Montana’s Junior Senator has Thrown his Support behind the Trump Administration’s push to end Birthright Citizenship.

Montana Public Radio | By Shaylee Ragar, published 02/05/26, at 
 5:29 pm, shaylee.ragar@mso.umt.edu.

President Donald Trump’s executive order redefining citizenship was challenged and is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy signed on to a brief supporting the administration’s policy.

Trump’s order relies on a narrow application of the U.S. Constitution’s citizenship clause. It would end automatic citizenship for children of parents who are unlawfully or temporarily in the country. The administration argues such parents are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Montana-Canada Border Traffic Falls Sharply in 2025

Passenger and freight traffic across Montana’s northern border fell sharply in the first 11 months of 2025, with commercial freight seeing the sharpest decline from a for comparable periods in at least 30 years. The number of inbound people crossing also saw the steepest year-over-year percentage declines of recent decades outside of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics indicates that full shipping container crossings into Montana for the first 11 months of the year fell 21% from its 30-year peak in 2024. Over the same period, individual crossings dropped 29%. The drop comes after years of sharp increases in freight and individual crossings coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Economy and tourism experts interviewed by MTFP pointed to President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff battle with Canada as a likely explanation for the drop.

McDonald's Owners Apologize After Browning Wrestling Team Denied Service

The owners of a McDonald’s in Ronan [Montana] on Friday apologized after a viral video appeared to show an employee refusing service to the Browning High School wrestling team. 

The 14-second video, reportedly recorded on Thursday, shows a man who appears to be an employee saying, “Browning school is not allowed. We’re not allowed to serve you guys.”

A student can be heard mumbling, “I guess they don’t like Indians here.” Browning is located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana.

Lawsuit says State isn’t Managing Rivers for the Benefit of All

[For more information, read source documents]

Graham Coppes entered the spring hopeful. Despite a slow start to winter, most western Montana river basins were reporting a near-average snowpack by April. But when warm May temperatures brought an underwhelming runoff, Coppes knew it would be a long, difficult summer for aquatic ecosystems and the $1.3 billion recreational economy they support. 

Slow-motion alarm set in as Coppes, a Missoula-based attorney, watched one blue-ribbon river after another dip to record lows. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks [FWP], which forecasted the difficult summer ahead in June, responded by partially or fully closing more than a dozen rivers to fishing after they reached low streamflow thresholds and high temperatures that can endanger trout.

In a lawsuit filed on Aug. 8, Coppes argued that FWP should have done more for iconic rivers such as the Blackfoot, Clark Fork and Big Hole to benefit the fish that live in them and the broader Montana public. Since then, rivers have remained at record lows, and Coppes told Montana Free Press in a recent conversation that the future is going to be “pretty bleak” for Montana’s aquatic ecosystems unless the state starts using and enforcing its water rights and reservations to bolster instream flows more assertively and proactively. ...

Guy Alsentzer with Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, says FWP is choosing politics over science, even as rivers are “diminished and degraded” by extreme drought and unchecked pollution.