For years, Kansas troopers have treated cross‑country drivers as rolling drug suspects — especially those coming or going from Colorado. This is the story of what happened when a handful of those motorists took the Kansas Highway Patrol to court.
History of Drug Interdiction by the Kansas Highway Patrol
Drug‑interdiction (intercepting illegal drugs in transit) work on Kansas highways dates back at least a decade. In 2016, troopers of the Kansas Highway Patrol (KHP) were already treating I‑70 as a “drug corridor” and relying on Colorado travel and out‑of‑state plates to justify extended stops.
That same year, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in a case called Vasquez v. Lewis that directly addressed these practices. The ruling made clear that facts like Colorado residency, Colorado travel, and use of a common cross‑country route cannot, by themselves, justify keeping someone longer or searching their car.
But even after that ruling, training and everyday enforcement did not meaningfully shift away from those factors, and the same style of interdiction continued on Kansas highways. Throughout the next several years, troopers continued to run interdiction on I‑70, I‑35, U.S. 54, and U.S. 36 in Kansas, all busy cross‑country routes. On those roads, troopers stopped lots of out-of-state drivers heading to or from Colorado, often in rental cars or recently purchased vehicles.
The ‘Kansas Two-Step’
A usual encounter started with a basic traffic violation, like speeding or drifting over the lane line. The trooper would pull the car over, collect license and registration, run checks, and write a warning or ticket.
Seem routine and innocuous? It might be if the traffic stop ended there. Instead, the trooper often used what’s colloquially referred to as the “Kansas Two‑Step.” The officer handed back documents and signaled the traffic part was done, then quickly came back to the window and restarted conversation as if it were optional.
During that second phase, troopers asked detailed questions: where the trip started, where it was headed, and why. Non‑Kansas plates plus a route that involved Colorado were treated as key “risk” markers, even when the story was ordinary and innocent (out-of-state motorists on vacation, visiting relatives, or driving through). Troopers often used these details to justify keeping people on the roadside longer. They then asked for permission to search the car or held the driver there until a drug‑sniffing dog arrived.
Drug‑detection dogs became a routine part of this script. Sometimes a dog team was already nearby; other times, drivers waited while a unit from the KHP or a local agency came to the scene.
Many searches and canine sniffs did not lead to charges. Data in the case showed that out-of-state drivers were about 35% of traffic, but made up around 77% of KHP stops and about 90% of canine searches. A large group of people went through lengthy stops and searches yet were never convicted of any crime from those encounters.
Drivers Take KHP to Court
Three of those motorists — Blaine Franklin Shaw, Samuel James Shaw, and Joshua Bosire — were the first people to challenge this pattern in court. Each had been stopped on one of these major highways, held on the roadside after the traffic business should have been over, questioned about their travel, and subjected to a drug‑interdiction style encounter that included a canine sniff but did not result in a criminal conviction.
Their experiences, which mirrored what many other out‑of‑state drivers had gone through, became the foundation for a federal class action filed in January 2020 in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. In that lawsuit, they sued the KHP’s superintendent, along with individual KHP troopers involved in the stops. The plaintiffs sought both changes to the agency’s roadside practices and accountability for the harms caused by these prolonged detentions.
A Win for Motorists at District Court
The district court agreed that these practices violated constitutional rights. It entered sweeping relief. The district court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor on their systemic claims, and issued a detailed permanent injunction that forced the agency to change how troopers conduct, document, and supervise traffic stops and drug‑interdiction work on Kansas highways.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. KHP’s superintendent appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. On appeal, he asked the court to scale back or undo the injunction, arguing that the drivers had no right to seek forward‑looking relief and that the district court had gone too far in restricting how troopers patrol Kansas highways.
Last week, the Tenth Circuit weighed in on that injunction and the underlying constitutional issues.
Tenth Circuit Narrows the Ruling
The appeal produced a mixed but still powerful ruling.
There were some important parts of the district court’s ruling that the Tenth Circuit agreed with. Namely, the appellate court agreed that KHP’s core practices (using out‑of‑state plates, Colorado‑related travel, and the Kansas Two‑Step to prolong stops) violated the Fourth Amendment. The court also confirmed that the named drivers had standing to seek forward‑looking relief against a systemic pattern of unlawful highway stops.
But the Tenth Circuit took issue with the lower federal court’s injunction. It concluded that several provisions went further than necessary to cure the proven violations. To the appellate judges, this looked too much like ongoing federal management of KHP’s internal operations, and did not sufficiently tie each reporting and training requirement to specific constitutional harms in the record.
In sum, the Tenth Circuit affirmed the heart of the constitutional ruling but reversed portions of the remedy as overbroad or insufficiently tailored. What comes next will play out back in the district court, where federal judges and lawyers will try to translate the Tenth Circuit’s narrower instructions into concrete, day‑to‑day limits on how KHP can police Kansas highways going forward.
Related Resources:
- What To Do and Say During a Traffic Stop (FindLaw’s Learn About the Law)
- When Can the Police Search Your Car? (FindLaw’s Learn About the Law)
- 4th Amendment Search and Seizure Protections (FindLaw’s Learn About the Law)
