Matthew Hyde replaces Eric Odell at a time Colorado’s wolf-reintroduction program is at a crossroads with increasing rancher conflicts, a federal review but also new packs and pups
Colorado has plenty to offer anyone who makes it to the Centennial State. We’ve given you 150 of our favorites. Here are just a few of yours.
While town officials say they don’t have authority over the center, opponents at a meeting Wednesday said they want them to block what some dubbed an ICE “concentration camp”
This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
“Farmwork in New Mexico, legal work authorization card required.”
It was fall 2020, three years after Mark and Mary (not their real names) first moved to the United States from eastern China. Laid off from their jobs a few months earlier, they were desperate for income, living in a cramped Monterey Park, California, apartment that they shared with four others.
For over two decades in China, alongside their day jobs, they had cultivated peanuts, rice and sweet potatoes on two acres in an undeveloped agricultural part of the country. The crops helped keep their six children fed. But as their own parents aged and their children got older, they wanted a steadier future.
The ad, on a popular job postings site for Chinese-speaking migrant workers, didn’t specify what kind of farmwork they’d be doing, but the line about paperwork made it sound legitimate. They called the number listed in the ad, and the details sounded promising: $200 a day for eight to 10 hours of “flowering trimming,” with food and accommodation provided. A few days later, they received a text message showing the location: Farmington, a sleepy oil-and-gas town of 46,000 on the edge of the Navajo Nation. It is the largest city in the Four Corners, the area where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona meet, and it is one of New Mexico’s major towns.
In the first week of October, the couple began the 740-mile, nearly 12-hour drive east. As they neared Farmington, they watched the sun bear down on Ship Rock, an escarpment rising 1,400 feet above the rugged high desert, visible for 50 miles in almost every direction. Beneath the watchful gaze of the winged, cathedral-like pinnacle, the San Juan River trickled through a dry, khaki-colored valley past stony mesas and rolling hills.
When the couple arrived at their destination, a pink, two-story motel, Mary told me that a middle-aged Chinese-speaking man took their car keys and confiscated their phones. Mary and her husband were put into separate rooms. Some had been converted into a makeshift processing facility, with the mattresses stashed in the bathroom and the dresser drawers emptied out. The doors were kept locked or guarded, according to legal documents, and Mark, Mary and the other workers were told to sit on an upside-down bucket beside heavy-duty black trash bags stuffed with lime-green marijuana plants.
Mary remembered the plant’s distinctive odor. The work left her nose swollen “like an elephant” and she spiked a 100-degree fever. Mary’s assignment was to cut the leaves from the plants’ buds with scissors from 7 a.m. or earlier, until 10 at night, working almost nonstop, according to legal documents. She was denied medication, and when she tried to stop work, she was forced to continue, a civil case she and others filed later stated.
Mark and Mary had unwittingly walked into the shadowy fringes of New Mexico’s brand-new legal weed industry — and the early days of a network that sought to use Chinese immigrants as labor on the farms that supplied the growing demand for the drug.
New Mexico, which legalized the adult use of weed in 2021, began its first licensed sales in 2022, and currently sells at least $35 million every month. Colorado and other states in the region have also legalized the plant’s use over the past decade and a half. At the same time, cannabis entrepreneurs started to see the potential for an unexpected workforce: Chinese immigrants. With youth unemployment hovering around 15% in China amid the post-pandemic economic downturn, over 60,000 Chinese migrants crossed the Mexican border into the U.S. from 2021 to 2024.
When law enforcement tried to rein in illegal weed operations like this one, the workers became the focus of their efforts. Despite the efforts of social support groups, the trafficked immigrant workers ended up bearing the brunt of the punishment for the very system that exploited them.
LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of Oct. 8, 2020, a local passerby noticed that a man was moving marijuana plants from a vehicle into a room at the motel. A strong smell of weed was emanating from cars in the parking lot with California license plates. Shortly after that passerby dialed 911, police arrived at the motel room and knocked on the doors.
The workers opened the doors. “At first, I felt like I was finally rescued,” Mary said. But that quickly changed: The officers escorted the 16 workers out of the rooms, instructed and gestured for them to sit or kneel on the ground, according to police dashcam video included in court filings against Mary. Some held their hands behind their heads, and as they waited over two hours to be transferred to the San Juan County Adult Detention Center, a policeman who spoke some Mandarin Chinese arrived and asked if the group knew what they were cutting. Everyone shook their heads.
After approximately five days of detention, Mary and the workers were advised that they couldn’t leave San Juan County pending trial, according to charging documents. She stared at the legal papers and tried to make sense of letters she did not understand.
A few days earlier, I’d been in Farmington, running down rumors about illegal marijuana grows involving hundreds of Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. I collected notes on ads for investment opportunities and jobs, describing a marijuana operation on tribal land as “undoubtedly a golden opportunity.” I ran into Chinese-speaking workers in mobile home parks and half-empty strip malls in and around Farmington. Outside a motel, I stopped to talk to a Chinese-speaking man about to light a cigarette — one of Mary’s co-workers, it turned out. We stayed in touch, and after he was arrested alongside Mary, he shared his charging documents with me, clearly confused.
In the wake of the bust at the Farmington motel, law enforcement intended to shut down the entire operation. More than 1,000 Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants were employed by the sprawling enterprise at its peak, Navajo Nation police told me.
Given the high-profile nature of the bust, local law enforcement took the stance that anyone, at any level, involved in illegal cannabis growing was culpable. “You can’t say you don’t know what’s going on,” one of San Juan’s top police officers told me at the time. “We will charge them. And we will prosecute them.”
“At first, I felt like I was finally rescued.”
