Bill to ban immigration detention facilities in New Mexico eyed for potential special session | Local News
Bill to ban immigration detention facilities in New Mexico eyed for potential special session | Local News | santafenewmexican.com # Bill to ban immigration detention facilities in New Mexico eyed for potential special session - By Daniel J.
santafenewmexican.com · Daniel J. Chacón dchacon@sfnewmexican.com · September 4, 2026
Bill to ban immigration detention facilities in New Mexico eyed for potential special session | Local News | santafenewmexican.com
# Bill to ban immigration detention facilities in New Mexico eyed for potential special session
- By Daniel J. Chacón dchacon@sfnewmexican.com
#### Daniel Chacon
Reporter
- Author email (dchacon@sfnewmexican.com) - Jul 30, 2025 - Jul 30, 2025 Updated Aug 26, 2025 - 0
The Torrance County Detention Facility, which is contracted with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in March 2025. Daniel J. Chacón/New Mexican file photo
A special legislative session to address federal budget cuts is looming in New Mexico, and it likely will include anti-crime bills and a measure that would ban immigration detention centers in the state, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s chief general counsel told lawmakers Wednesday.
“Will there be a special session? The answer to that question is most likely definitely yes,” Holly Agajanian said during a meeting of the interim legislative Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, which is meeting this week in Mescalero.
“The next question always is when. I don’t have an answer for you on that one,” she said. “My guess would be late August, early September. Obviously, that’s something that we need to sort out sooner rather than later, but that would be my best guess.”
For next year’s 30-day session, which would be Lujan Grisham’s last, Agajanian said the governor considers a measure to enhancing penalties for selling guns on or near school grounds; adding parents to complaints regarding juvenile firearm offenses to ensure their children are complying with court orders, such as treatment or community service; and increasing firearm regulations, including restrictions on high-capacity magazines, ghost guns, 3D-printed guns and silencers, Agajanian said.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has called a special session of the Legislature to consider measures on food assistance, funding for public broadcasting, and health care affordability and stabilization effort following federal funding cuts. Gabriela Campos/New Mexican file photo
“If there is a special session, the governor will ask lawmakers to address federal budget cuts, increase penalties for felons in possession, update our outdated definitions of danger to self and others, make a small adjustment to the criminal competency bill that passed in the last session and ban local governments from contracting with federal agencies to detain immigrants for civil violations,” he said.
Agajanian delivered the same message to lawmakers, saying items on the agenda for a special session would include dealing with the repercussions of the federal budget reconciliation bill, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which President Donald Trump signed into law July 4.
A handful of anti-crime bills that have failed to gain traction in the Legislature are also poised to be on the call, including increasing the penalty for being a felon in possession of a firearm and a law defining harm to self and others that would give judges more authority to order habitual offenders suffering from behavioral health disorders into treatment.
“Governor is [also] willing to have a bill on the call that would ban the presence of immigration facilities in the state of New Mexico,” Agajanian said. “That is not something that we have previously had come up to her desk before, and I know there’s been a lot of back and forth on it, and I do believe that she is at this point ready to put a bill like that on the call.”
During the 60-day session earlier this year, lawmakers considered a bill that would have banned state and local governments from contracting with the federal government to detain people for civil immigration violations. The proposal, House Bill 9, also would have required counties that have such contracts to end them as soon as possible. The measure stalled in a legislative committee.
“Our President has taken illegal immigration to the lowest numbers ever, but here we are finding a way to use taxpayer dollars to pick a fight with the administration for cheap political points,” she said in a statement. “Meanwhile, we’re leaving serious bipartisan juvenile justice reform efforts out in the cold. I’m deeply upset yet not surprised that this is shaping up to be another special session of hot air.”
During Wednesday’s meeting, the committee chair, Sen. Joe Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, noted a proposal to prohibit local governments from operating immigration detention facilities within their borders has gone before the Legislature in the past.
“I’ve resisted the efforts to try and ban the state and local governments from doing this,” he said. “The groups who have been promoting this seem to think that if you shut down the New Mexico beds that the feds won’t be detaining people. … If we shut down the New Mexico beds, they’re just going to send them someplace else, [such as] Texas or Alcatraz or ‘alligator Alcatraz’ or some other deplorable place.”
Cervantes said he’d rather have New Mexico, which he believes is perhaps “a little more humane” and “a little more civilized as a state” care for detainees, who would be close to their families “and close to a state and a culture and the people that perhaps don’t see immigration quite the same way as others do.”
Rep. Christine Chandler, a Los Alamos Democrat who serves as vice chair of the committee, said she was “really happy” to hear the governor is considering a ban on immigration detention facilities in New Mexico, which she said was a measure she co-sponsored.
Cervantes said efforts are underway for the committee to tour the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, one of only two immigration detention facilities in New Mexico, at its next meeting at the end of August.
Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, said she’s tried “many times” to get into one of those facilities unannounced, after hearing about “cruelty” and issues such as feces on jail floors.
“They’re also not subject to the same kind of scrutiny that our state facilities are, and so what we hear about feces on the floors and the detainees having to clean it up, those are the kinds of stories [that are] always denied,” she said. “Yet, attorneys have told me they can smell the feces when they go in to visit clients.”
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@danieljchacon.
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