CHEYENNE, Wyoming — The Laramie County Sheriff's Office said on Thursday that it has removed 72 commercial truck operators it described as "unsafe and undocumented" from Wyoming roads over the past year, under the county's immigration-enforcement partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Source: CDLLife
The sheriff's office said the removals came through its participation in the federal 287(g) program, which it joined in October 2025. Over the same year, deputies made a total of 538 arrests for federal immigration violations, and the office stressed that all of them "strictly originated from traffic stops involving violations of state law" — that is, deputies say every immigration arrest began with a stop for a state traffic or vehicle violation, not with an immigration check on its own.
Why the county started checking trucks
According to the sheriff's office, the 287(g) program was implemented after community complaints to the Sheriff's Office and other elected officials about unlicensed, unsafe and undocumented commercial truck drivers using county roads to bypass the state's ports of entry — the weigh and inspection stations commercial trucks are required to pass through. The office said those drivers were causing significant safety risks and damage to county roadways. It said the removal of unqualified truck drivers from Laramie County roads has since led to "improvements in public roadway safety."
The enforcement is not new in kind, only in scale and reporting. In an earlier three-day operation, Operation Safe Haul, the sheriff's office worked with the Wyoming Highway Patrol and ICE on Interstate 25, Interstate 80, U.S. Highway 85 and state and county roads around Cheyenne, Carpenter, Burns, Pine Bluffs and Albin. Deputies in that operation alone conducted 195 traffic stops and issued 49 citations, according to the sheriff's office release reported by Wyoming News.
Source: Wyoming News
Sheriff's complaint: no way to report bad trucking companies
Sheriff Brian Kozak also used Thursday's update to press a complaint aimed at Washington rather than at drivers. The sheriff's office said Kozak has had a hard time reporting trucking companies that employ unqualified truck drivers to the federal authorities, and that deputies have repeatedly encountered unsafe commercial truck operators while there is no effective federal mechanism to report negligent or unlawful trucking companies to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The office said Kozak has raised the issue with national and state transportation officials, including National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Administrator Jonathan Morrison and Wyoming Department of Transportation Director Darin Westby.
The legal fight behind the numbers
The program is being challenged in court. On May 26, 2026, the ACLU of Wyoming filed a lawsuit in the First Judicial District Court in Laramie County against Sheriff Kozak over the agency's immigration-enforcement practices. The suit stems from the October 2025 action in which Kozak and 25 deputies were sworn in by ICE to enforce immigration law under the 287(g) provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The ACLU alleges that Kozak overstepped his authority and violated Wyoming law by failing to get approval from the Laramie County Commissioners when he signed the county's 287(g) agreements with ICE, and that he failed to follow the Wyoming Administrative Procedure Act's rulemaking process, which would have allowed community members to comment on the partnership.
Source: CDLLife
"When it comes to decisions that affect our communities, Wyomingites deserve a transparent, democratic process. Sheriff Kozak's decision to unilaterally sign these 287(g) agreements without the approval of the elected County Commission is not only reckless, it is illegal," ACLU of Wyoming executive director Libby Skarin said in the organisation's statement on the lawsuit.
Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows ICE to enter written agreements with state and local law-enforcement agencies so that trained local officers can perform specified federal immigration-enforcement functions, under ICE supervision. Laramie County's deputies were sworn in under such an agreement in October 2025.
Why this matters for Punjabi and immigrant truckers
Cheyenne sits at the crossing of Interstate 80 and Interstate 25, two of the busiest freight corridors in the western United States, and Punjabi and other immigrant truckers run these routes daily between the Midwest, the Mountain West and the West Coast. The practical lesson from Laramie County's own account is that enforcement there begins at the traffic stop: deputies say every immigration arrest this year grew out of a stop for a state-law violation, and commercial drivers were a stated focus because of complaints about trucks bypassing the ports of entry. Drivers crossing Wyoming should expect their CDL, vehicle condition and paperwork to be examined closely at stops and inspections, and carriers should note that the sheriff is now publicly pressing for a way to report the companies that put unqualified drivers on the road — not only the drivers themselves.
What happens next
The ACLU's lawsuit is pending in Laramie County court and will decide whether the sheriff needed county-commission approval and a public rule-making process before signing the 287(g) agreements. The sheriff's office has given no indication the enforcement will pause while the case is heard, and Thursday's figures were presented as a one-year progress report, suggesting the traffic-stop-based checks will continue. On the federal side, there is still no announced USDOT reporting mechanism of the kind Kozak is asking for; whether NHTSA or the Department of Transportation creates one is the second development to watch.