This is not a new — or uncommon — approach. Since 1979, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has offered grants to fund cannabis eradication. Success is often measured by tracking seizures and destruction, with state and local agencies presenting the number of weapons seized and the amount of product destroyed. That leads law enforcement to focus on the physical operation rather than its finances and leadership. It’s easier to find the workers, laboring in the fields and hoop houses, than it is to catch the financial backers and often-digital systems used to bring in laborers under false pretenses. The legalization and decriminalization of cannabis has also reduced interest in prosecuting those behind the business.
This means that the harshest consequences often fall on those who were least responsible. In early November 2020, a few weeks after local law enforcement targeted the Farmington motel, federal officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the DEA raided Diné politician and entrepreneur Dineh Benally’s farms on the Navajo Nation. They found dozens of Chinese workers, who were underdressed for the cold weather and half-asleep among the plants inside the heated hoop houses. The workers were searched and bused to a nearby high school, where the gym and classrooms were arranged for interrogation.
None of the farm’s operators or backers were arrested at the time, however. By the time law enforcement arrived, they were long gone. The charges against the 16 workers who were picked up at the motel weren’t dropped until late November, over two weeks after the bust. Yet they were clearly not the ones running the business, and at least some of them had no idea the work they engaged in was illegal.
Although law enforcement hadn’t arrested the operation’s leadership, I wanted to know just how dozens of Chinese-speaking workers had ended up in this remote part of New Mexico, a state with few Chinese communities.
SOME OF THE WORKERS I spoke with mentioned a “Mr. Lin.” I tracked the phone number on the Chinese-language investment ads — as well as various speeding citations and calls to local and tribal police — to Irving Rea-Yui Lin, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur based in Monterey Park, California. He agreed to meet me at the lobby of a two-star motel on the eastern end of Farmington. Solid and slightly hunched at 5 feet 7, Lin, then almost 70, resembled any nonchalant grandpa you might run into at a park in China.
Around 2018, he told me, he began exploring investment opportunities in cannabis and met Benally. In early 2020, Lin brought Benally to L.A.’s suburban Chinatown and served as translator as Benally discussed cannabis investment in the Navajo Nation.
“(Benally) said they were a sovereign nation with their own regulations and licenses, which was similar to China’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement in Hong Kong,” Lin recalled. Around 100 people showed up at the meeting room. “The pandemic made it a golden opportunity.”
“We started doing whatever we could,” Lin recalled. Cannabis is strictly illegal in almost all of East and Southeast Asia. And in the U.S., Asian Americans are more likely to believe that marijuana legalization makes communities less safe and to show less support for it than other ethnic groups.
In spite of that, Benally and Lin’s strategy seemed to work. Some people invested tens of thousands of dollars — their life savings — after Benally promised that it was legitimate. Posts showed up on WeChat groups and in classified ads in Chinese-language newspapers through job agencies, offering job opportunities in “New Mexico flower trimming,” “weeding on Indian Reservations” and “building greenhouses and pipework on the Navajo Nation,” according to court filings.
“And if they’re stuck in New Mexico, they’re stuck on a whole other planet.”
Lin made it clear in repeated interviews with me that he was well aware of the nature of the plants involved — he knew it was marijuana — but that he saw it as part of a long tradition of surviving by using loopholes in the legal system. “Just like how I made money in New York 40 years ago: always going through Pian Men,” he said, using a common Chinese phrase that literally means “side gates”—unofficial, higher‑risk ways of earning money by working off the books, hustling in cash‑only side gigs or trading in gray‑market goods when you can’t get a regular job.
“The tendency to find side gates is a natural one,” Lin added. For first-generation immigrants, “many methods were unconventional, and jobs and gigs were also intrinsically unconventional. Over time, no matter what, it was all side gates. It becomes a habit.”
Lin himself survived on these side gates: After graduating from college in Taiwan, he became a seaman on the Pacific route from Taiwan to San Francisco, where he first dreamed of immigrating while gazing at Oakland’s bustling harbor. In his sailor’s cabin, he studied English and read computer science textbooks between his onboard duties. He developed a plan: “Come to the United States, take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), study computer science, and get a job at IBM,” Lin said. But he needed money to cover his tuition and expenses at a computer science master’s program in New Jersey, and so he was drawn in by ads shared by job agencies in Manhattan’s Chinatown. There, he found his first job as a warehouse manager, earning $220 a week, or over $10,000 a year.
After graduating, he dabbled in other businesses, including information technology, nickel mines, gold mines and real estate. He was once the leader of a coalition of Chinese IT entrepreneurs, he told me. Chinese people on the East Coast called him “President Lin,” he said. But his reputation was tarnished by at least one copyright lawsuit against his company in the late 1990s, and his other ventures were short-lived successes, forcing him to roam the fringes of American society and reestablish himself in L.A.’s suburban Chinatown.
The workers at Benally’s operation, he said, were doing much the same. Cannabis cultivation operates nationwide: It’s seasonal, labor-intensive and easy to staff informally through brokers. New Mexico is not the only place it has surfaced; in recent years, raids in California, Oklahoma, Massachusetts and Maine have uncovered similar recruitment and trafficking allegations.
Lin shuttled more than 100 workers from Los Angeles to New Mexico, sometimes for a fee, he said, and offered services to transport up to twenty thousand marijuana seedlings in his 12-seat van. He profited from the business, he admitted. Meanwhile, workers and investors lacked the inside information he had.
New Mexico has a long history of trafficked workers, but the systems set up to help the victims, who often spoke Spanish, struggled to support those affected by Lin and Benally’s operation. Lynn Sanchez, director of the human trafficking outreach department at The Life Link, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that connects crime victims with legal, economic and housing support, first met Mary and other Chinese workers shortly after the raid on the Navajo Nation. She and a few social service providers waited at the high school where the workers were bused. They brought Spanish- and English-language pamphlets, since law enforcement had told her about providing services to “displaced farmworkers.”
