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© 2024 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  9/1/25

Lawmakers try to understand state’s ICE detention centers

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     New Mexico has three ICE detention centers in Otero, Torrance and Cibola counties. The governor is considering a bill to ban immigration detention facilities during an upcoming special legislative session.

     Understandably, local governments want to protect these sources of jobs and revenue, but detention centers aren’t your regular, accessible employer. They receive our tax dollars to warehouse human beings, but if you expect responsibility and transparency you’d be disappointed.

     And, of course, they’re politicized. Democrats see hellholes; Republicans see summer camps. What’s the public to make of this? 

     In recent reporting Patrick Lohmann of Source New Mexico dug beneath the rhetoric following a tour of the Otero County Processing Center by some members of the legislative Courts, Corrections and Criminal Justice Committee. 

     The August 25 tour was supposed to be a committee activity. Chairman Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, had worked for months with Otero County’s lobbyist, former Rep. Zach Cook, a Republican, to arrange a tour for the committee. Cook assured him a tour was in the works, but as the date approached Cook wasn’t hearing back from ICE. Cervantes canceled the tour.

     Days later, Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, arranged a visit when U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was visiting the state. Brantley asked federal officials why the committee hadn’t received permission to visit the facility, and they said they had no request on record to visit the facility.

By this time, the committee schedule was finalized, and Brantley’s tour became “unofficial.” 

     Eight Republicans and one Democrat, Rep. Andrea Romero of Santa Fe, toured the state’s biggest immigration detention center. They weren’t allowed to speak to detainees. Republicans saw a clean, humane, safe facility with a law library, dental and mental health care, exercise equipment, and computers. They noted the potential loss of 300 jobs and gross receipts tax revenues.

     In a news release Brantley said: “ICE will do their job no matter what. Our choice is simple: a clean, safe, and accountable facility here, or one where we have no say in how detained migrants are treated.”

     Romero saw hundreds of inmates “who just look absolutely in despair,” sitting or lying on their beds. Recreation equipment was locked up. She was the only one asking about due process, legal representation, and how quickly detainees are deported.

     Romero told Lohmann she hoped other elected officials “get an opportunity to really see these places, because it shouldn’t just be one person trying to decipher what’s actually happening. We need to have a lot of transparency around people’s rights, around who we detain, and for what reason.”

     Both legislators make good points. Corrections facilities are often the best and sometimes the only job options in rural counties. And wouldn’t we rather have ICE facilities in a state that cares about conditions?

     But the question of transparency looms over everything. Why should Cervantes and even Brantley have to go to such lengths for a tour? They are elected officials who want to lay eyes on a facility that receives massive amounts of taxpayer money. If the detention centers are as good as their supporters claim they should welcome the visits.

     But it’s ICE we’re talking about here. Police wear uniforms but not masks, catch criminals, and are accountable for what they do. Masked ICE agents dressed in street clothes are supposed to be catching criminals, but instead they prey on moms and dads, restaurant and agricultural workers, students, Dreamers, U.S. citizens, green card holders, and pretty much anybody with brown skin. Arrests are often so violent that detainees are injured.

     When U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez visited at the end of July, Otero’s average daily population was 843, and more than 80% had no criminal charges or convictions. This compares to 71% nationally, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. 

     Vasquez was not allowed to speak to detainees, and jailers wouldn’t answer questions about their treatment. He said their phones were broken, and toilets wouldn’t flush.

     Staff members of U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich visited the Torrance County Detention Center, with 435 detainees, in late May and reported terrible conditions. Nobody has seen the Cibola County Detention Center, population 227, since January 2024. 

     New Mexico is not an outlier. The feds now have new guidelines that require advance notice for oversight visits and make some facilities off limits – even though the law says members of Congress are not required to provide advance notice. In July a dozen U.S. House Democrats sued. Vasquez has his own bill about ICE detention transparency and treatment.

