ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico — Federal immigration agents in unmarked vehicles swept into a neighbourhood construction site in Bernalillo County's South Valley on Thursday, November 5, detaining workers at homes still under construction, in an operation captured on a video that has since circulated widely on social media. The New Mexico Political Report, which published the video with the filmer's permission, said an unmarked SUV accelerated past a pickup truck on the street, then braked sharply to cut it off, as at least a half-dozen men in tactical gear marked 'POLICE ICE' rushed into the unfinished houses. At least one man is seen being removed in handcuffs while nearby residents watched and filmed.

Source: New Mexico Political Report / The Paper

The operation took place on Rosemary Court, near the junction of Coors Boulevard and Sage Road SW — a new housing development in the South Valley, the largely working-class, heavily Hispanic area south of downtown Albuquerque. The video was recorded by an Instagram user who shared it and gave permission for it to be republished by The Paper and the New Mexico Political Report. In the footage, agents move between the framed and half-finished homes as residents stand by with phones raised — a scene that has become one of the most shared images of the current enforcement surge in New Mexico.

KOB 4, Albuquerque's NBC affiliate, which visited the site and the surrounding streets, reported that nearly 10 ICE vehicles entered the construction neighbourhood that day. Witnesses told the station that some construction workers ran from agents and were caught, while others went inside the homes under construction and were arrested there. KOB 4 also obtained a separate video showing ICE agents at a local bakery, and said it has asked federal authorities for details of both operations.

Source: KOB 4 reporting, summarised by WiseVoter

Arrests up from 20 to 729 a month, lawmakers are told

The South Valley sweep landed one day before immigrant advocates presented the state Legislature's Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee with a preliminary records review that put hard numbers on the surge. The report, prepared by Somos Un Pueblo Unido from public-records requests and federal data, found that immigration arrests in New Mexico jumped from 20 in July 2024 to 729 in July 2026 — a rise of 3,545 per cent in two years. The underlying arrest data comes from the Deportation Data Project and Syracuse University's TRAC clearinghouse, accessed on November 5, 2026.

Source: Somos Un Pueblo Unido preliminary IPRA report to the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee

Teague González, executive director of the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, told lawmakers that one pipeline feeding those arrests is cooperation between local officers and ICE — what advocates call 'handoffs.' She said local agencies hand people to ICE in a variety of ways, including taking them to parking lots where federal agents are waiting, or driving them directly to local ICE offices. The law center says at least 242 people held in New Mexico detention facilities since January 2025 arrived there through some form of local police or sheriff assistance — among them Brando Chavez Martinez, who was stopped by Sandoval County deputies on Interstate 25 on May 22, 2026, while riding with friends to a family wedding, and was transferred to ICE and taken to the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia despite, advocates say, having no criminal history.

Source: Source New Mexico

The gap in New Mexico law that the fight is about

New Mexico has some of the strongest state limits on immigration cooperation in the country — and, advocates argue, one conspicuous hole in them. State law and local policies bar formal agreements between local agencies and ICE, and there is no 287(g)-style partnership in force. But there is currently no statewide law prohibiting informal communication and collaboration — a phone call, a tip, a jail list — between a local officer and federal agents. This year's Immigrant Safety Act, House Bill 9, now codified at NMSA 1978 sections 13-9-1 to 13-9-6, restricts the expansion of immigrant detention and bars counties from using local jails for immigration detention, but it is tied up in litigation between the U.S. Department of Justice and the state. A separate 2025 law, the Nondisclosure of Personal Information Act, prohibits state employees from passing personal information, including immigration status, to federal immigration authorities.

The result is a patchwork that changes at the county line. In Albuquerque, police and jail officials are prohibited from coordinating with ICE. Next door in Sandoval County, sheriff's spokesman Lt. John Castañeda told Source New Mexico the county has 'no specific policy that says we're not going to help ICE,' and no policy prohibiting deputies from coordinating with federal agents. The records review found documents from 10 counties showing some level of communication or collaboration with federal immigration agencies — including, advocates say, jail staff in Eddy and Lea counties providing ICE with a 'nearly daily list of foreign-born individuals' booked into their jails, before those people have seen a judge and regardless of the reason for their arrest. Neither county immediately responded to requests for comment.

For the South Valley, the immediate impact is at the job site and on the street where it happened. Residential construction in the Albuquerque metro runs heavily on immigrant labour, and an operation that moves through half-built homes in mid-morning — filmed by neighbours and replayed across the community within hours — reaches far beyond the people detained: crews who do not return to a site, employers who cannot say whether their workers were taken, and families on streets like Rosemary Court who watched it happen from their own front doors. For Punjabi and other immigrant readers with family in the trades across the Southwest, the case is a concrete example of how the current enforcement model — lower-profile, dispersed, and built on local cooperation — works in practice.

What happens next

Two Albuquerque Democrats, State Senator Antoinette Sedillo Lopez and Representative Cristina Parajón, have said they will carry legislation into the 60-day session beginning January 19, 2027, aimed at closing the informal-cooperation gap, and advocates are pressing the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee to keep the issue in front of lawmakers through the interim. On the federal side, the open question remains the simplest one: how many people were taken on Rosemary Court, and on what basis. Until ICE or the Department of Homeland Security answers KOB 4's outstanding requests, the only verified count from the South Valley operation is the detention visible on the video itself. Awaaz Punjab will update this report if federal authorities release figures.