She was surprised to learn that all the workers were Chinese. With a FBI agent translating, Sanchez tried to explain what Life Link could offer. But initially only eight of the nearly 60 Chinese workers Sanchez spoke with that day accepted Life Link’s prepaid debit cards, clothing, food and other essentials. The agent, she recalled, shook her head and snapped: “They don’t want help; they just want another job.”
A public defender later called her. The public defender, Nicole Hall, had seen a stack of case files about the 16 workers picked up at the Farmington motel, with misspelled Chinese names. “Something was wrong,” Hall later told a reporter. “And none of these people should be going to jail.”
Sanchez followed up with Mary and the other 15 workers at the two hotel rooms in Farmington they shared. “I don’t know what they were eating or how they were surviving, but it looked like they’ve been through an awful lot,” Sanchez told me.
The migrant workers found the place they’d ended up disorienting. Outside, the San Juan River Valley looked tranquil in the shifting pink-orange light of a sunny late afternoon.
“You don’t see the world the same way when you’ve been psychologically overwhelmed like that, to be their age, to be taken at gunpoint to jail, and then to be told you have to stay here, in this climate that was really very anti-Asian,” Sanchez said. “And if they’re stuck in New Mexico, they’re stuck on a whole other planet.”
The workers’ mugshots had been published by local outlets and republished in China; the anti-Asian hatred that spread during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic further made them a target. While waiting for their hearings, many stayed inside, afraid to be seen, afraid to ask for help.
After the charges were dropped in late November 2020, many of the workers used state funds for crime victims to return to Monterey Park. They found a cold welcome: Few employers would hire them once news of their suspected involvement in the black-market marijuana industry got out in Chinatowns in the U.S. and in China. At least three workers said that they’d received random phone calls that warned them not to seek help or cooperate with law enforcement. “There was a sense that someone was following us,” Mary told me.
Some of them were desperate to take any opportunity that came their way. Hoping to save money and buy medication for his daughter in China, who suffered from a serious heart condition, a man in his 50s immediately took on a job transporting marijuana plants, according to Sanchez and Lin. In late 2021, he was pulled over while driving a truckload and was arrested in Oklahoma. He then spent around a year and a half in immigration detention centers in Colorado and Texas. During that time, his daughter died.
The other workers were due to receive checks that covered their lost wages in New Mexico. Sanchez decided to deliver them in person instead of mailing them. She repeatedly visited Monterey Park, a low‑rise, predominantly Asian suburb where Chinese restaurants, storefront churches and employment agencies share the same strip malls. She walked along streets where employment agency windows were filled with ads for working-class jobs. Workers were lined up at the door, sometimes out into the street.
Sanchez realized that Mark and Mary’s experience wasn’t an isolated one. According to one estimate, around 2.5 million Chinese migrant workers had immigrated in recent decades, many passing through Monterey Park, driven by political suppression and economic distress. “Monterey Park was packed with a dense mass of Chinese men looking for work,” one of the other Life Link employees told me. “And some would end up in New Mexico.”
Sanchez soon learned that Mary no longer felt safe in Monterey Park. She offered Mary and other workers the chance to relocate to New Mexico. Mary and her husband were among the first to say yes. Life Link helped them apply for affordable housing, rent assistance and health care. Sanchez connected Mary and the others with legal partners, including the New Mexico Immigration Law Center and the Human Trafficking Legal Center of Washington, D.C., to apply for T-visas, which are reserved for trafficking victims and have an annual rejection rate as high as 40%.
Sanchez also hired her organization’s first Chinese-speaking employee: Yuxi Qin, whose father was one of the workers arrested in Farmington. He accepted Life Link’s assistance and moved to New Mexico, and after she saw his relocation and recovery, she began to help Sanchez with the growing number of Chinese-speaking clients.
“The illicit cannabis industry brought migrant workers from China, a place that we’d never expected to see in New Mexico,” Sanchez said. She acknowledged that it had been a learning experience; next time, she hoped, nobody would fall through the cracks. “There is much more to do.”
At the same time, some law enforcement agencies wanted to focus on the people behind the illicit cannabis trade. Like Sanchez, Kevin McInerney, a commander at California’s Department of Cannabis Control and one of Sanchez’s West Coast partners, had spent time strolling around Monterey Park. Following the lead of a Chinese-speaking anti-trafficking investigator with the U.S. Department of Labor, McInerney would sit at an unpretentious joint that served classic Northern Chinese dishes or stop by the employment agencies to read the job postings taped to the doors and talk to laborers waiting on the street for rides to worksites or to the airport for out-of-state work.
“The workers seemed more like victims of the system than criminals.”
“They were picked up during the days, dropped off, and then ended up in the day-rental converted apartments, where multiple people slept in the same room, with their belongings in a separate place,” McInerney said. The workers seemed more like victims of the system than criminals. He began to have second thoughts about local news clips showing police officers busting into residential shacks and handcuffing workers at marijuana farms. The visuals fit into the conventional logic of dealing with drug crimes, but left him with a lot of questions.
In 2022, California’s Department of Cannabis Control started an anti-trafficking and worker exploitation effort, he said, to “investigate the recruitment pipeline funneling migrant workers into cannabis” and “shift the culture of law enforcement.”
“That’s been a struggle, not just here,” he said, due to the lack of resources for the time-consuming work of investigating the people behind the recruitment, transportation, housing and coercion.
