Labrador Letter: 2025 Year in Review Part 1 – Protecting Idaho Families

The news cycle moves fast. A legal victory one week becomes old news the next. An arrest that took months of investigation gets buried under whatever controversy dominates the headlines. I understand that. But I also think you deserve to know what your Attorney General’s office accomplished this year, even if some of it got lost in the noise.

Over the next two newsletters, I want to walk you through some of our biggest victories in 2025. To keep you updated on how we’re protecting Idaho families and defending the laws you elected me to uphold.

Protecting Women and Girls

As many of you know, over five years ago, Idaho became the first state in the nation to pass a law protecting women’s sports from biological males. The law faced immediate opposition. Businesses threatened boycotts. Five former attorneys general urged a veto. Editorial boards called it discriminatory. The attorney general at the time wrote a legal opinion raising concerns about the law, which gave opponents their talking points for years to come.

Idaho did the right thing and passed the law anyway, but activists sued immediately and kept it tied up in federal court. When I ran for Attorney General in 2022, I promised to aggressively defend Idaho’s law and since taking office in 2023, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

This year, we asked the United States Supreme Court to hear our case. In July, the Court agreed. Then the ACLU tried to get the case dismissed. In October, Federal District Judge David Nye rejected the dismissal attempt and ruled that after years of litigation, Idaho has earned the right to present our case to the nation’s highest court. Arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court are scheduled for January 13, 2026. The case represents a critical opportunity for the Court to clarify that states have the authority to protect women’s athletics and ensure fair competition based on biological reality. Idaho’s leadership on this issue has helped build a national movement. What began as our lone stand has grown into a coalition of states committed to protecting equal opportunity for women and girls.

Beyond the women’s sports case, we won other victories protecting women and girls in 2025. In February, the Trump Administration rescinded Biden’s Title IX rewrite, the rule that would have forced schools nationwide to allow biological males into girls’ private spaces. What Idaho fought in court for years suddenly became federal policy. Then in March, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Idaho’s law requiring sex-separated facilities in public schools: bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, overnight accommodations. The court said plainly that separating these spaces by biological sex serves the state’s interest in protecting student privacy and dignity.

Protecting Children and Prosecuting Criminals

Earlier this month, I traveled to East Idaho to honor two Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) detectives for reaching their 100th combined arrest. One hundred predators in just this region of our state who targeted children online, investigated and arrested.

That milestone is part of a bigger story. When I took office, we had over 1,400 unworked ICAC tips sitting in the system. Tips that had come in from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about potential predators targeting Idaho children. These were tips that were just sitting unreviewed, and while not all tips mean a crime was committed, the Office of Attorney General was not reviewing them in a timely manner. After learning of this I made changes to how the unit operated, brought in additional resources, and we cleared that backlog. Now we respond to new tips within 24 hours.

The Idaho ICAC Task Force operates as the state’s primary law enforcement resource for investigating technology-facilitated crimes against children. My full-time unit at the Attorney General’s office works alongside more than 200 ICAC-affiliated investigators from local, county, state, tribal, and federal agencies across Idaho. This structure ensures statewide coverage and rapid response.

This year in 2025, the Task Force made 143 arrests, up from 90 in 2024, 62 in 2023, and 34 in 2022, the year before I took office.

We continue to look for ways to do our job better in the ICAC Unit. In March, we brought a new K-9, Badger, onto the team. He’s an English Labrador trained to detect the glue in electronic storage devices like SD cards, thumb drives, hard drives hidden in walls, cars, anywhere predators think investigators won’t look. Since March, Badger has been deployed on over 30 search warrants and found evidence that could have been missed. He’s also a trained therapy dog and has been to more than 10 public outreach events, helping us teach Idaho families how to keep their kids safe online.

Beyond crimes against children, our Criminal Division’s Special Prosecutions Unit has dramatically increased its work prosecuting cases across Idaho. This unit handles complex cases that local prosecutors request our help on, including public corruption, insurance fraud, and Medicaid fraud. In 2021, the office filed 3 cases. In 2022, they filed 8. In 2023, my first year in office, we filed 36 cases. Last year we filed 41. This year we filed 101. For those math lovers that’s a 3,267 percent increase in cases filed from 2021 to 2025.

This work doesn’t always make headlines. But it’s some of the most important work we do.

Defending Idaho’s Pro-Life Laws

When the Idaho Legislature passes a law and the Governor signs it, my job is to defend that law in court when it is challenged. That’s a core function of the Attorney General’s office. We stand up for the laws Idaho’s elected representatives pass on behalf of the people.

Idaho’s pro-life laws have been under constant legal attack since they were enacted. Activist groups file lawsuits trying to overturn what Idaho voters and their representatives decided. This year, we secured major victories in federal court defending Idaho’s Defense of Life Act, though litigation in state court continues.

For two years, we fought the Biden Administration’s lawsuit in federal court claiming that EMTALA, a federal law designed to prevent hospitals from turning away patients who can’t pay, somehow required Idaho to perform abortions. EMTALA exists to save lives. Idaho’s law exists to save lives. There’s no conflict between them. In March, the Trump Department of Justice recognized what we’d been arguing all along and dismissed the case.

The Satanic Temple filed both state and federal lawsuits challenging Idaho’s law. In state court, they claimed abortion was a religious rite protected by the First Amendment. That case was dismissed. In federal court, they argued that requiring women to carry pregnancies to term constituted slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment and violated property rights under the Takings Clause. In April, a federal district court dismissed their federal case. When they appealed, we won again in August at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit remanded the case asking whether any amendment could save their claims. In November, the federal district court made it final: no amendment could fix their arguments, and the case was dismissed with prejudice.

In April, the Fourth Judicial District Court in state court upheld the Defense of Life Act in Adkins v. State of Idaho. The court rejected arguments that Idaho’s Constitution includes a right to abortion, reaffirming that there is no such right and that authority rests with the people of Idaho through their elected representatives.

While we’ve won these significant victories, other challenges to Idaho’s pro-life laws remain pending in state court and my office will continue defending the laws passed by Idaho’s Legislature and signed by the Governor.

Supporting Local Prosecutors

The Attorney General’s office doesn’t just defend state laws. We also support local prosecutors when they need specialized expertise or resources for complex cases.
In November 2022, four University of Idaho students were murdered in Moscow. Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin. The tragedy shook our entire state. This year, Bryan Kohberger pled guilty and will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Our Criminal Division provided critical support to Latah County throughout this prosecution. Our attorneys assisted with the grand jury process and wrote the legal briefing for some of the most challenging pre-trial motions in the case: the motion to dismiss the indictment, the motion to change venue, the motion to suppress DNA evidence obtained through investigative genetic genealogy, and twelve separate motions to strike the death penalty.

Nothing can undo what happened in Moscow that night, but I am thankful that the person who committed this horrible crime is behind bars where he will spend the rest of his life.

More to Come

Next week, I’ll share more about what we accomplished in 2025: consumer protection victories that put money back in Idahoans’ pockets, our fight against federal overreach on issues like Lava Ridge, and holding state agencies accountable to open government laws. For now, I want you to know that protecting Idaho families is what we do every day in the Office of the Attorney General, and we are happy to do it. Happy New Year, Idaho!