New Mexico again considers ban on immigrant detention
A proposal to ban state and local governments in New Mexico from collaborating with the federal government to do immigrant detention passed its first committee on Tuesday afternoon.
The House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee on Tuesday afternoon voted 4-2 to pass House Bill 9, known as the Immigrant Safety Act.
The legislation would prohibit state agencies and local governments from entering into agreements used to detain people for violations of civil immigration law, and would require any existing agreements to end as soon as possible. It doesn't affect enforcement of criminal law.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding approximately 1,500 people inside the three immigration detention centers in New Mexico, said Sophia Genovese, asylum and detention managing attorney with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center and an expert on the bill.
'We have the power to hold the line in New Mexico and not let the Trump administration and ICE use our state as a laboratory for cruelty,' said Jessica Inez Martinez, director of policy and coalition building for the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, and another expert on the bill.
The proposal comes as conservative cities and states increase cooperation with the federal government's deportation plans.
Reps. Eleanor Chávez (D-Albuquerque), Angelica Rubio (D-Las Cruces), Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe) and Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos) are sponsoring HB 9.
Chávez told the committee on Tuesday she is concerned that the federal government is using New Mexico counties as 'pass-throughs' and 'shields' in a scheme to detain immigrants.
She said rather than directly hiring the private prison corporations, ICE enters into contracts with New Mexico counties, who turn around and subcontract with the companies to run the detention centers under documents called Intergovernmental Service Agreements.
ICE does this in order to avoid the Competition in Contracting Act, Chávez said, which requires the federal government to competitively select contractors.
'Agreements with local public entities like New Mexico's counties create a loophole through the competition and transparency that is otherwise required in federal contracts,' she said.
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Democratic senators have twice joined Republicans to reject similar legislation last year and the year before, in starkly different political climates.
HB 9 would also prevent any local government from passing an ordinance that would contradict the law.
It would give the New Mexico Attorney General and local district attorneys the authority to enforce the law through a civil lawsuit.
Federal oversight officials in 2022 told ICE to move everyone out of the Torrance County detention center in Estancia after finding conditions inside to be unsafe and unsanitary. ICE responded less than a month later by moving even more people into the detention center.
That August, a Brazilian asylum seeker named Kesley Vial died by suicide while being held in Torrance.
If not for systemic failures in medical and mental health care, almost all of the people who died in immigration detention in the U.S. between 2017 and 2021 could still be alive today, according to a report released last summer.
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