The kind of thing that Lin and others allegedly engaged in is particularly hard to tackle. Labor advocates and investigators have come to realize it is a type of “affinity exploitation.” Operators recruit newcomers through the same language and social circles that immigrants rely on to survive, turning those same trusted networks of trust into a funnel for fraud, coercion and sometimes forced labor. And once they’re involved, the people themselves become a part of the supply chain. Without stability, legal experts explained, people can be exploited by every aspect of their basic needs.
“Cannabis entered and operated within this existing infrastructure,” said Erika Moritsugu, former deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and the Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander senior liaison at the White House, in an email. The New Mexico case caught her eye after she learned about it through “community partners on the ground” and “field colleagues in government.” She met with eight of the Chinese workers over a video chat in 2021.
But law enforcement’s growing awareness of the role — and the power — of the illicit operations’ backers lagged behind the fast-moving business. Lin emerged from the Navajo Nation bust relatively unscathed, except for, he said, the visit a law enforcement officer made to his hotel in Farmington. And he quickly returned to corralling new investors for new projects that his partners were starting in Oklahoma.
The winter following the bust, I watched him pitch a group of 20 or so at a Chinese community center in Los Angeles County. The attendees sat at a safe social distance
from one another, wearing masks or plastic face shields. The flyer they held promised “Legally licensed, completely transparent! The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought a turning point to the industry! A senior expert explains!”
As he took the stage, Lin urged people to join him in investing in cannabis in Oklahoma and promised them a fortune.
“The return on investment is higher than 1,000%. Finance one greenhouse, and you’ll walk away with $300,000.” Lin wandered around in the room with a mic in his hand, gesturing like a stand-up comedian. Once investors put in the funds, he said, “our professional team will take care of the rest.”
Lin said that much of the demand for marijuana grown in Oklahoma came from out-of-state buyers because it was so costly to enter the state-sanctioned cannabis industry. “Running a dispensary is very expensive, and we reduce their cost,” he added.
Transporting marijuana products across state lines is a federal felony offense, but Lin didn’t make that clear to his potential investors at the seminar or the workers he and his partners hired from job agencies.
Lin obtained a permit for a marijuana farm in Waterflow, an unincorporated community between Farmington and Shiprock, that was issued by New Mexico’s Cannabis Control Division in December 2023. (The license for NNK Equity LLC was revoked in August 2024, after a compliance check determined that the grow had exceeded its allotted plant count.) He also reconnected with Benally, with whom he claimed to have cut ties after the Farmington hotel bust. He told me that he had helped to bring workers to Estancia, New Mexico, 45 minutes southeast of Albuquerque, for a year. Benally had established cannabis grows there.
The operation in Estancia proved to be a turning point for how law enforcement officers in New Mexico dealt with the workers they found. David (not his real name), a sturdy 20-something-year-old cattle rancher from the dry grasslands of northwestern China, was one of those who ended up working in Estancia. His spouse lived in the U.S., and in 2023, he sold his cattle, left China and entered the U.S., walking across the Mexican border to reunite with his spouse. Drawn by the hope of earning at least $4,500 a month, he booked a flight from New York, where he was living, to Albuquerque. There, he and another young Chinese man were picked up by a car bound for Estancia.
“Finance one greenhouse, and you’ll walk away with $300,000.”
“I was in what seemed like a complete wasteland,” David told me. “Without a single light bulb in sight. And you wouldn’t even know if you were being sold to anyone.”
David said the farm had around 60 employees, all Chinese-speaking, in an isolated environment: one locked gate, dogs as guards. Workers worked long hours, and he wanted to quit on the second day, but his request was denied. And without a car, leaving felt impossible.
On the morning of the third day, as he ate breakfast and prepared to work, at least 100 officers arrived at the gate, David remembered. Two armored vehicles entered. A truck with a large antenna came in, he said, and a trailer with porta-potties followed. Three helicopters circled overhead. This time, law enforcement was ready: Through loudspeakers, David recalled, officers made announcements in Mandarin Chinese, saying they were from the New Mexico attorney general’s office.
“Don’t panic, we’re here to search,” one of the loudspeakers blasted. Workers emerged from hoop houses, crouching and covering their heads. Officers checked their documentation. A bus arrived for anyone who wanted to leave. Most decided to keep working until payday, but six workers boarded it, including David.
Law enforcement connected them to Lynn Sanchez and Life Link. David was initially skeptical of Sanchez and her organization. But Mary told him, “Lynn is kind-hearted and genuinely here to help you,” David recalled.
On Sept. 27, 2023, Mark, Mary and 13 other Chinese migrant workers who were arrested in Farmington filed a civil lawsuit against Lin, Benally and others they alleged had trafficked them. McInerney told me the workers’ progress — finding stable housing, legal support, a clearer path to immigration relief — offered a model: Treat trafficked workers as victims first, and use that stability to build cases that target networks rather than individual laborers.
When I asked Irving Lin for comment on the civil lawsuit, he claimed that he “has a clean background” and merely served as an interpreter for immigrant workers. He felt betrayed by his own people and claimed, inaccurately, that the workers were able to get green cards. “Again, it’s all through side gates,” he said.
His obstinance reminded me of a conversation we had just before Lunar New Year in 2021. He recalled that after he started dabbling in the marijuana industry in 2018, his wife often told him: “I’m sure you’ll be arrested one day.” One of his daughters would say, “Daddy’s crazy.” “But Daddy is creating something,” Lin would snap back.
“Marijuana would devalue if we don’t move fast, given the wave of legalization in many states,” Lin said. “I’m no longer young. Time is limited. And I might not be able to do this in another three or five years.”
