Sherry Robinson 8-25-25+

sherry robinson 8-25-25 on

Government shutdowns should be unthinkable

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

My husband has many fine qualities. One is that he has insurance.

During years of freelance writing, one thing I haven’t had to worry about is insurance coverage. But I’m acutely aware that circumstances haven’t favored many a fellow freelancer or millions of other people who aren’t insured through an employer.

Critics may paint Obamacare as some form of socialized medicine that benefits bums, but from my perspective as a business journalist, it’s an economic underpinning for the self-employed and small businesses that can’t offer insurance. It’s indispensable to the entrepreneur, the artisan, the handyman and legions of workers like them.

What I hear from the insured is that it’s no-frills coverage. It could be better, but it’s affordable (barely). Now the “big beautiful bill” threatens to triple their premiums. If they’re unable to pay, their only choice is to go uninsured. That only works for the young and healthy.

So Democrats drew a line in the sand, and here we are in a government shutdown.

In “Breakdown: Lessons for a Congress in Crisis” former U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman provided a thoughtful history of government shutdowns and government dysfunction, which have worsened since he published the book in 2022. The down-to-earth Bingaman is a moderate Democrat who represented New Mexico for 30 years in the Senate. Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, called Bingaman a model senator and a “workhorse, not a show horse.”

When Bingaman became a senator in 1983, President Ronald Regan was in his first term, Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats held the House. “Congressional leaders of both parties shared a sense of responsibility for keeping the government and the Congress functioning,” he wrote.

Members of Congress and the president observed norms about how their branches of government should function. Norms aren’t rules or laws but “understandings and traditions about how officeholders and institutions behave and interact,” Bingaman wrote. They’ve been called the “soft guardrails” of American democracy.

Norms ended when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994 and delivered government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996, introducing a new tactic in negotiations with the president, in this case Bill Clinton. Gingrich argued that the right not to pass money bills was only weapon Congress had to counter the president’s veto. Bingaman argued then that Gingrich’s “right” was an abuse of power and contrary to the designs of the founding fathers.

In 2013 Republicans shut down government over the Affordable Care Act. ACA was then three and a half years old, but Republicans added language to the spending bill to delay its implementation. Democrats controlled the Senate, and Obama was still in office, so the Rs held up a continuing resolution and government closed.

Donald Trump in 2018 became the first president to shut down government over support for his border wall. Rep. Tom Cole, R-OK, worried about impacts on midterms, saying, “I don’t see how putting the attention on shutting down the government when you control the government is going to help you.” Trump waited until after the elections to shut down the government.

The same year, Democrats shut down government (Bingaman thought this was a mistake) over the legal status of Dreamers. After Republicans promised full debate of proposals to continue Dreamers’ legal protections, Dems approved the spending bill. They never got that debate.

And now the Rs want Dems to sign off with the promise that they’ll take up ACA premiums. It’s like Lucy urging Charlie Brown to kick that football she’s holding.

Throughout this turmoil, Bingaman believed that shutting down the government was “an ineffective and damaging way to gain leverage in a policy dispute” because it fails to achieve its purpose and reinforces public perceptions of government dysfunction.

He agreed with his friend, former Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, who said: “Shutting down the government of the United States of America should never, ever be used as a bargaining chip for any issue, period. It should be to governing as chemical warfare is to real warfare. It should be banned. It should be unthinkable.”

Bingaman worried in 2022 that we had reached a point where the public judges how serious a politician is on a given issue by whether he or she is willing to shut down government. “And the more demagoguery on display before the shutdown occurs, and during the shutdown, the more difficult it is to resolve the dispute,” Bingaman wrote.

That’s truer than ever, and it’s gotten much worse. Shutting down government is not only a weapon of the party out of power, currently it’s a weapon of the party wielding power.

Keep ICE detention centers but monitor them

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Picking pumpkins just got a whole new spin.

Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, emailed her members that Torrance County Commissioner Kevin McCall was an ICE supporter and cautioned teachers against field trips to McCall’s Pumpkin Patch, a popular family-owned business, according to SourceNM.

The online uproar prompted McCall to clarify during a commission meeting: “Our business is in no way communicating or working with ICE, which is utterly false. From its start 28 years ago, our mission has always been to provide a fun, family-friendly place for guests to make cherished memories.”

In his role as county commissioner, McCall recently voted with fellow commissioners to extend the ICE contract with the Torrance County Detention Facility, which Bernstein wrote “has been the scene of various documented human rights violations against detainees, but Mr. McCall and the other commissioners excuse that in the name of economic gain for both the county and private interests.”

