Chief Magistrate Judge Gregory B. Wormuth (D.N.M.) Begins Dismissing Federal Military-Trespass Charges at Probable-Cause Stage; 98-Case Mass Dismissal on May 15 Exposes Knowledge-Standard Flaw in NDA Architecture

On May 14–15, 2025, Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory B. Wormuth of the District of New Mexico (Las Cruces division) issued a cascade of dismissals of federal military-trespass charges filed under 18 U.S.C. § 1382 (entering military property for an unlawful purpose) and 50 U.S.C. § 797 (violation of a security regulation) against migrants apprehended inside the New Mexico National Defense Area (NMNDA). The first individual dismissal was issued May 14 in United States v. Lopez-Gonzalez, No. 25-mj-01562, followed on May 15 by a mass dismissal of 98 charges issued simultaneously — an exercise the court called permissible because “the factual allegations in the complaints are virtually identical with respect to the two military trespass charges across hundreds of cases” and “the government’s cut-and-paste approach to factual allegations…allows the court to apply the legal analysis across every criminal complaint charging these crimes filed thus far and still pending.” A further approximately 22 dismissals followed the next day, bringing the first-wave total to roughly 120 cases. By the time of the Texas Tribune/ProPublica joint investigation (March 2026), approximately 60% of all 4,700+ military-trespass charges filed since April 2025 had been dropped or dismissed, with at least nine judges across New Mexico and West Texas finding the prosecutions legally deficient.

Wormuth’s central holding was that knowledge of entry into the NMNDA was “an essential element” of both charged offenses, and that the government’s criminal complaints — which alleged only that “some signs” had been posted in the zone in English and Spanish — failed to establish probable cause that defendants knew they were entering a military installation. His ruling quote, widely cited in subsequent coverage: “Beyond the reference to signage, the United States provides no facts from which one could reasonably conclude that the Defendant knew he was entering the NMNDA.” He also found: “The mere fact that some ‘signs’ were posted in the [zone] provides no basis to conclude that the Defendant could have seen the signs,” citing the mountainous terrain and the absence of evidence that any specific defendant had actually observed the posted notices. Critically, the NMNDA zones were unfenced and inadequately signposted — a structural feature, not an operational failure. The ACLU-NM April 2026 report confirmed that “the government has not provided the public with accurate maps of the zones,” meaning no public-facing mechanism existed by which a migrant could have known the area’s military-jurisdiction status. Wormuth also noted U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison’s opposition to defense motions for a court-wide advisory hearing as “remarkable” in tone, signaling a deteriorating judicial-prosecutorial relationship that the Albuquerque Journal later characterized as the federal judiciary being “in an uneasy standoff” with federal prosecutors.

Context and structural significance. The Wormuth dismissals are the first judicial checkpoint to bite on the NDA architecture established by NSPM-4 (see 2025-04-11–nspm-4-national-defense-area-roosevelt-reservation-first-designation). NSPM-4 created a novel federal criminal exposure — military-installation trespass under 18 U.S.C. § 1382 stacking on top of the standard 8 U.S.C. § 1325 unlawful-entry charge — through purely administrative action: presidential redesignation of existing federal land as military property. The Wormuth dismissals reveal the architectural weakness in this design. Unlike a military installation that defendants could reasonably be expected to know about (Fort Huachuca itself; a fenced perimeter with signage), the NMNDA is an unfenced strip of desert that became a military installation by executive fiat, with signage inadequate to provide constitutionally sufficient notice. The knowledge-standard problem is not a gap in the government’s evidence in any individual case; it is a structural defect in the charge as applied to the NDA architecture. Wormuth’s rulings make this defect visible at scale.

The DOJ’s criminal-information workaround. Rather than concede the architectural weakness, the government’s response — documented in detail by the Texas Tribune/ProPublica investigation — was to bypass the probable-cause stage entirely by refiling cases via criminal information rather than indictment or complaint. Criminal information is a charging mechanism that does not require a magistrate’s probable-cause review; it routes cases directly to arraignment. Prosecutors used this mechanism to resurrect more than 1,600 military-trespass cases that judges had already dismissed for lack of probable cause. As former federal public defender and prosecutor Meghan Skelton told ProPublica: “If there is no probable cause, the case is supposed to end. They are trying to circumvent that in a way that has not been done in the 30 years I’ve been practicing law.” U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison, who had announced the first 82 Title 50 charges on May 1, 2025 — the same day Wormuth issued a briefing order on mens rea requirements in In re Misdemeanor Charges, No. 2:25-mc-00019 — was the architect of the three-stacked-charges prosecutorial theory (§ 1325 illegal entry + § 1382 military trespass + § 797 security regulation violation). First Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison opposed the defense bar’s motion for an advisory hearing in which the court might have established uniform briefing on the knowledge standard across all pending cases. Attorney General Pam Bondi subsequently issued a mandate requiring “zealous advocacy” of administration priorities, with warnings of discipline for non-compliance, underscoring that the criminal-information workaround operated with explicit DOJ institutional support rather than as a rogue local prosecutorial improvisation.

Significance for the Posse Comitatus bypass architecture. The Wormuth dismissals are structurally significant not because they ultimately blocked the NDA prosecutions — the criminal-information workaround largely absorbed the judicial friction — but because they made the architecture’s operational logic visible in the public record. The prosecutorial record now shows: (1) the government knew the zones were unfenced and inadequately marked; (2) the government filed charges anyway; (3) when judges dismissed those charges for lack of probable cause, the government refiled via a mechanism designed to bypass probable-cause review; (4) Assistant Federal Public Defender Amanda Skinner identified this as a “double jeopardy / foul blow” problem, seeking advisory briefing on the constitutional implications. The pattern documented by Wormuth’s orders is the executable proof that the NDA architecture treats administrative-redesignation-as-criminalization-precondition as a tool to be defended by procedural workaround when judicial review reveals the underlying weakness. See also 2026-04-21–aclu-nm-invisible-military-bases-border-report for the year-one assessment and 2026-05-16–haywood-santa-fe-aclu-invisible-military-bases-coverage for named-actor courthouse documentation.