He faced new pressures as the legal system turned its focus to him and the other business operators. In 2024, Benally’s cannabis license in Estancia and Lin’s in Waterflow were revoked, and Lin was arrested in late 2024. On Jan. 23, 2025, after more than five years of federal investigations, the FBI arrested Dineh Benally, and the two men were detained without bail as they face federal charges. Benally pleaded guilty to 15 felonies tied to his operations on the Navajo Nation and elsewhere in New Mexico, including “unlawfully employing illegal aliens” and “conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens.” He faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years and could be sentenced to life. Benally did not return a request for comment.
Lin was charged with three counts of drug conspiracy, manufacturing marijuana and possession with intent to distribute. After he was booked into a county correctional center, according to New Mexico court documents, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. While being transferred between jails and medical care, he continued to assert his innocence and requested English-Chinese interpretation in court. In December 2025, Lin passed away in custody. The official cause of death was heart failure; a representative of his estate filed a wrongful death case in state court. Lin’s family and lawyer did not return requests for comment.
Law enforcement’s efforts to prevent future operators from repeating Lin’s activities face new challenges. In March 2024, Los Angeles County proposed creating a workers’ resource center — a hub for accessing physical and mental health services, transportation and housing navigation, immigration and employment-rights training, wage-theft clinics and other support in Chinese — in Monterey Park. The plan required at most about $2 million per year, a fraction of McInerney’s total budget. Due to a lack of funding, the plan is on hold.
Some of the people trafficked to work on Lin and Benally’s farms will bear the consequences forever, such as the worker who lost his daughter. He still travels between California and New Mexico looking for work. Others, though, have begun to find their footing. Almost all the other workers who had filed suit obtained T-visas. And Mark and Mary have built a quiet life in Santa Fe, in an apartment across the street from the visual art exhibition Meow Wolf. Early in the morning, before the tourists, college students and young professionals trickle in, the couple plays badminton in Meow Wolf’s parking lot. They checked out the exhibition once but weren’t impressed by its colorful mosaics and other dazzling features. They left immediately; they preferred nature, they said, and would drive up to the Santa Fe Mountains, where the high desert opens into a sea of aspens and ponderosa pines. They dream of opening a dumpling restaurant, or perhaps a health center based on traditional Chinese medicine.
“People like them used to feel like they were fish, always swimming aimlessly to find gigs in job agencies and floating around the United States,” Qin said. “They have become trees, started to take root, and are flourishing in New Mexico.”
Susie Ang is an illustrator based in Singapore.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The weed’s industry’s trafficked workforce.”
The post The Chinese immigrants trafficked on New Mexico’s weed farms appeared first on High Country News.
The agreement with the federal government and five states to allow more access to fix agricultural equipment is a win for farmers and consumer advocates
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The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.
Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.
Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management — the first overhaul since 1995 — would instead expand the practice.
The proposed rules would also ratchet back public participation in the agency’s decisions to allow grazing on federal public lands. The BLM’s proposed updates would strictly limit who has a say and when they can object, eliminating many steps where the public has been able to observe and comment on decisions to issue or renew permits.
“They’re clearly trying to reduce involvement of anyone other than ranchers,” said one BLM employee who works on rangeland management.
The BLM did not respond to questions about the proposed regulations, which were released publicly in May and, after a period for public comment, will go back to the agency in mid-July for further review.
In a June news release announcing the action, the agency said it “reflects the Trump administration’s priority to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, promote productive working lands and strengthen local economies.”
ProPublica and High Country News spoke to multiple current and former BLM employees to gauge the impact of the proposed regulations. Some, like the BLM staffer who works on rangeland management, requested not to be named because they still are employed by the agency. The employees agreed that the updated regulations offer several concrete benefits, including a requirement that the agency study the ecological impacts of all uses of public lands — from timber harvesting and recreation to mining and oil drilling. The current rules limit such reviews to the livestock industry, where they have uncovered tens of millions of acres of damage due to overgrazing.
“They’re clearly trying to reduce involvement of anyone other than ranchers.”
The regulations would also allow the BLM to handle low-level violations of grazing regulations more informally, avoiding potentially unnecessary fights between ranchers and regulators; clean up sections of the code that may be at odds with recent court decisions and laws; and offer the agency and ranchers more flexibility in how they manage the range, allowing for quicker decision-making responding to a local ecosystem’s needs.
Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Lands Council, a ranching trade group, in a news release called the update “a massive step forward.”
He said the existing regulations grew from the “cattle free by ’93” movement of the early 1990s that was hostile to ranching and aimed to rid public lands of livestock. “The resulting regulations all but ensured ranchers did not have the flexibility to take full advantage of the scientific and management advances that the industry has made over the last 35 years,” Canterbury said.
Other groups working on rangeland management say the regulations go too far in the opposite direction, tipping the scales toward ranchers. They point to proposals allowing ranchers to continue business as usual if they appeal agency decisions limiting grazing, threatening Native American tribes’ ability to graze bison and enshrining highly subsidized grazing fees. (ProPublica and High Country News found that in 2024 the federal government charged ranchers $284 million below market rate for the use of public lands.)
“We can expect considerably more places where cows and sheep are going to be and more damage,” said Josh Osher, public policy director of the Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group. “I think we see big impacts on wildlife.”
The livestock industry influenced the regulatory rewrite from both outside and inside the Interior Department.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Public Lands Council, two main trade groups, publicly celebrated their meetings with the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments in the spring. Among their agenda items was a memorandum of understanding allowing the trade groups to give guidance to the departments, including on a “Grazing Action Plan” that involved updating regulations.
The groups did not respond to requests for comment. (The Western Landowners Alliance, which represents conservation-minded ranchers and landowners, said it’s still evaluating the regulations.)
Representatives of Native American tribes and conservation groups, meanwhile, told ProPublica and High Country News that the administration offered them no opportunity to provide input on the draft regulations before they were published.