She ends with: “Spooky stuff. Beware rotten pumpkins.”

Let’s pause to roll our eyes.

Bernstein has been a champion of teachers for many years, but this was not her finest moment. Teachers understandably fear the impacts of ICE raids on their students. Bernstein should stick to that issue instead of inventing conspiracies.

This pumpkin story is really about the disconnect between rural and urban areas, especially around jobs, and it’s a subject I’ve written about often during my decades of reporting in New Mexico.

If you drive around Torrance County, and I have, you’d see that employers are few and far between. However flawed it is, the detention center is one of the county’s few large employers, with 100 workers. According to New Mexico Political Report, it spends $8 million a year in a county with a poverty rate of 20.4%.

So when Bernstein pans the detention center vote as excusing its lapses “in the name of economic gain for both the county and private interests,” she misses the point. Her “economic gain” looks more like survival in a poor county.

Last month, when I wrote about the state’s ICE detention centers in Estancia, Alamogordo and Milan, I heard from Linda Calhoun, a small business owner in Torrance County who sees a middle ground.

“This issue keeps being presented as a choice between closing the detention centers and leaving things as is because of the local financial considerations. But I see everyone overlooking another possibility, especially here in Torrance County. That possibility is to bring the facility up to current health department standards…

“I read somewhere that the New Mexico Health Department has no jurisdiction over the facility in Estancia because of its contract with the feds. I just don’t understand why that is. Our restaurant has to abide by Health Department standards, as well we should.”

“The building in Estancia is in serious disrepair. They should not be allowed to skate without any accountability. I have seen pictures of huge cracks in the concrete floors. The plumbing and heating don’t work. Detainees are fed frozen burritos that have not even been thawed, much less warmed…”

Calhoun has a point. If the state has the authority to collect gross receipts taxes from these entities, why does it not enforce standards? The answer is that it apparently hasn’t tried.

In September, the New Mexico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights blamed many of the three facilities’ problems on a contracting process that creates “confusion when it comes to oversight and accountability and leaves each stakeholder only partially accountable for addressing issues.”

ICE contracts for space with Torrance, Otero and Cibola counties, which are pass-through agents for private owners. The Torrance County manager told New Mexico Political Report that because CoreCivic owns the facility, the county has limited oversight.

More likely, the county is reluctant to pressure CoreCivic because it closed the facility in 2017, and that had immediate economic fallout. The company reopened the center two years later with the ICE contract.

My reading of the civil rights advisory committee’s report is that the state should step up.

The committee recommended closing all three immigration detention facilities and expanding community-based alternatives to detention (the committee chair and vice-chair dissented). It also said the state should stop using these county pass-through contracts, and – most important to this discussion – “create a robust oversight system for monitoring immigrant detention centers in the state.”

The governor, some legislators and immigrant advocates are pushing legislation to close the facilities and ban ICE detention in New Mexico. However, economic development doesn’t always mean high tech or oil and gas. It would be smarter economically (and a kindness to immigrant inmates, who will be detained somewhere that may be worse) to preserve and monitor the state’s detention centers.

Tracking every federal cut that will hit the state

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Legislators got the people’s business done in two reasonably efficient days during the recent special session, but not without some political theater.

This year, the governor and Democrats were on the same page in wanting to prepare the state for the Republican president’s funding cuts. And because of the Legislature’s newly created Federal Funding Stabilization Subcommittee, they had numbers.

Few people know the state’s numbers like the subcommittee’s co-chair, Rep. Patty Lundstrom, D-Gallup, who is former chair of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee. She’s also a moderate who hasn’t been afraid to buck the Progressives.

Republicans argue that the special session was unnecessary because impacts of the “big beautiful bill” won’t hit until 2027, if then. But it’s not that simple.

The subcommittee, which began meeting in March, “listened to agencies that are super worried,” said Lundstrom. And it’s keeping an eye on moving targets – namely, when federal regulations governing Medicaid and other programs take effect. The Trump administration hasn’t released many regulations, and now with the government shutdown, Lundstrom expects further delays. When the subcommittee meets in November it will have “a matrix of everything that will hit the state.”

It appears that Medicaid may not change until 2027, but “changes are happening now to SNAP,” Lundstrom said. One in five New Mexicans relies on SNAP (formerly called food stamps) for food. Food banks around the state have been strained for months.

The subcommittee also zeroed in on the Affordable Care Act insurance premium tax credits that expire at the end of the year. Some 6,300 New Mexicans could see their insurance costs spiral. As we know, saving the credits provoked the standoff between Democrats and the administration that triggered the government shutdown.

