After hearing resounding disapproval from sheriffs around Wyoming, a legislative committee Friday killed one of two sweeping immigration bills that would have required every sheriff in Wyoming to enter into federal immigration contracts.
Even sheriffs who are actively working to contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement decried House Bill 276 as government overreach, short-sighted and blind to the difficulties that federal contracts impose on small-town sheriffs.
Had it become law, the bill would have required and every county sheriff in Wyoming to establish a federal immigration-enforcing contract. Sheriffs who either failed to establish the contracts or who didn’t show an effort to do so would have lost state funding for law enforcement and for training.
The House Appropriations Committee on Friday completely rewrote the bill so that it would merely have required sheriffs to report their illegal immigrant encounter numbers to the state instead. The rewritten version also would have expired at the end of President Donald Trump’s administration.
But after the rewrite, the committee then scrapped the bill altogether on a 4-3 vote, which makes it unlikely to be resurrected on the state House of Representatives floor for a debate.
“The vast message is there’s serious concerns with the implication of this bill,” Allen Thompson, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, told the committee on Friday.
He’d just left a meeting with 19 county sheriffs and has been cycling through a “flurry of conversations and meetings,” Thompson said.
Wyoming’s sheriffs like to help enforce federal immigration laws, Thompson told the committee.
This is generally the case, though ICE in recent weeks has said that the Teton County Sheriff’s Office did not honor its detainer requests for two years.
Already Working With Ice
Other Wyoming sheriffs, however, have been mobilizing to ink ICE contracts and improve relations with the federal agency in other ways, especially since Trump’s general-election win in November.
Sheriffs have sent personnel to the Southern border to help fight the migrant influx, Thompson said.
Still, of the nation’s 3,083 sheriff’s offices, ICE only has contracts in place with 77, said Thompson. ICE's currently published data is very similar to that figure, saying it has contracts with 75 sheriff's offices.
“There’s a reason for that,” said Thompson. “These agreements cost time and money and incur manpower and commitments many agencies just cannot incur.”
Niobrara County Sheriff Randy Starkey told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday that he has a staff makeup of four deputies. If he has to send two of them to an immigration training, it would be a “financial hardship” on the county.
Starkey still works with ICE as well as he can without a contract, he said.
“The sheriffs wholeheartedly support the message of this bill,” said Thompson. “(But) if this bill passes, we’re sending a message to ICE that they hold all the cards in negotiations — and they have no incentive to listen to what we have to offer and what we have to say.”
The sheriffs whom the bill would harm most are those actively working with ICE to forge contracts, Thompson added.
He also urged the committee to wait and see what Trump’s administration does before making drastic changes. Wyoming law enforcers have seen “tremendous movement in the last three days on a national level,” he added.
Thompson then proposed amendments that were, essentially, a rewrite of the bill into a mere reporting requirement, rather than a contracts mandate.
The reason the bill surfaced in the first place, said Committee Chair John Bear, R-Gillette, was “inconsistency” among Wyoming sheriffs in their willingness to enforce immigration law.
He said it was an effort to help the Trump administration by remedying those inconsistencies.
However, Bear ultimately voted against the bill.
Campbell County Sheriff Scott Matheny, who shares a district with Bear, called it government overreach in a Thursday interview with Cowboy State Daily.
Roll Call
Voting against the bill with Bear were Reps. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, Scott Smith, R-Lingle, and Trey Sherwood, D-Laramie.
Voting in favor were Reps. Bill Allemand, R-Casper, Abby Angelos, R-Gillette, and Jeremy Haroldson, R-Wheatland.
Another similar bill numerous sheriffs also opposed in Thursday interviews with Cowboy State Daily — Senate File 124 — is still pending in the Wyoming Legislature.
SF 124 would also require sheriffs to enter into federal immigration contracts, but left open what would happen to them if the federal government didn’t want to cooperate.
It also would impose other new duties on law enforcement, such as asking every person they arrest and cite about his or her immigration status.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