They also take issue with the process due to the involvement of Karen Budd-Falen, a high-ranking official in the Interior Department and a long-time grazing advocate whose family is in the ranching business. She served in the first Trump administration and was barred from discussing grazing policy due to potential conflicts of interest. But after rejoining the department, she received an ethics waiver allowing her to work on grazing policy.
In December, Budd-Falen participated in a discussion about public lands management with Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. During that event, Budd-Falen called grazing regulations the issue that “probably was the closest to my heart” and gave a rare view into the effort to update them.
“You want to know what put the public ranchland out of business — it was Bruce Babbitt’s regulations,” she told Lummis, referring to President Bill Clinton’s Interior secretary from 1993 to 2001. “By the first of next year, you will see fully new regulations that don’t just fix a few of the Babbitt things. We went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”
“I am so excited about these regulations,” she said.
“We went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”
Native American tribes that manage bison herds say Budd-Falen’s efforts to aid ranchers could hurt their operations. Several rancher and stock grower associations in Montana, which at one time were represented by Budd-Falen, have railed against a conservation group called American Prairie that uses permits to graze bison herds to revitalize local ecosystems. The ranchers worry this will cost them subsidized leases and that the bison could spread disease to their cattle.
The Trump administration has sided with the ranchers in the dispute — first by revoking American Prairie’s permits and then by redrafting grazing regulations to mandate public lands livestock operations be “production-oriented,” potentially eliminating permits for herds used to revitalize ecosystems. Tribes fear they too could lose permits for the bison herds they manage to preserve cultural practices or restore the land.
“We’re really concerned about this,” said OJ Semans Sr., a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, which represents more than 15 tribes. “I’m just kind of confused about how badly it was written.”
Ranchers have long complained that conservationists are quick to sue to prevent them from placing their herds on public lands, miring their businesses in litigation. The BLM’s updates would reduce green groups’ ability to challenge decisions.
The agency proposes changing the definition of “interested public,” meaning those who have a say in rangeland management. Under the new proposal, the public would have to prove a “cognizable” interest in the grazing in question. The agency did not respond to a request to define its use of the word. But a former BLM higher-up said that would likely set a higher bar for who gets advance notice of agency decisions and their ability to comment on them. Environmentalists assume it means only those with a business interest would be allowed to influence agency decision making.
The new regulations would also remove a mandate that the BLM include the public in “consultation, cooperation and coordination,” the agency’s process of gathering feedback when preparing to take actions such as authorizing grazing. The update would significantly narrow who must be involved, staff said.
Throughout the regulations, the agency proposed changes that would keep animals on the land.
Mark Squillace, a law professor focused on natural resources at the University of Colorado Law School, noted that if a rancher appeals an unfavorable ruling, it is automatically paused, meaning the rancher can continue the very practices that had been found to be harmful. “That effectively invites everyone to appeal to avoid the decision,” Squillace said. “That is a disaster.”
The new regulations also elevate cows’ status as firefighters, making it easier to place herds on public lands under the justification that they eat vegetation that could become fuel for wildfires.
Nada Culver, deputy director of the BLM during the Biden administration, said that some provisions would make it more difficult for agency staff to tell ranchers to take animals off the land, hindering their ability to address overgrazing. And renewing permits to continue grazing would be even easier under the new regulations, she said.
“The most text in this regulatory proposal is devoted to explaining why the public no longer gets to participate in pretty much every step of the process,” Culver said.
The Trump administration has also prioritized restocking vacant areas, which may be without cows and sheep because they are far from a water source, they need time to recover from wildfire or the agency is attempting to eradicate invasive species. Within months of President Donald Trump returning to the White House, political appointees instructed staff to build lists of every vacant plot that might be eligible for more livestock.
“By the end of next year,” Budd-Falen said in her discussion with Lummis, “every single vacant allotment will be filled by a rancher.”
The post The rules for grazing on 155 million acres of public lands are getting overhauled appeared first on High Country News.
The Willow fire near Leadville grew by 900 acres overnight spurring mandatory evacuation of areas southwest of the city. Ouray 100 race canceled because of Gold Mountain fire.
Schools in mostly rural counties are building high school shooting teams that teach kids discipline, focus, camaraderie — and most important, how to handle a gun safely
Sylvie Andrews and her partner didn’t just lose the new house they’d helped build when the Eaton Fire ripped through Altadena, California, in January 2025. They lost an entire decade’s worth of sacrifices they’d made to put down roots in their hometown, and the community they’d created. “We put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it,” Andrews said. “That’s what we lost in the fire.”
That fire, along with the Palisades Fire to the north, destroyed over 16,000 structures and killed 31 people. But while Andrews and thousands of Angelinos were racing to evacuate, other people saw a financial opportunity. Using Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires — how they would grow, how long they would last and how much they would destroy.
Prediction markets are essentially gambling websites where people bet on the outcome of events, including elections, sports, the weather and more. Anything is fair game, from oil prices and the spread of infectious diseases to international incidents. Markets usually frame questions in a “yes” or “no” fashion, with the price of a “contract” fluctuating between $0 and $1. A price of 50 cents on a “yes” contract means that the people doing the betting collectively believe the event has a 50% chance of happening. Market hosts make money by charging a fee on wagers.
In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50% contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February?
People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine. “Wow,” Andrews said repeatedly when she learned the figure. “My first take is that it’s morally reprehensible,” she said. “The fact that someone would feel OK doing that flabbergasts me.”
“The prediction markets are just the wild, wild West,” said Susan Sherman, who grew up in the Pacific Palisades. She lost her childhood home in the Palisades Fire; her late parents had owned it since 1963, and now, it was gone. She sold the empty lot a few months ago. “I look at (betting on the fires) as just being very crass and heartless.”