     When New Mexico legislators examine these detention centers, they will weigh jobs and revenue, but they must also assess the state’s role in this increasingly unpopular human roundup.

© 2024 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  8/25/25

Sanitizing history is a dangerous exercise

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     The history police are at it again. Taos officials want to rename Kit Carson Park, and the president aims to scrub “propaganda” from the venerable Smithsonian.

     Freeing the historical record from uncomfortable facts doesn’t change anything. I’ve written before that history isn’t pretty. History is what happened, good and bad. History has shaped where we are today. If we ignore history, it repeats itself until we citizens finally get it.

     Kit Carson, one of New Mexico’s best known historical figures, was a scout, soldier, Indian agent, rancher and trader. In 1862 Gen. James Carleton ordered Carson to attack Mescalero Apaches, kill all the men and capture women and children. It was a brutal campaign, but Carson ignored the order to kill all the men, and the Mescaleros became the first occupants of the Bosque Redondo reservation on the Pecos River.

     The next year Carleton ordered Carson to round up Navajos. Carson didn’t want to lead the campaign and tried to resign, but Carleton cajoled him into staying. In “Blood and Thunder,” author Hampton Sides describes how Carson grimly carried out the ruthless, scorched-earth campaign that Carleton demanded. After troops destroyed their crops, livestock and orchards, the starving Navajos surrendered.

     Contrary to popular belief, Carson didn’t oversee the terrible Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo. He rode with the first group (there were many groups over several months) to the Rio Grande and then went home. Taoseños greeted him as a hero. Navajos and Hispanic settlers had fought each other for 200 years. 

     The poorly managed Bosque Redondo became a concentration camp overwhelmed by hunger and disease. Thousands died. In 1868 survivors were allowed to return home. 

     The Taos Town Council wanted to rename the park in 2014, but it didn’t happen. The proposal has resurfaced. A committee has studied Carson and listened to guest speakers. I give them credit for tackling the question more responsibly than their neighbor down the road. In Santa Fe a handful of vandals tore down a public monument as the city’s mayor abdicated leadership. Subsequent city deliberations included not one historian.

     Arguments for Carson: In his time he was a nationally known and respected citizen of Taos. His home near the plaza is on the Historic Register. “He was on the ‘right’ side of history at many times and in many places in his lifetime,” said Hampton Side. “He befriended many Indian tribes and was a sympathetic observer of Native American culture.”

     Arguments against: His role in the Long Walk blights his legacy.

     As the author of two books about the Apaches, I can say that Kit Carson was hardly the worst villain in the Indian wars.

     And I applaud efforts to examine the Long Walk, especially the state’s exhibit at Fort Sumner Historic Site. The facility stepped up after some righteous prodding by Diné young people. 

     For years, the museum told only the army’s side of the story. In 1990 a group of teens stopped at the site’s prayer shrine and saw more about Billy the Kid than the Navajo experience. They wrote to the state: “We the young generation of the Diné were here on June 27, 1990, at 7:30 p.m. We find Fort Sumner’s historical site discriminating and not telling the true story behind what really happened to our ancestors in 1864-1868.” They asked the museum to display what really happened. 

     After several attempts, the site in 2021 opened a powerful new exhibit. The Bosque Redondo Memorial features life-size murals by Diné artist Shonto Begay. Historian Heidi Toth described its impact as “equal parts sad, uncomfortable, and inspiring.”

     Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, has said he wants the truth of Bosque Redondo told “so America can know and so the world can know, but also, so that it won’t happen again.”

     This kind of uncomfortable history is now under the gun at the venerable Smithsonian. President Trump is exasperated at exhibits depicting “how horrible our Country is” and says he’ll do to museums what he’s done to higher education. Museums that don’t reflect his vision of history could see funding cuts and loss of nonprofit status.

     The park’s name change pales by comparison, but in either case it amounts to trying to sanitize the historical record. We all like an inspiring story, but history isn’t all Betsy Ross stitching the flag. The ultimate history lesson is to not repeat the mistakes of the past.