Kalshi New Mexico Tribes' Injunction Hearing: No Ruling Yet

A federal judge in Las Cruces took four New Mexico tribes' bid to block Kalshi under advisement on September 23, and set no date for a ruling. The hearing ran 93 minutes; the tribes want her to stop Kalshi taking event-contract trades from people standing on their reservations, and their reply brief asks her to skip a temporary block and issue a permanent injunction outright. The clerk's minutes say only that an order is to follow.

The case is Mescalero Apache Tribe v. Kalshi, Inc., No. 2:26-cv-01517-MIS-GJF, in the District of New Mexico, before District Judge Margaret I. Strickland. The plaintiffs are the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Pueblo of Isleta, the Pueblo of Pojoaque and the Pueblo of Sandia. We downloaded and read the complaint, the tribes' reply, Kalshi's motion to dismiss, a supporting amicus brief and the clerk's minutes off the federal docket the morning after the hearing.

What happened in court on September 23?

The clerk's minutes record a combined Motion to Dismiss and Preliminary Injunction hearing, in session from 9:32 a.m. to 11:05 a.m., a stated 1 hour 33 minutes. Dan Rey-Bear appeared for the tribes and Olivia S. Choe for Kalshi. Rey-Bear argued the dismissal motion in five points and the injunction in five more; the minutes record no point count for Kalshi's side.

Two things the court raised on its own are on the record, and both went to the same subject. The minutes note the court raising "Geofencing by other gaming platforms" during the tribes' injunction argument and "Geofencing" again during Kalshi's, then a question to Rey-Bear "regarding Kalshi recovery". At 11:04 a.m. the entry reads: "Court Matter will be under advisement. Order to follow."

That is the whole of what the public record says about the outcome. Nobody knows which way it goes, and we are not going to guess. The District of New Mexico's own electronic filing feed carried the entry at 19:16 GMT on September 23 under the case number 2:26-cv-01517, which is worth stating because CourtListener's own metadata field for this case gives the Albuquerque prefix 1: rather than the Las Cruces 2: that appears on every filing.

What are the tribes asking for?

The complaint asks the court to stop Kalshi "operating Class III gaming activities on the Tribes' respective Indian lands" in breach of their tribal-state compacts and their federally approved gaming ordinances, as those are made enforceable by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. It also asks for civil penalties, and its opening paragraph carves one plaintiff out of that request: penalties are sought "for all the Tribes besides Pueblo of Sandia".

Their September 4 reply goes further than the motion title suggests. It argues that "there is now no factual dispute" and that the remaining questions are "purely legal", so the court should issue a permanent injunction rather than a preliminary one because that "best serves the interests of judicial economy". A reader watching for a temporary order should know the tribes have asked for a final one.

The mechanism they rely on is the one the judge kept asking about. The reply argues Kalshi "cannot dispute that only the location of the bettor when placing a bet determines where the bet occurs under IGRA", citing Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community and California v. Iipay Nation. On that reading, where Kalshi's servers sit is irrelevant and the reservation boundary is drawn by the user's handset. The tribes say eight declarations describing investigations of Kalshi's activity on their lands, filed with their opposition, went unrefuted.

They are not alone on the docket. More than thirty tribes and tribal gaming organisations appear as amici, among them the National Congress of American Indians, the Indian Gaming Association, the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Mohegan Tribe of Indians of Connecticut. One amicus brief is from Blue Lake Rancheria, Chicken Ranch Rancheria and the Ho-Chunk Nation, the tribes behind the two other prediction-market cases we have covered, and the judge granted them leave to file it on September 22, the day before the hearing.

Why does Kalshi say the tribes cannot regulate it?

Two arguments, both jurisdictional rather than about whether event contracts are gambling.

The first is Montana v. United States. Kalshi's brief opens: "The inherent sovereign powers of an Indian tribe do not extend to the activities of nonmembers of the tribe." It argues that neither of Montana's two narrow exceptions reaches an exchange "which it operates from offices and on servers entirely off-reservation", and that the sovereign right to exclude "protects physical incursions onto tribal territory entirely absent here". On IGRA, the brief argues the statute "sets conditions for gaming on Indian lands" and "does not convert tribal ordinances into federal law".