As prediction markets boom and a new wildfire season begins, fire survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous thinking — and dangerous behavior, too.
ONE MAJOR CONCERN stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. “That’s what has me nervous,” Sherman said. Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire, or help one grow. Unlike other disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding or extreme heat, a fire can be manipulated in minutes by just one person. “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said.
“Imagine what a bad actor might do,” said Ann Skeet, the senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “A market that might support that kind of activity, I think, is a dangerous market.” Firefighters or land managers with exclusive information about a fire’s behavior or an agency’s firefighting plans could even be tempted to bet on a fire, which would be considered insider trading.
But the biggest dilemma is largely an ethical one. “When you start gambling on somebody’s potential death or harm, you’re really diminishing the value that you’re placing on human life,” Skeet said.
BETTING ON A WILDFIRE’S OUTCOME isn’t just limited to general prediction market platforms anymore. This year, ahead of what’s likely to be a busy fire season in the West, a new prediction market specifically focused on California fires was launched. Called “Wyldfyre,” it bears the tagline: “You can’t predict wildfire. But you can trade on it.” High Country News was unable to determine the platform’s owner or the owner of its website’s IP address; the website is opaque, with no contact information listed.
Currently, Wyldfyre users can only simulate trading, but according to the site, the ability to bet with real money is “coming soon.” The platform purports to be the first prediction market of its kind, pricing county and city wildfire risk in real time. “California burns. Every year. And it’s getting worse. The question isn’t if — it’s where and when,” the site reads. It includes hotspot data from NASA and National Interagency Fire Center fire perimeters to help gamblers make predictions.
Proponents of prediction markets say the platforms generate useful information through crowdsourcing. Wyldfyre frames its platform as providing a public good. “Wyldfyre turns collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting — one trade at a time,” the site reads.
But entities with a real need for wildfire forecasting, including federal and state firefighting agencies, say they aren’t interested in prediction market data. “The Forest Service does not use information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasting, and we do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation,” an agency spokesperson told High Country News. “Our priority is protecting firefighters, communities, and public lands, and our fire analysts use validated science, proven predictive tools, and data from federal partners such as the National Weather Service, NOAA, and the National Interagency Fire Center.”
“The Forest Service does not use information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasting, and we do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation.”
California’s state firefighting agency has a similar policy. “CAL FIRE does not use prediction‑market-derived data in wildfire forecasting or operational decision‑making, nor are we currently evaluating that type of system,” said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of CAL FIRE’s intelligence program.
The agency uses a “scientifically based fire-behavior modeling” program to generate a fire-spread prediction when a 911 call for a wildfire is processed, SeLegue said. The automated program uses weather observations, forecast data, fuel and vegetation conditions, topography, location data and information on available resources. “Our modeling is deterministic and physics‑based; it is not informed by markets, wagering systems, crowd predictions or any other form of prediction‑market mechanism,” SeLegue said.
AS PREDICTION-MARKET BETTING soars in popularity, politicians are beginning to try to rein it in. Representatives from Utah and California introduced federal legislation in March that would prohibit betting “related to terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or illegal activity,” according to a press release. A California senator introduced companion legislation that would also prohibit contracts about “an individual’s death.”
Meanwhile, Minnesota just became the first state to outlaw hosting or advertising (though not betting on) prediction markets; the federal government promptly sued the state for over-stepping its authority. None of the proposed restrictions at a state or federal level explicitly include wildfire — at least not yet.
While state and federal governments struggle to control prediction market betting, Andrews has an idea. “If someone won money in gambling with our fate, I would hope that they might be ashamed of themselves,” she said, “and take that money and donate it directly to fire survivors.”
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
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By Annie MacKeigan, The Water Desk
Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of factors—wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But scientists are finding that the most important indicator of where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in.
Recent studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and severity. Those studies could eventually aid in developing more precise forecasts for fires across the country.
This link, between how moist the ground is under a forest or grassland and fire risk, is gaining more traction among scientists due to an increasingly expansive network of monitoring equipment.
In Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, 10 remote soil moisture sensors transmit data hourly, measuring the amount of water in the soil at that specific location and a certain depth, so scientists and researchers can better understand the ecosystem.
In the Rocky Mountain region of northern Idaho and western Montana, the U.S. Forest Service is working to install soil moisture networks at existing remote weather stations to increase the federal government’s observational capacity.
In the Oklahoma grasslands, 120 monitoring sites make up a network for automated soil moisture data collection that spans the whole state, collecting data once every 30 minutes. The network, called the Oklahoma Mesonet, is one of the densest monitoring networks in the world, and is managed in collaboration between the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
In Colorado’s Garfield County, the Middle Colorado Watershed Council uses soil moisture data to better understand wildfire risk for their mountain communities. The council uses available satellite data as an indicator for wildfire risk through drying trends and overall watershed health.
“It doesn’t look like a lot on the surface,” said Stephanie Kampf, professor of ecosystem science and sustainability at Colorado State University. The sensors are buried underground, collecting soil moisture data from different depths across the West.
But what may not look like much from the surface is a developing network of soil moisture data that could prove invaluable in predicting, and potentially preventing, some of the West’s most destructive fires.
A growing link
The West is in an era of megafires. Decades of fire suppression have put the region in a fire deficit. Fire is an important part of the landscape, but changing climate conditions foster more severe and destructive burns.
Soil moisture data could help better predict the location and severity of these potentially catastrophic wildfires.
“There is growing acknowledgment in fire science that soil moisture is really important,” said Zachary Holden, research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and contributor to a 2025 research study that explored soil moisture as a strong predictor for wildfire.
