Former executive director of the ACLU-New Mexico looks back on decadeslong career

Split nearly down the middle, the results of the 2024 presidential election brought elation, fear, hope and despair. For at least the next four years, Peter Simonson is going to look away.

“That’s one thing I promised myself in this new Trump term,” said Simonson, the recently retired executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.

“I am not going to do what I did last time, where I was going every morning to The New York Times front page and reading whatever the latest outrage was. ... I just, I just don’t know that my mental health can take it.”

Simonson sat down with the Journal days after departing to look back on his 24-year-long career with the civil rights organization — highlights that include helping to win the freedom to marry for same-sex couples and ending prison abuses — and look forward at what he believes is next for the group, the country as a whole, and himself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How’s retirement treating you?

Took a break from the news. No media, no New York Times, no Trump. And, yeah, it was good.

It’s tough to take a break, but I definitely need one now and then.

I think folks who are doing the reporting are going to need many breaks over the next four years.

I was wondering about your younger years, your formative years. Was there something that you feel shaped the path you took?

I would say I wasn’t inclined towards looking at political questions and systems of injustice until I went into the Peace Corps.

There were some volunteers that were friends of mine that really sort of introduced me more to critical perspectives on understanding how the poverty I was seeing in the Dominican Republic was a consequence not of people’s own making, but a consequence of much larger political and economic systems that exploited labor and turned peasant economies into industrial, agricultural ones that pushed people off of land and into the margins of large plantations and forced them to become laborers in free trade zones and large-scale agriculture.

So seeing that dynamic really was my politicization, and then it sort of took further root.

When you pursued an education in cultural anthropology, were you already going in this direction, or did that come out organically, this alignment of your education and eventual career path?

Yeah, it definitely aligned with the experience in the Dominican Republic and the Peace Corps...

I really thought that I would go back into community development and return to Latin America and work in sustainable development. And so I thought cultural anthropology was the most effective way to do that, because it was so clear to me that so much of the approaches to small-scale development just don’t work because so frequently people trying to support that don’t understand what factors the people on the ground are having to contend with...

The exercise of cultural anthropology is all about trying to understand that there’s a cultural lens that we all look through... and it blinds us to other alternatives, other ways of seeing things, other strategies for how to achieve our work. And I think one of the strengths I brought to the organization, which was kind of a consequence of cultural anthropology, was the ability to think out of the box, think out of sort of routine, traditional ways of doing our work and think about sort of different ways of approaching things, doing things.

That’s actually a good segue — the announcement on your retirement said you turned a team of three then into a team of dozens at the ACLU. How did that growth come about? Was it organic? Was it out of need?

We had three or four staff when I first started, and for the first two, three, four years, it remained right around that size. And then I had the idea... of maybe putting an office down in Las Cruces that would just focus on regional border issues... because at the time, the ACLU was really not focused on the border at all. And I presented that idea to the head of a new department in the organization... And it happened that they were also thinking about a new program where they would seed a couple of ... affiliates across the country with some investment over a period of time that would help that affiliate sort of make a leap to a new level and a different size of organization, a more robust organization.

And so we were selected as one of the three... and by the time we got to the Trump administration, I think we probably had about 15 staff. We were really able to use our growth to capitalize on the opportunity that Trump gave because our membership just skyrocketed overnight. And then eventually, you know, success breeds success... And now we’re at, gosh, I think we’re at 32 or 34 or something like that...

We’re not a very populous state by any stretch and yet we have a larger affiliate than Arizona and Oregon and Ohio and places like that, because we’ve done so well here.

What do you see as your first big case after you took on the executive director role, for you personally and for the organization?

One of the early cases that we took that was particularly important to me was the Otero County sheriffs were receiving federal money through a program called Operation Stone Garden, through Homeland Security, and it was intended to work on drug indictments, and the sheriff there, at the time, just paid his deputies overtime to just go track down undocumented immigrants.

