SANTA FE, NM (AP) — New Mexico lawmakers on Tuesday rejected a proposal that would prohibit state and local agencies from contracting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrants seeking asylum in the United States.
The bill failed in the Senate by a vote of 17 to 21. It would also have phased out local governments’ participation in tripartite agreements with private prisons and federal agencies.
The bill would have impacted three privately operated detention centers in New Mexico – and would have effectively ended the detention of migrants at the privately operated Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral in southern New Mexico, on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas, in early 2025.
Similar bills are currently being considered in the Colorado and New York state legislatures that would limit local governments’ contracts with federal immigration authorities or with private contractors under interstate service agreements.
Supporters of the bill in New Mexico pointed to reports of prison-like discipline, poor sanitation conditions and suicide attempts in immigration detention centers and urged lawmakers to take action on humanitarian grounds.
“We are talking about those immigrants who have come to the country under our laws and have applied for asylum,” said Democratic Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque, a co-sponsor of the bill. “We have found that many of them … are being held in conditions that are anything but adequate.”
During the debate, Republican senators downplayed the harshness of living conditions at the Otero County migrant detention center, run by Utah-based Management & Training Corporation, and said terminating the government contract there would deal a severe financial blow to the community.
Republican Sen. Ron Griggs, whose district is home to the Otero County Processing Center, said Otero County borrowed money in 2007 to build the migrant processing and detention center in hopes of eventually paying off the bonds and creating a permanent source of revenue to support public services.
He described the bill as a “direct attack on facilities in some of our poorer rural areas”.
The Otero County Processing Center normally houses about 600 male and female migrants.
Five Democratic senators joined Republicans in defeating the bill. Four other Democratic senators were excused or absent from the vote.
Griggs also argued that a local detention ban in New Mexico would not necessarily improve conditions for migrants awaiting asylum in detention centers in other states.
Jazmin Irazoqui-Ruiz, an attorney with the New Mexico Immigration Law Center, disputes this. She says migrants may be released temporarily to live with relatives or other sponsors to save money, or they may be transferred to states like Colorado that take a different approach and provide legal representation to indigent immigrants.
In recent years, California, Illinois and New Jersey have passed laws aimed at limiting the number of migrant detention centers in their jurisdictions.