Holden helped create a forecasting model that used archival soil moisture data to estimate wildfire growth from 140 wildfires in the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains from 2012 to 2021, later expanded to include Oregon and Washington.
The forecasting model, now publicly available, aims to be a more detailed tool for prediction as climate change alters our foundational understanding of ecosystems, a model that will combine weather and hydrology.
In addition to Holden’s research, which focuses on the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains, a number of other researchers in the West are linking soil moisture with wildfire prediction, finding that soil moisture and hydrologic conditions are an even stronger predictor for wildfire than drought and weather conditions.
“You can predict whether something is going to be wet or dry, just looking at precipitation patterns, but soil moisture itself gives you the combination of how much water came in, and then how much water went back out through evaporation,” Kampf said.
A 2023 study aimed to better understand the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire risk. According to Erik Krueger, contributor of the study and plant and soil sciences researcher at Oklahoma State University, wildfire researchers were collecting data related to vegetation fuel, fuel load and fuel moisture properties when the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire became clear.
“We just said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this soil moisture database, how can we use it to look at the relationship between when and where wildfires will occur?’” Krueger said.
According to Krueger, scientists have understood that there is a relationship between soil moisture and wildfire, but the data could not be found in one place. “There was no way to quantify [the risk] without the soil moisture data,” he said.
After combining the data, Kruger said, they could better understand wildfire risk.
Wildfire scientists have worked for decades without the soil moisture data that is now becoming available. “We can make their jobs a little bit easier, and make our wildfire prediction a little better,” Krueger said.
Applying the science
It’s not just scientists interested in this link between soil moisture and wildfire. Western land and water managers are seeing the benefits of the emerging fire indicator as well.
“Wildfire isn’t just a forest issue, it’s fundamentally a watershed issue,” said Kate Collins, executive director of Middle Colorado Watershed Council and the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative in Garfield County, Colorado. “Watershed health and wildfire are just not siloed issues at all, they are inextricably linked.”
But wildfire prevention can be contentious, especially in places like Garfield County, which is considered a wildland urban interface, or WUI, where people live in areas affected by wildfire.
“We do need to have fire in our landscapes regularly,” Kampf said. Routine fire lessens the impact of excess dry fuels in an area, limiting the severity of the burn. And emerging as a tool to plan less severe burns, or prescribed fire, is soil moisture.
Prompted by the increased risk of severe wildfire, the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative has shifted their focus to mitigation efforts, which include riparian restoration, mechanical thinning of vegetation, creating defensible spaces, and prescribed fire. Each of these efforts not only helps reduce wildfire risk, but also supports soil moisture retention.
The process of building a usable set of soil moisture data is just beginning. Using the data as a tool, particularly in relation to wildfire risk, is relatively new. Building a strong dataset not only takes time, but also additional resources that are still being pulled together.
A new approach’s limitations
Sensors can only collect soil moisture data for the specific soil column they are inserted in, which brings other challenges.
“One is topography, so not just the elevation, but what aspect you are on and sloping around, and then you have the vegetation at that site,” Holden said.
In a high alpine area, soil moisture data collected at one point may not be representative of an entire region. How do you apply one finding across a shifting landscape?
In July 2025, a team with Aspen Global Change Institute set out to answer that question. “Single point moisture data has value in that it can give you an insight into what’s happening in the soil across a watershed,” said Asa DeHaan, research technician at AGCI.
A single watershed has a wealth of different types of soils, especially in complex, mountainous regions like Independence Pass near Aspen, Colorado, where the data was collected. “This one spot is really dry. We need to go out and see, is this the case across a larger area?”
DeHaan and a group of 14 others embarked on a three-day mission of collecting soil moisture data with handheld probes every 5 meters in a 100 square meter area around the monitoring site. “There really was a high variability across this area, kind of what we hypothesized was going to be the case,” DeHaan said.
This idea is called “slope granularity.” AGCI’s continued research on slope granularity aims to understand if the patterns that were recorded among different vegetation types and in different alpine environments may extend to larger landscapes.
According to Colin Kinsman, a team member on the July 2025 trip, the group collected somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 data points within the region. “All this was in an effort to see what the deviation is across the slope,” Kinsman said, information that is necessary to groups looking to better understand severe wildfire risk.
Expanding the networks
But the predictive ability of soil moisture monitoring hinges on there being robust measurements and data collection available to wildfire researchers and managers. Integrating soil moisture data is made more difficult by sparse observations across the West.
According to Helen Silver, co-director of the Integrated Rocky Mountain-region Innovation Center for Healthy Soils, IN-RICHES, and Quench soil moisture monitoring programs out of Colorado State University, advancing soil moisture as a tool for wildfire prediction means not only expanding the monitoring network, but also putting all the data in one accessible place.
Silver is working with the U.S. Forest Service to introduce more monitoring sites across Colorado to create a larger network of data. More data could help wildfire managers use the network as a tool for predicting wildfires. “We have a really large opportunity to install more sites that will help with prediction,” Silver said.
But maintenance and installation of such sites is expensive. Together with the Forest Service, Silver is working to bring in more money. “I would love to see federal funds and state funds put towards this,” she said.
But getting the data, having the data and using the data are all separate issues. “What we need is a few champions, a few wildfire scientists that are champions for using this practically, for implementing these new tools,” Krueger said.
Ultimately, soil moisture monitoring can’t predict with total certainty where a wildfire will begin. But Krueger said it could give an additional boost to forecasts. Is that worth the investment? “If it’s your house that is downwind from where the fire is, it probably is,” he said.
This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Lead image: The team that collected soil moisture data at Independence Pass in Colorado in July 2025 recorded over 15,000 data points. Photo courtesy of Colin Kinsman
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