New Mexico Senate passes bill seeking to close immigration detention facilities

SANTA FE — The New Mexico Senate passed a bill Tuesday that could shut down immigration detention centers in the state, successfully sending the legislation to the governor’s desk after nearly a decade of failed attempts.

With Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in support, New Mexico is expected to join six other states that have also severed ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid ongoing public outcry over the agents' use of force.

“We’re better than this — you don’t have to turn on the TV to know that we’re better than this,” said co-sponsor Sen. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces.

Cervantes voted against past iterations of this bill, a decision he said he now regrets.

The vote came nearly six hours after the Senate opened the floor, delayed by a series of back-to-back monologues by Republican senators about unrelated subjects — from riding horses to Black History Month.

New Mexico Senate Republican spokesperson Brandon Harris denied that the extended use of the announcement period was an attempt to delay the vote and said instead Republicans were "highlighting priorities."

Ultimately, after four hours of debate, the bill passed on a 24-15 vote.

The only Democrat to vote against the bill was Sen. George Muñoz of Gallup.

“If you want to see a town dry up like a tumbleweed and blow away, get ready, because we are a prison town,” Muñoz said.

If signed into law, the act would not directly shutter detention centers; instead, it would forbid counties and local law enforcement from contracting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Two facilities, in Torrance and Cibola counties, could remain open if ICE decides to contract directly with the facilities’ owner and operator, CoreCivic.

Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security has responded to repeated requests for comments on whether officials would pursue such a contract.

While two of the rural facilities may be able to circumvent the law, the largest detention facility located outside Chaparral will likely close because it is owned by Otero County.

Lawmakers who represent Otero have warned that closing the facility would economically devastate rural communities that rely on prisons for jobs and tax revenue.

“Would you want your people, your neighbors, your friends, your children's friends — would you want them to have the opportunity to have a full belly tomorrow night and have their mom and dad to have a job?” said Sen. Jim Townsend, R-Artesia. “I will, I'll stand for them because it's the right thing to do.”

Other lawmakers who represent the affected counties argued that their communities cannot rely on the prison industry forever, but to get there the state needs to step in and provide economic relief.

“Dignity should never be compromised for revenue,” said Sen. Angel Charley, D-Acoma. “Justice should never be traded for economic survival… We can take a moral stand and still do right by the people who will feel the impact the most — Cibola County has already given more than its share.”

An amendment that would have compensated the counties for lost tax revenue as a result of the facilities closure was narrowly shot down by a 20-19 vote. Several additional amendments leveled by Republican lawmakers also failed. 

Despite opposition, the bill, which sprinted through both chambers of the Legislature, is headed to the governor's desk. Staff in the Governor's Office said she plans to sign the bill, which she first expressed support for in an executive message on the session's first day.

Conditions on the ground

The detention facilities have long been criticized by immigration attorneys and advocates who have repeatedly warned of human rights abuses, including uses of arbitrary solitary confinement, meager food rations, poor medical care and abuse from guards.

Immigration attorney Zoe Bowman, who has clients in both the Cibola and Torrance facilities, said these complaints aren't new.

What's changed, she said, is that attorneys now feel powerless to do anything about abuses their clients report to them.

“One thing that is different now is that a lot of the internal accountability mechanisms we relied on before have been wiped out from the Trump administration,” Bowman said.

The bill’s passage sends a strong message to her clients, she said, that New Mexicans are standing beside them.

Before the vote, co-sponsor Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, who has visited the Torrance facility in Estancia, called the situation “heart wrenching.”

She described meeting a young man with developmental disabilities who did not understand his situation.

“He looked at me with sad eyes — he did not understand why he was in the facility,” Sedillo Lopez said. “His mother was in Florida and he wanted to go home to her. He said to me, ‘no me gusta aquí.’ ‘I don't like it here.’ And he said this in a childish voice, my heart just broke.”

Gillian Barkhurst is the local government reporter for the Journal. She can be reached at gbarkhurst@abqjournal.com.