GOVERNMENT & ACCOUNTABILITY

A federal judge let the removal of 624 horses proceed near Mono Lake. The agencies’ own record shows why the consultation question is not settled.

By Kim M. Braud | August 26, 2026

The wild horses came off the range in July. The legal question that was supposed to stop them did not go with them.

On June 29, the Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute Tribe of the Benton Paiute Reservation sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the Department of Agriculture in federal court in Sacramento. The suit sought to halt the removal of 624 wild horses, roughly 90 percent of the documented herd, from in and around the Montgomery Pass Wild Horse Territory, a 207,921-acre expanse straddling the California and Nevada line east of Mono Lake. The tribe’s reservation sits at the territory’s southeastern corner, inside the removal area.

The complaint, Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute Tribe v. Department of the Interior, No. 2:26-cv-02323 (E.D. Cal.), does not argue that the government lacks authority to manage the herd. It argues the government skipped a step the law requires first: government-to-government consultation with the tribe under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, along with two executive orders and a joint secretarial order, before approving the 2025 decision that authorized the roundup.

What the agencies’ own record says

The strongest evidence in the tribe’s filing is not the tribe’s language. It is the government’s.

The March 2025 Decision Record that authorized the removal states, in its own text, that “Tribal Consultation is ongoing,” and that concerns about Traditional Cultural Properties and sacred sites “will continue to be considered.” The agencies’ Finding of No Significant Impact conceded that Native American cultural connections to the area “were not fully reviewed” and were “limited to discussing lithic scatters,” a reference to scattered stone fragments rather than the springs, burial areas, and petroglyph sites the tribe says are present.

An agency that approves an action while its own record calls the required consultation unfinished has documented the gap the lawsuit is built on.

Those are the government’s words, in the government’s own decision. Whatever a court ultimately makes of them, they are not the tribe’s characterization. They are the record.

The meeting both sides blame each other for. Here the record forks, and the fork is where the case was decided.

The tribe’s account, as laid out in the complaint: it answered the government’s October 2023 form letter within a day, then waited fifteen months for a substantive meeting; its chairman was turned away from a November 2024 objection meeting; and in December 2025 the agencies offered only a “listening session,” citing active litigation. A consultation meeting set for May 19, 2026, the tribe says it confirmed, never happened, because the agencies invoked the appeal in a separate wild horse case, Tobin v. Rollins, to limit what they would discuss.

The government’s account, which the court credited, runs the other way: the agencies made repeated attempts to consult, the tribe did not respond, and the tribe canceled the May 19 meeting itself.

On July 7, Senior U.S. District Judge Dale Drozd denied the tribe’s emergency request to stop the roundup. He found that the agencies had made repeated attempts to consult and that the plaintiffs canceled the May 19 session. The removal began the next day.

Why the denial is not the end of the question

A temporary restraining order is decided quickly and on a narrow test: whether the party asking is likely to win, and likely to suffer irreparable harm before a full hearing. Drozd’s order answered that emergency question. It did not resolve the merits.

Two things remain open. The count the removal rests on was taken in 2024 and put the herd at 694, though a June 2026 agency notice cited 699, and no census has been taken since, across two hard winters the tribe says killed many animals. And the agencies’ own concession that consultation was “ongoing” when they approved the action is a documentary fact the emergency ruling did not erase. The larger case continues.

What the case comes down to

Set aside the image of horses running across open ground, and the question that is left is procedural. It is the question this newsroom asks of any public process: did the agency do what the law requires before it acted, and can the affected party show that it did not.

On the emergency record, the government’s version prevailed. On the full record, the agencies’ own documents describe a process that was, by their own word, still open when the decision was signed. Those two facts are not in tension by accident.

They are what a court will have to reconcile.

Kim M. Braud is the Founder & Editor of Evans Cutchmore Press, an independent newsroom covering Louisiana and the Gulf South. Her reporting focuses on government accountability, infrastructure, business, culture, and the public policies that shape communities.

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