The second is preemption, the argument sweeps readers will recognise from the state cases, where a Connecticut federal judge and a King County judge in Washington have both rejected it. Kalshi says Congress gave the Commodity Futures Trading Commission exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts traded on its exchange under the Commodity Exchange Act. The brief warns that if these four tribes can regulate it, "hundreds of other tribes could too", and calls that patchwork "intolerable for an exchange that operates throughout the United States under the oversight of a federal regulator".

The brief leans on a CFTC notice of proposed rulemaking published on June 12, Prediction Markets; Public Interest Determinations, 91 Fed. Reg. 35806, which it says confirms the agency's exclusive jurisdiction. The tribes' answer is that it is only a proposal: their reply quotes the Ninth Circuit's August ruling that "proposed regulations have no legal effect", and adds that even a final rule would not bind the court because judges "do not defer to the CFTC's [re]definition of gaming".

The sequence that produced the suit is in Kalshi's own account of it. The brief states that in May the Pueblo of Isleta sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter demanding it stop "all class III gaming activities within Isleta's jurisdiction", threatening "legal action" and a "civil fine", and that "On June 1, 2026, Kalshi sent a response, stating that Isleta does not have jurisdiction to enforce its tribal laws against Kalshi."

Does this change anything for sweepstakes players today?

Not directly, and not yet. Kalshi is a prediction market, not a sweepstakes casino, no sweeps operator is a party, and nothing here touches a Sweeps Coins balance. New Mexico is not a state where sweepstakes play is banned, and the ranked sweepstakes casinos that serve it are unaffected.

What makes it worth your attention is the geofencing question the judge asked twice without being prompted. Every sweepstakes site you can register with enforces its state list by reading where you are, which is why a new brand's excluded-state list is the first thing we check, and why so many operators block states that never passed a sweepstakes ban. The tribes' case says the same test decides IGRA: the bet happens where the bettor is standing. If that wins, a nationwide operator can be told to draw a line around a reservation, not just a state, and the question of who has to block whom stops being settled by a company's own terms.

This is also not the first court to weigh it, and we should be plain about that rather than overselling a hearing. The Ninth Circuit already held on September 16 that Kalshi's contracts are class III gaming on Indian lands, a Wisconsin judge ruled for the Ho-Chunk Nation and certified the question for the Seventh Circuit, and the California case that produced the Ninth Circuit appeal is still frozen in the district court. New Mexico is the third active tribal front and the first in the Tenth Circuit, the same court that refused to pause Utah's gambling ban for Kalshi on September 8. One question running in three circuits at once is how it ends up in front of the Supreme Court. For where any of this leaves sweepstakes play state by state, our guide to where sweepstakes casinos are legal is the page to read.

Our New Mexico state page says tribal gaming law and sweepstakes law run on separate tracks in this state. That is still true of sweepstakes casinos, but the "no crossover" line needs revisiting once Judge Strickland rules.

Sources & documents

• Clerk's minutes, September 23, 2026 hearing - docket entry 59, Mescalero Apache Tribe v. Kalshi, Inc., D.N.M. No. 2:26-cv-01517-MIS-GJF
• Plaintiffs' reply in support of motion for preliminary injunction - docket entry 55, filed September 4, 2026
• Kalshi motion to dismiss - docket entry 21, filed June 24, 2026
• Complaint - docket entry 1, filed May 12, 2026
• Amicus brief of Blue Lake Rancheria, Chicken Ranch Rancheria and Ho-Chunk Nation - docket entry 48-1, filed August 17, 2026, leave granted September 22
• Docket record - CourtListener, read September 24, 2026
• District of New Mexico ECF feed - same-day confirmation of the September 23 entry

21+ only. Prediction markets and sweepstakes sites both carry real risk of loss. If gambling is costing you more than money, call 1-800-GAMBLER or read our responsible gaming resources.