think we’re more panicking on the policy side of things, because we better understand it,” Reyna-Pugh said.

She and her husband, a military veteran, moved to Wyoming from Mississippi in 2017, and her family followed. The southern state’s economy was struggling. Reyna-Pugh and her sister also often felt people were looking at them as foreigners, they said. Today, she contributes to Wyoming’s civic life as an organizer with the Equality State Policy Center, including through a program for better Latino political advocacy. She lives in Rock Springs with her family but is a presence in the state capitol.

But the more she reads stories about people being detained and questioned, even though they’re citizens, and the more she sees bills like Steinmetz’s or hears increasing rhetoric about criminalizing all immigrants, the more she worries.

Other legislation that would make life harder for Wyoming immigrant families continues to make its way through the Legislature.

Jose and Sara carry driver’s licenses they acquired in New Mexico. That state issues driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, as do 18 others. The Wyoming House passed a bill that would invalidate those driver’s licenses in Wyoming. A senate committee advanced that bill Tuesday.

Reyna-Pugh, her sister and mother have begun carrying their passports with them, anytime they leave the house.

“I’m afraid they’re going to come and pull me in, ask me ‘Where are your papers?’” her sister Rosario said.

She and her family, particularly her husband and sister, talk more and more often about moving to Mexico. Reyna-Pugh sees the defeat of Steinmetz’s bill as a temporary setback for political forces bent on making life difficult for immigrants. Regardless of her citizenship status, those efforts will make Wyoming a more complicated place to live for someone with her skin color and heritage.

“It’s never going to stop,” she said, comparing Steinmetz’s bill to the Hydra, the many-headed monster of Greek mythology. “We might kill this bill, but another one is going to pop up.”

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on February 19, 2025.