Heath Haussamen
State Rep. Rod Montoya urged his fellow lawmakers on Friday to avoid antagonizing President Donald Trump when it comes to immigration policy.
“New Mexico doesn’t hold any cards. … I give. I don’t want to play this game of chicken,” the Farmington Republican said. Trump has threatened to cut federal funding for state and local governments that oppose his immigration policies.
Fortunately, most of Montoya’s colleagues didn’t share his willingness to give in so easily.
The House was considering legislation to prohibit state-funded entities from detaining individuals for civil immigration violations. The aim is to stop counties from running immigration detention centers for the federal government.
New Mexico currently has three, in Cibola, Otero and Torrance counties. All are run by for-profit prison companies. Lea County is also seeking a contract to detain immigrants for the federal government, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
Montoya argued that Trump’s demands to bend to his will are serious. The president or the Republican-controlled Congress could retaliate by cutting federal funding to New Mexico if the state enacts this legislation, he warned.
Most Democrats voted for House Bill 9, which passed on a vote of 35-25 and now heads to the Senate. Democrats repeatedly said the state has the authority to decide whether to allow such immigration detention centers under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says powers not expressly given to the federal government “are reserved to the States.”
“I stand with the people of New Mexico and our sovereignty,” said Rep. Andrea Romero, a Santa Fe Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors.
This is the energy and courage we need from Democrats.
Inhumane conditions
Immigration detention centers are oppressive. Crossing the border illegally is a civil offense just like speeding or running a stop sign. And yet, folks who commit this violation are often held in inhumane and life-threatening conditions.
About 95 percent of deaths in the custody of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) between 2017 and 2021 — 49 of 53 —were preventable, according to a 2024 report from the ACLU National Prison Project, Physicians for Human Rights and the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight.
“In most of the deaths reviewed, ICE detention medical staff made incorrect, inappropriate, or incomplete diagnoses; or provided inadequate or unreasonably delayed treatment,” Source New Mexico reported.
At the facility in Torrance County, the Homeland Security Department’s Office of the Inspector General “identified critical staffing shortages and violations of ICE detention standards that compromised the health, safety, and rights of detainees,” according to a 2022 report.
“Even dogs at dog shelters get treated better,” said one man who was held there, Edwin Jesus Garcia Castillo, in an article published by the Albuquerque Journal.
The Inspector General recommended three years ago that ICE move detainees out of the Torrance County facility. ICE instead moved more people there, according to Source New Mexico.
Later in 2022 a Brazilian asylum seeker died by suicide while being held there, Source New Mexico reported. The man’s attorneys called the conditions he had faced “horrific.”
None of this was new information. A 2017 report from the Inspector General found “problems that undermine the protection of detainees’ rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment” at four detention centers across the nation, including the one in Otero County.
Anthropologists Margaret Brown de la Vega and Nathan Craig argued that ICE detention centers subject people to conditions similar to torture and should be abolished. They made the case during a presentation at the University of Texas-El Paso in 2019, according to UTEP’s student newspaper, The Prospector.
“Those who’ve been in both prison and detention facilities will tell you immigration detention centers are worse,” the newspaper quoted Craig as saying.
Shame on us
So why have we continued doing this?
For some, it’s because immigration detention centers create jobs in our communities. That’s true of a few representatives who voted against this bill.
For others, the motives are less pure. That’s true of Republicans like Montoya, who called human beings “illegals” on the floor of the N.M. House of Representatives. Such dehumanization has no place in our state capitol, especially during official proceedings of the House.
Really, we’ve let immigrant detention grow into a massive industry in our state over decades because large corporations that make big profits off incarcerating people we don’t know have bought our support with jobs for New Mexicans.
We’ve consented. Shame on us for that.
This is leadership
Now Trump is president, and his extremism on immigration has provided moral clarity for some people who tolerated this before. Whatever it takes to find courage.
New Mexico has the right to stop counties that receive state funding from contracting to hold folks for ICE. Facilitating the federal government’s inhumane treatment of non-citizens in exchange for jobs is abhorrent.
I hope the Senate will muster up the courage we’re seeing in the House and approve this legislation. Trump plans to ramp up the federal government’s oppression of immigrants to a new level. New Mexico can’t stop that, but it can and should refuse to participate.
“We are stepping up to protect our people and prevent our state resources from being used to harm our communities,” Rep. Eleanor Chávez, an Albuquerque Democrat and another of the bill’s sponsors, said in a news release following Friday’s vote.
Thank you to the sponsors of this legislation. In addition to Romero and Chávez they are Angelica Rubio of Las Cruces, Marianna Anaya of Albuquerque and Christine Chandler of Los Alamos.
I’m grateful for their leadership.
Disclosure: My spouse, Rep. Sarah Silva, D-Las Cruces, voted for House Bill 9.