And so they started to conduct these raids on this little unincorporated village of Chaparral ... knocking on people’s doors, pulling people out of homes, going in through their windows, and we just pounced on that and sued Otero County for a series of Fourth Amendment violations ... and got a great policy that prohibits them from actually enforcing federal immigration law.

That was a great one but a more monumental one, and probably one of the sort of jewels of what I would consider my sort of personal crown at the ACLU, would be the case that we filed on behalf of same-sex couples seeking the freedom to marry... that worked its way up to the state’s Supreme Court and the Supreme Court granted the freedom under our state constitution, roughly six or nine months before the U.S. Supreme Court decided. So we were, as it concerns the freedom to marry, a free state before the Supreme Court ever did it.

OK, that might be one of the answers to the next question. If you could pick three landmark victories or cases during your time at the ACLU to talk about, what would they be?

You know, we don’t always do our work through cases... We do a lot of work in the Legislature, too, and there’s some huge wins there as well.

The very recent victory, the passage of the New Mexico Civil Rights Act, that allows for people in our state to go into state courts and seek remedies for constitutional rights violations that they’ve suffered and actually receive compensatory damages — that was a landmark achievement...

You know, removing the age-old language from our state laws that would have banned the provision of abortion care had it remained in existence once Roe was overturned. That was one of the most important accomplishments the organization has achieved in the time that I’ve been with it. Again, we did that as a coalition effort, we’re never alone in this work...

There’s been so many cases that we brought on behalf of inmates for overcrowding, denial of medical services, certainly being the subject of violence and physical abuse by guards.

What do you think about the current standing of Albuquerque Police Department police reforms? (APD entered into a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding excessive use of force.) You’ve been in this since the beginning, even way before the beginning. What do you think about where it was, where it is now, and what it looks like in the future?

I feel like, at some level, the (consent) decree has done about as much as it’s going to achieve.

My concern is that it’s not going to endure and that once you get successive changes in leadership, many of the processes that have been put in place as a consequence of that consent decree will start to unravel. I don’t believe that the leadership is committed to sustaining those reforms, despite the lip service they give to that effect.

At the same time, I don’t think that that consent decree alone is the answer to police violence... unless you’ve got leadership that is strongly behind having a constitutional and professional police force. And there are other issues. I think the way you recruit officers is critically important, the standards that you hold those officers to. I think all of those pieces need to be working in tandem to be able to really make a dent in patterns of police violence.

Is there anything you think that went wrong or should have been done differently — or you hope for in the future — that you think could make the changes that need to be made?

Ideally, I would like to see some sort of rigorous enforcement or accountability mechanism inside the city that is independent enough of the department that it can continue to hold the department accountable... Some really good work was done, I don’t want to discredit that. But I really do fear that the sort of default setting for the department is to back away from those things.

Going forward, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges or potential threats to civil rights, broadly and also in New Mexico in particular?

I am very concerned about what a new Trump administration means for the country. An area that I’m particularly concerned about is the degree to which private groups, militias and such sort of organize themselves to underscore what Trump is trying to do...

Another piece of work that we did was challenging the activities of this militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, back in 2018, who were literally unlawfully detaining immigrant families, hundreds of them, and turning them over to Border Patrol. I really worry about that activity sort of exploding under Trump... Being a border state, there are plenty of wide open spaces where the federal government likes to put detention centers, where they’re far away from any sort of legal assistance, no one can really keep an eye on what’s happening...

And then, lastly, I worry that Trump will, in addition to appointing radically conservative justices to federal courts, he himself will start to ignore injunctions against his administration. The ACLU filed over 400 cases against the Trump administration, and they were forced to change many of the things that they did. You know, the Muslim ban was significantly altered, the family separation policy was stopped dead in its tracks, and they will just start to ignore those kinds of injunctions...

And if that’s the case, this organization is going to be at a bit of a moment of identity crisis, because the courts have always been where we’ve done our best work, I think, and it’s where we’ve been able to create accountability when the odds were really stacked against us. And if that strategy is foreclosed and if the courts are severely undermined, we’re going to have to look for other ways to do our work and think that will be a moment of pretty significant self-reflection for the organization.