(Reno, NV) Today, Wild Horse Education (WHE) and individual advocates Laura Leigh and Tammi Adams have asked a federal court in Nevada to place limits on a massive helicopter roundup planned for the Callaghan Complex and to require the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to follow the law herd by herd, instead of hiding behind a vague “complex‑wide” number.

BLM has scheduled the removal of 2,000 wild horses from the Callaghan Complex beginning July 10, 2026, under a new “herd management area plan and gather plan” that lumps several distinct herd areas together across more than 1.1 million acres. In its own 2026 population report, BLM estimates there are about 2,538 wild horses in the Callaghan HMA, 2,430 in South Shoshone, 282 in Bald Mountain, and 155 in the Hickison area. Yet the gather schedule simply states that “2,000” horses will be removed from the “Callaghan Complex,” without saying how many will be taken from each HMA.

The motion for preliminary injunction is attached to, and grounded in, a broader complaint that challenges the very foundation of BLM’s management framework for the Callaghan Complex: “appropriate management levels” (AMLs) that were set decades ago for administrative convenience, not through the site‑specific, data‑driven analysis that the National Academy of Sciences has said is essential. The NAS has warned that AMLs are not transparent to stakeholders and are not based on rigorous scientific methods, underscoring that these numbers should not be treated as fixed, unquestionable limits. By allowing BLM to proceed with a helicopter gather that could remove up to 2,000 horses from a single HMA under those flawed AMLs, the agency would create exactly the kind of irreversible harm this lawsuit is designed to prevent: if plaintiffs ultimately succeed in proving that the existing AMLs are invalid, the horses taken under this July operation cannot be put back on the range, and the demographic, genetic, and ecological damage to the targeted herd cannot be undone.

Note: BLM had begun Scoping to update the oldest Land Use Plan (LUP) in the nation that covers these herds in 2011. BLM abandoned the full LUP/RMP revision by 2014, yet amended planning for many uses through site-specific planning documents. BLM began creating Scoping documents for HMAPs for herds included in this “Callaghan gather plan” in 2016 that would have created the much needed amendments to the LUP. By 2018, BLM simply stopped working on those. Instead, BLM just lumped a bunch of HMAs together, called them a “Complex,” and created the largest gather plan in the country. This type of action is purely based in administrative ease, not in equitable process and “hard look” analysis required under law. 

Wild Horse Education is also warning the court and the public that a July helicopter roundup is especially dangerous for foals in this terrain during active foaling season, which can extend into July. In rugged, high‑elevation country, foals and heavily pregnant mares are far more vulnerable to exhaustion, injury, separation, miscarriage, and death during helicopter chases and the chaos of capture, loading, and confinement. These risks are even more troubling when BLM intends to move pregnant mares and foals into holding corrals that are closed to the public.

BLM keeps no meaningful public statistics on foal deaths and miscarriages associated with these operations, just as it typically does not publish complete statistics on injuries and deaths in off‑range corrals. But eyewitness documentation and records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show these losses can be high, and that many deaths linked to a roundup occur after capture, not simply during the chase itself. That is one more reason the agency should not be allowed to launch a July roundup under a vague plan that leaves the public and the court in the dark about where the real impact will fall.

The harm does not end with the last helicopter flight. Horses removed from the Callaghan Complex would be shipped to the Palomino Valley Wild Horse and Burro Center and the Indian Lakes Off‑Range Corrals, where years of documentation and FOIA work have revealed long stays, disease, injuries tied to facility conditions, and death rates that are far higher than most people realize. Many horses spend months or years in these corrals, and some never leave.

In addition, BLM has been accelerating its Sale Program, where title transfers immediately, while doing a poor job of tracking what happens next. Wild Horse Education has already documented once‑wild horses turning up in kill pens just days after sale events, and there is a very real fear that horses removed from Callaghan could disappear into this pipeline before they can even be located or steered into safe, private care.

BLM has tied this roundup to a new Callaghan Complex HMAP and Gather Plan finalized in February 2026 and scheduled the gather to start in July 2026. At the same time, the agency has approved expanded mining operations in the North Shoshone Herd Area and near South Shoshone and the Callaghan HMA, while Wild Horse Education is already before the Interior Board of Land Appeals challenging another mine just north of the area.

These overlapping decisions raise serious concerns that BLM is moving to clear wild horses out of the way of hard‑rock mining, rather than managing them as an “integral part” of the public lands as the law requires. The motion argues that going forward with the gather under these conditions, using a vague “complex‑wide” plan and outdated AMLs, is arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful under the Wild Free‑Roaming Horses and Burros Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Wild Horse Education (WHE) filed an administrative appeal after BLM finalized the Callaghan Complex plan in February, and then brought that challenge into federal district court in May. Because BLM continues to refuse to clarify how the scheduled “gather” will be implemented, WHE and the individual plaintiffs have concluded they have no choice but to seek a preliminary injunction to prevent further irreversible harm while the case proceeds. Plaintiffs are represented by Greenfire Law, PC of Berkeley, California.

We need your support to keep our teams engaging lawmakers, our team fighting in the court, our team ready to run the roundup schedule. Every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every court case we bring, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support.