We have always known that this case is going to be a hard one to explain to the public. The history of Callaghan is long and includes a U.N. judgement, a massacre of hundreds of wild horses, the oldest land use plan in the country, a protest camp by livestock, and a district famous for kicking things down the road. The HMAs in Callaghan are all very distinct pieces of a story that reads like an entire “Ken Burns style documentary” on the history of the West. 

This is a long read and it only scratches the surface. As with most large HMAs and complexes the public seems to focus on them when the helicopter flies. The HMAs in the Callaghan Complex are now center stage as the “largest roundup of the year” in many social media posts. But this place is so much more than that.

Let’s start with the distinction between the “court case” and a Preliminary Injunction Motion.

First, what a Preliminary Injunction actually is

Before we get into Callaghan, let’s clear up the single most common misunderstanding we hear.

A Preliminary Injunction (PI) is not the court case. It is a motion filed inside a court case. The lawsuit itself — the underlying complaint — is the thing that asks the court to decide, eventually and entirely, whether the Bureau of Land Management broke the law. That takes time. Sometimes a lot of time (unfortunately).

A PI is the emergency tool you reach for while that longer fight plays out. Its whole purpose is to preserve as much of the status quo as possible so that, if we win the underlying case, there is still something left to protect. In plain terms: a PI tries to keep the world from being permanently rearranged before the judge ever rules on the merits.

We want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty: a PI is highly unlikely to be granted (no matter where it is filed). Courts set a high bar. But “unlikely” is not “never.” We have won them before, and how we won is worth understanding.

Horse hit with helicopter. The first court order in history against abusive conduct came when BLM denied this even happened. (photo: LLeigh)

How it can work on the long road

Years ago, during a roundup where horrible things were happening on the range, we asked for emergency relief. The judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order after a helicopter pilot struck a horse. The TRO held and helicopters were stopped through the end of that “gather.” But when it came to the Preliminary Injunction, the judge refused to issue it because that roundup was going to end. (note: Even in a case where the public sees the “harm” as evident, the bar for harm in legal terms is really high. Even in the this case only the unique circumstances of the Plaintiff tied to the “bar of harm.”)

That could have been the end of it. It wasn’t.

We then won a separate motion, in a different case, that reshaped the very legal standard the judge had used to deny our PI — the “likelihood of repetition” standard. Armed with that changed law, the court then issued a Preliminary Injunction barring BLM from using helicopters for the entire life of that gather plan.

That is the long game. That is why we file even when the odds are long. A single motion can move the law, and moving the law protects horses far beyond the one gather in front of us. It can also set precedents that extend beyond a single herd or plan.

If we look at Pancake (phase 1), if we gave up after the Preliminary Injunction was denied, we never would have won the massive precedent that proved roundup plans are not management plans and that BLM illegally delayed the creation of management plans. This case also sent the gather plan back to BLM and it could no longer be used for faolures to analyze the . It also had expansive impact across the entire program as well.

Even if the single motion does not create the impact, the underlying case still can for the long term.

The “case” at Callaghan: attached to the motion, but not the same thing

At Callaghan, the Preliminary Injunction and the underlying complaint are filed together, bolted to each other — but they are still two different things. The complaint asks the court to find that BLM’s whole approach to the Callaghan Complex is unlawful. The case asks the court to void the plan and send it back to BLM. The PI asks the court, right now, before the July 10 roundup, to constrain how BLM carries it out.

This is a genuinely hard, complicated legal move. We know that. We did it anyway, because it is the right thing to do.

What the PI actually asks the court to order

We are not asking the court to stop the Callaghan gather entirely. The court would never grant such a motion when BLM says “there are over 5000 horses and we are just catching 2000.” We know that. We do not like that or agree with that. Wrong is simply wrong. So we narrowed what we are asking for to preserve as much as we can while the underlying case is heard. 