“The primary reason for the special session ties back to Obamacare,” Lundstrom said. “The subsidy ends before the end of the year. It could triple what they pay now. My fear is they (will lose coverage). It was our main reason to be up there.”

Another priority was keeping rural hospitals open. Because of impending funding cuts to Medicaid six to eight rural hospitals could close within 18 months.

Bills generated by the subcommittee include:

· House Bill 1, which provides $16.6 million to maintain SNAP food benefits and $1.2 million to retain SNAP program staff at UNM and NMSU.

· House Bill 2, which allows the state Health Care Affordability Fund to subsidize health insurance purchased through the state BeWell marketplace. The bill also removes income caps for purchasers. The cost is $17.3 million this fiscal year.

· Senate Bill 1, which moves $50 million into the Rural Health Care Delivery Fund to stabilize healthcare services in rural and underserved areas.

However, the picture keeps changing. Even as state lawmakers deliberated during the special session, the U.S. Department of Energy cancelled $135.2 million in projects in New Mexico as part of a larger swipe at blue states during the shutdown. Lundstrom predicts that eventually everybody who’s suffered a funding cut will appear before the subcommittee. State coffers can’t help everybody, leaders warn.

The Democrats missed no opportunity for messaging around these bills and the session itself. The governor and legislative leaders talked about stepping up to protect the state’s most vulnerable residents, to keep food on their tables, to help rural hospitals stay afloat.

The Republicans did their own messaging, mostly about being shut out of the process. Because their party has done the same thing to Democrats in Congress, it’s an ironic complaint. On the other hand, it was an opportunity for Democrats to take the high road. They didn’t.

Lundstrom supports including the Republicans. As a young member of the appropriations committee, she learned from her mentors, Reps. Lucky Saavedra and Kiki Varela, that everyone should have a voice in the process.

“It’s a team approach,” she said. “Republicans represent different parts of the state with different needs. We need to hear from those parts of the state.”

Considering how poorly the Dems are being treated in Congress these days, we might sympathize with their reluctance to work with the Rs here at home. But what if they rise above the mistrust and resentment to demonstrate that cooperation produces better solutions? That’s the best message of all.

Self-serving senators keep medical compacts out of special session

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

What is it about healthcare that inspires so much gibberish?

On the same day that the president was dispensing unfounded medical advice on Tylenol to pregnant women, state Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth was spinning a wild yarn about why lawmakers shouldn’t take up medical compacts during the upcoming special session.

The interstate medical licensure compact is an agreement among states to recognize each others’ professional licenses. It allows healthcare workers licensed in one state to work in another that participates in the compact. They would instantly ease New Mexico’s shortage of medical professionals. And for people who now travel outside the state to see specialists that we don’t have, it would be a huge savings in time and money.

Most states participate in the compacts because they make sense. New Mexico belongs only to the compact for nurses, and it works very well. Attempts to approve compacts for doctors and other healthcare workers have failed, as I’ve written before, because of opposition from the powerful New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association.

Now there are two new reasons to join compacts.

The federal government is offering $50 billion to rural hospitals to offset effects of the “big beautiful bill,” but applicants in compact states will get preference. Deadline for the initial round of funding is Nov. 5. Waiting until the regular session to debate the compacts risks losing this funding, warns the nonpartisan Think New Mexico, which has championed compacts.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman George Muñoz, who is a businessman and not a lawyer, said pointedly, “If the Legislature chooses to leave $100 million a year on the table, that may be a key issue.” Muñoz, who is from Gallup, knows well the precarious state of rural hospitals.

The other new reason is that one in five service members turn down assignments at New Mexico Air Force bases because medical care is inadequate for that family. The rate of medical rejections here is double the Air Force average. Cannon in Clovis, Holloman in Alamogordo, and Kirtland in Albuquerque are among the top 17 Air Force bases for military rejection.

The governor is ready to have medical compacts on her agenda for the Oct. 1 special session but said the Senate’s leaders are opposed.

By that she means the five Senate Democrats who killed the physician compacts bill this year by amending it to death in the Senate Judiciary Committee: Joseph Cervantes, of Las Cruces; Katy Duhigg, Moe Maestas, Debbie O'Malley, and Mimi Stewart, of Albuquerque; and Peter Wirth, of Santa Fe. They’re all from New Mexico’s biggest cities and don’t know or care what’s happening to rural hospitals.

Senate Majority Leader Wirth, a lawyer, told Source New Mexico he opposed adding medical compacts to the special agenda. “Healthcare policy should not be held hostage to short-term grant deadlines,” Wirth said. “Making permanent changes to professional licensing standards based on temporary funding availability and an ever-changing set of rules coming from the federal government sets a dangerous precedent.”

