Santa Fe New Mexican Court Reporter Phaedra Haywood Surfaces Wormuth-Ellison-Skinner Legal Architecture and Criminal-Information Workaround in NDA Trespass Coverage

On May 16, 2026, Santa Fe New Mexican courts reporter Phaedra Haywood published coverage of the ACLU-NM’s April 21, 2026 “Invisible Military Bases at the Border” report. The Haywood piece amplifies the ACLU report and adds two analytical contributions absent from the wire coverage of the NDA architecture:

1. Named-actor specificity at the courthouse level. The piece names Chief Federal Magistrate Judge Gregory Wormuth (Las Cruces) as the judicial pivot of the cascading probable-cause dismissals; First Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison as the author of the prosecutorial theory that a single act of border crossing supplies state-of-mind for three stacked federal crimes; and Assistant Federal Public Defender Amanda Skinner as the author of the double-jeopardy / “foul blow” defense argument. The named-actor specificity is the kind of documentary detail local court reporters surface that the wire services miss.

2. The criminal-information workaround as structural pivot. Haywood surfaces that federal prosecutors are now charging trespass cases via criminal information rather than indictment — a mechanism that bypasses the initial probable-cause requirement and routes around the Wormuth dismissals. This is the prosecutorial-architecture pivot inside the broader judicial-vs-prosecutorial standoff the ACLU report characterizes as “uneasy.”

The piece also documents specific contested legal text: Wormuth’s May 2025 order on the state-of-mind standard for the two federal trespass statutes (one requiring “willful” violation of “defense property regulation”; the other potentially requiring “knowledge or notice”); Wormuth’s ruling that “the mere existence of signs in the area does not prove that a person has seen the signs”; the practice of charging documents now routinely showing trespass counts crossed out with “no pc” handwritten notations.

The Haywood piece does not cite RAMM. It is a peer-coverage candidate for future RAMM citation on the NDA architecture and the broader administrative-redesignation-as-criminalization-precondition mechanism. See peer-coverage note: cascade-research/notes/peer-coverage-haywood-santa-fe-invisible-military-bases-2026-05-16.md.