(Note: If you compare our Carter case to the one at Callaghan, they are two different ends of the spectrum. At Callaghan the time it takes for an underlying complaint to be heard, if the roundup does not simply slam one HMA over another, leaves room for a meaningful win in the underlying case. At Carter, if the roundup happens as planned it is a “one and done” and there is no room at all for any meaningful recovery of that herd. Two cases with motions of the same name but different ramifications.)

We are asking the court to force BLM to answer one straightforward question it has spent months refusing to answer: How many horses are you removing, and from which Herd Management Area? In an attempt to gain disclosure of the actual proposed action and a few limitations. 

Can you believe BLM will not answer that one single question? In the past each one of these HMAs would have had a site-specific target disclosed. But after using a purely administrative construct of “complex,” not defined in any law, they simply say they do not have to.

BLM issued a schedule to remove 2,000 wild horses from the Callaghan Complex starting July 10, 2026. The “Complex,” as BLM defines it, spans five distinct units — the Callaghan, South Shoshone, Bald Mountain, and Hickison (north of US Route 50) HMAs, plus the North Shoshone Herd Area — sprawling across 1,145,515 acres, of which wild horses are actually authorized to use only about 329,134 acres. (These boundary lines are wrong and BLM knows it. That is part of the underlying complaint.)

Our attorneys wrote to BLM’s attorneys in April, May, and June asking a single, simple thing: confirm that all 2,000 horses will not be pulled from one HMA alone. BLM refused to answer. Repeatedly.

Their counsel said the agency “does not yet know” where traps will be, or how many horses will come from any location, and — remarkably — claimed the private contractor would decide. BLM’s state Wild Horse and Burro lead confirmed there are “no targeted/logistical numbers per HMA/area” for this gather. This is a real mess that skirts real obligations.

“One HMA.” This is the heart of it, and it is worth slowing down for.

From a courtroom’s-eye view, a gather of “2,000 out of roughly 5,000 horses in a 1.1-million-acre Complex” sounds modest. Forty percent, spread across a vast landscape. Not much of an impact, a judge might think.

But that framing is an illusion created by the word “Complex.”

A “Complex” is not a legal thing. It is an administrative construct. And BLM’s own declarant admitted exactly that in this litigation — conceding the complex is “an administrative management tool,” not “an official designation.” That concession is important. Because the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act does not operate at the level of a “complex.” It operates at the level of an area — the individual HMA — and its Appropriate Management Level (AML). Excess is determined HMA by HMA. Removal is authorized HMA by HMA. The law is written that way for a reason.

• Pulling 2,000 out of ~5,000 across the whole Complex? Sounds small.
• Pulling 2,000 out of the roughly 2,430 horses in South Shoshone alone? That is not a trim. That pushes the population lower than what BLM has agreed (off the record) should be (In a nutshell: BLM was going to amend the land use plan, stopped. Then was writing an HMAP in 2017 just for this HMA and agreed that AML could be set as high as 1000, then just stopped.)

BLM’s refusal to say which of those two things it will do is not a paperwork oversight. It is more than likely the functional miscarriage of law for the horses from South Shoshone (because that is where we believe BLM is going to focus this hit). By analyzing the whole thing as an “administrative complex construct” instead of as five distinct areas, BLM never disclosed the environmental impact of gutting any single HMA — hiding behind an administrative construct.

BLM wants it both ways. Either the “complex” has legal weight — in which case BLM has to defend a unit that appears nowhere in the statute — or the complex is just administrative “ease,” in which case the legally operative unit is the HMA and BLM must ground its numbers in HMA-by-HMA AMLs and the data behind them. BLM’s own declarant chose the latter. That choice concedes our central point: the law lives at the HMA level, and the “complex” is a convenience that, in practice, lets BLM obscure the absence of the HMA-specific targets and data the Act demands.