Wirth added that lawmakers need time before the regular session in January “to examine how interstate compacts would interact with New Mexico’s existing laws and ensure that any changes truly serve the long-term interests of providers and patients.”

Think New Mexico responded: “Lawmakers have had ample time to think through the compacts. New Mexico entered the nurse compact in 2003. Other compacts have been introduced repeatedly over multiple years. Seven of the ten compacts passed unanimously through the House in 2025. In March, the (physician) compact was debated at length in the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Wirth is dissembling. Pretending to be concerned and raising false issues, he will keep compacts out of the special session and buy time for the trial lawyers to mount a more elaborate attack during the regular session.

The governor has called them on it. In a news conference she said: “I worry there are so many trial lawyer leaders in the Senate that it gets caught there. I understand that they will tell you their perspective is patient safety, but if you have no doctors here and nobody can get in, I don’t see how you make the argument that you’re leaning in to patient safety.”

Increasingly alone, Wirth and the trial lawyers’ Senate minions face a loud and growing clamor for compacts, medical malpractice reform and meaningful measures to retain and recruit doctors and other healthcare professionals.

Look around, senators. You’re hurting people.

New Mexico outshines Colorado in tourism attractions but not numbers

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

My plan was simple. I was going to meet my brother and his family at a favorite haunt in western Colorado. I’m no longer 50, when I drove great distances without a care, so I figured I’d drive as far as I could, grab a motel room and finish the next day.

It was the road trip from hell.

Here it is in a nutshell: Cloudbursts that caused lines of travelers to hunker down on the roadside with their flashers on, mobs of tourists in Colorado, and ordinary motels charging $300 a night – the going rate, and that’s if you could find a room. Add to that road construction in Salida that made it impossible for a stranger to get through town. And a corrupted Google maps app barking out the wrong directions. And a $300 room with walls so thin, the couple having sex in the next room should have asked if it was good for me too.

Driving back the next day, I could only ask myself, why on earth do people go there? And in droves. In Colorado you can eat the same bland food you find anywhere and escape into nature with a hundred companions crowding the trails. Colorado is not only overdone, over-exposed and over-priced, it’s boring!

As a Colorado native, I can say New Mexico has everything Colorado has and so much more – a beautiful and varied landscape, the cultural treasures of our Native American and Hispanic residents, a vastly more interesting history, and a vigorous art scene. Where else can you find in one place: hoodoos, caverns, opera, little green men, Billy the Kid, hot springs, hot air balloons, Route 66 and a duck race? Icing on the cake: Buy jewelry directly from Native American artisans.

If the tapped-out Colorado tourists drove south a couple of hours, they would find Ojo Caliente, Chama, Taos, Raton, Angel Fire, Red River and Farmington – each with excellent offerings and ready to entertain you without breaking the bank. Drive farther south and discover a great deal more.

Many feel this way. On Reddit I found this post: “Why isn’t New Mexico as popular as Colorado or Texas? I recently visited New Mexico and was blown away by its natural beauty. All the places I drove to like Carlsbad, Cloudcroft, White Sands, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe – the scenery was absolutely stunning… Why isn’t New Mexico bigger as a tourist destination or economically? It feels like such an underrated gem with so much to offer.”

Here are a few responses:

“Colorado is stupid expensive and, well, Texas is Texas. No thanks.”

“I know! I went this year and I so enjoyed it. I loved the fact that it wasn’t overrun with people. Got a solid dose of peace and quiet!”

“Me too!!! Less traffic, not too many people, small scenic towns. What’s not to love?”

“For folks looking to get away and connect with nature, it’s perfect. Ski resorts aren’t sold out, the mountains are just as beautiful as Colorado (fight me)… Texas has barely any (national) parks the size of what we have here… I’m a transplant and I love New Mexico with all my heart.”

Also commenting were many New Mexicans who like being undiscovered. These two posts were typical: “Shhhhhhhhhh” and “Good. Stay away. Shoo.”

Back in New Mexico, I learn that we’re even less discovered than usual this year. After breaking records in 2024 with 42.6 million visitors who spent $8.8 billion, our tourism has taken a hit. International visitation is off and people of modest means are staying home. Considering that tourism employs 95,219 people, or 8.1% of the state’s workforce, this is concerning.

Foreign guests are only 1.8% of New Mexico’s visitors, but they spend five times as much as Americans, according to the state Tourism Department. Canadians represent the biggest decrease. Why? Make a wild guess.