The AML and boundary lines on paper are wrong

When Laura Leigh worked as a formal BLM volunteer starting in 2016, she and BLM’s own Wild Horse and Burro Specialist agreed the South Shoshone AML was far too low — that a proper number was likely in the range of 500 to 1,000 horses. South Shoshone had been gathered only once since the 1971 Act (in 2008), routinely carried populations above its “high AML,” and the horses there were consistently healthier than in neighboring HMAs (not just our words, BLM said the same thing). The land was not suffering from too many horses.

The boundary lines are wrong too, and BLM knows it.

BLM’s own declarant stated the agency treats a highway as the Callaghan HMA boundary — but the boundary drawn in the EA doesn’t match the highway. That admission confirms what we’ve said for years: BLM knows the boundaries are wrong, has known, and those wrong lines have artificially suppressed the AML in favor of removal.

BLM knows the boundary line is wrong, admits it.

Yet BLM refused to actually analyze this in the HMAP (this is all part of the underlying complaint). 

The population data no one can explain

Sitting underneath all of this is data that simply does not hold together. As we laid out in our companion piece, “The Math That Does Not ‘Math,’ “ BLM’s own population estimates for this Complex lurch 40 to 50 percent up and then down, year to year, with no gathers to explain the swings — patterns consistent with inconsistent survey “padding,” with horses being pushed across HMA lines by mining and disturbance, and with removals BLM won’t claim. BLM’s own 2008 decision documents already admitted that South Shoshone and Bald Mountain showed negative growth “that cannot be explained,” alongside reports of aircraft herding horses and suspected killing (BLM claims “unexplained” in paperwork but they know what happened).

You cannot lawfully remove “excess” horses from an HMA when you can’t accurately say how many are there, using an AML that was never valid, inside boundaries you admit are wrong. 

That is not a basis for a roundup. It is a basis that demonstrates a real need for a real management plan with real analysis of data. But BLM told everyone that actual analysis could not be done because they did not have the space to do it in paperwork where they lumped a roundup plan together with a management plan and then created self-imposed page limits. 

If this hasn’t made you crazy yet: congratulations, you can now enter the long haul of being a wild horse advocate. 

Why we fight. 

If the court denies the PI, BLM can still hit one HMA under its complex-wide assertion. The roundup may proceed. If we win the underlying case — after the roundup — that win will eventually force BLM to do what it has dodged for nearly fifty years: fix the boundaries, recalculate the AMLs, write real herd management area plans that include fixing water sources in disrepair for decades, and manage each HMA on its own facts.

So why file a Preliminary Injunction where the odds of winning are extremely slim? If BLM empties South Shoshone this July, that one HMA will have suffered the most, and it will have the longest, hardest road back to recovery — while the paperwork that should have protected it gets corrected years too late for real justice. Even if we lose based on BLM not saying outright that they are just going to hit South Shoshone making the assertion “speculative,” we can still file for reconsideration should BLM take that path once the roundup begins. (We can also expand welfare claims should violations occur as the roundup proceeds and ask for reconsideration).

Yes, it is a lot of work. Why not just run only the long game to protect the herds long term? Because it is all simply wrong. And, if we are going to fight for justice, justice involves the whole battle and not simply the easier parts.

We are fighting the good fight because it is the right thing to do. Regardless of the odds. Regardless of how long we have to fight.

Just a P.S. as there seems to be some denial on social media about livestock going out in the HMAs. Livestock is out. This spring thousands of sheep over several valleys hit the range. The sheep (and dogs) kept not only wild horses, but pronghorn and other animals from gaining access to water throughout.  Instead concentrating use in areas where there was no risk of getting bitten by a dog. Those areas have primarily dysfunctional water sources. (Note: if you are on the range and there are sheep and a dog runs toward you… get back in your vehicle as fast as you can.)

We will do another update shortly. We have a lot of updates in queue from our range team to courtroom and we are working hard to get them to you.

Every court case we bring, every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support.

Our deepest gratitude for helping to keep the fight moving forward.