The travel press also blames inflation, rising airfares, and the overall cost of travel.

Surprisingly, tourism in Taos declined two years in a row, according to the Taos News, because of construction on the town’s major arterial, a dry winter and political uncertainty. Said one business owner: “The times are incredibly uncertain and people are scared."

Even powerhouse Santa Fe has seen visitation slip. The city’s tourism executive attributes it to economic uncertainty.

I’d like to see New Mexico’s promoters focus on Colorado and its hordes of exploited tourists. It shouldn’t be too hard to lure some of them to New Mexico. We would only be a bit less undiscovered.

Watchdog to governor: CYFD’s failures are on you

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Another cabinet secretary has departed the horror show we call the Children Youth and Families Department.

Teresa Casados left the same day the Governor’s Office announced her retirement, which looks like a firing.

In 2023, when she joined CYFD, Casados was the governor’s chief operating officer. She had been a competent bureaucrat – that reliable person a governor can count on to get things done. Casados had led the state’s COVID-19 response, along with wildfire relief. But the agency reporters usually describe as “embattled” was a different challenge.

At the time of Casados’ appointment, I remember the objections: She’s not a social worker. She has no experience with abused and neglected children. The governor brushed them aside, confident that her fixer would bring order to chaos.

Two years later, demands of a massive court settlement remain unmet, the Attorney General is investigating, and legislators have tried repeatedly to bring oversight and accountability to the department.

CYFD is worse than ever, says watchdog Maralyn Beck, who describes Casados’ job performance as “terrible.” On her watch we saw the first child suicide in state custody, followed a month later by a second.

But Casados’ departure isn’t cause to celebrate, Beck says. “This isn’t about Teresa,” she posts on social media. “Governor, this is on you.”

Beck is the self-appointed CYFD watcher and truth teller who has dogged the agency since her own eye-opening experience as a foster parent in 2017. She founded a nonprofit, New Mexico Child First Network, and has become an expert on CYFD and the child welfare system in New Mexico.

I urge everyone who cares about kids to watch Beck’s August 28 podcast with reporter Daniel Chacon, of the Santa Fe New Mexican, but I warn you: It will hurt your heart to know what goes on under the state’s banner.

Beck was in her early thirties in 2017 when she volunteered to be a foster parent after a baby died in foster care. The infant had been strapped in a car seat for 12 hours with no food.

Becoming a foster parent took eight months, not because CYFD was being careful but because nobody saw any urgency in recruiting foster care givers. As a foster mom, Beck experienced an agency in chaos with no internal controls or accountability. Employees didn’t talk to each other or to foster parents and often treated foster parents poorly. CYFD’s culture was broken, and management was abysmal.

Monique Jacobson was then Gov. Susana Martinez’s all-purpose bureaucrat in charge of CYFD. Like Casados, Jacobson was well regarded. Like Casados, she had zero relevant experience. During a public meeting Beck was surprised at Jacobson’s ignorance of CYFD’s internal workings.

Beck expected Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to do better. Her first hire, Brian Blaylock, had experience with troubled youth but was in over his head as a cabinet secretary. The second, retired state Supreme Court Justice Barbara J. Vigil, was a poor fit and spent two months of her short tenure in London, Beck said. Casados was the office’s third occupant.

Through them all, children died.

“You don’t have child fatalities in a system that’s working,” Beck said.

Just weeks ago, the court-appointed arbiter for the Kevin S. lawsuit’s settlement declared that CYFD and the state Health Care Authority have shown little urgency in complying with the settlement agreement. Filed in 2020, the class-action lawsuit accused the two agencies of failing to keep children in their care safe.

Said Beck: “Kids are not in appropriate placement. It is exponentially worse than when the Kevin S. lawsuit was filed.”

She’s also troubled that CYFD doesn’t pay its foster care givers regularly or reimburse them for expenses, even though it routinely places little ones wearing diapers and nothing else.

Beck describes herself as an ordinary person who simply wanted to help. Her plan in life was not to become an expert on CYFD, but knowing what she knows, she feels compelled to do this work. She testifies regularly in state hearings, where her mantra is, “Our kids are not OK.”

“I have all but put my life on hold to fix this department,” she told Chacon. “I’m not backing down. Better expect me at every hearing.”

She has a few choice words for elected officials, especially the governor: “We need leaders to stop being political. We need leaders with humanity. We need leaders willing to do not just the hard work but the heart work.”

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.

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.

Sherry Robinson 8-25-25+

sherry robinson 8-25-25 on

This website uses cookies.