SANTA FE, New Mexico — Immigrant advocates in New Mexico say local law enforcement agencies are still handing people over to federal immigration officials, months after the state passed one of the country's strongest laws against cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). At a press conference at the State Capitol on Friday, November 6, advocates released emails and other evidence which, they say, show a pattern of local agencies transferring detainees to federal immigration officials — a practice they argue undermines state law. Two Albuquerque Democrats, State Senator Antoinette Sedillo Lopez and Representative Cristina Parajon, say they now plan to introduce legislation to crack down on ICE referrals.
The advocates' claim is an allegation, not a court finding: no judge has ruled on the emails they released, and the agencies involved have not been given a verdict against them. But the documents land on ground the state has already fought over three times this year — in the Legislature, in lawsuits by the state attorney general, and in a federal records suit — and the lawmakers' response targets what legal analysts identified back in February as the gap in New Mexico's law: it bans formal agreements with ICE, but it does not stop an individual officer from picking up the phone.
Source: KSFR, reporting Source New Mexico (Nov. 9, 2026)
What the advocates say the emails show
Source New Mexico reports, in the account carried by KSFR on Monday, that current state laws prohibit the use of jails for immigration detention and the sharing of personal information with immigration agents. Some cities and counties have gone further on their own, adopting policies that stop their law enforcement agencies from handing detainees over to immigration officials at all. But there is no single statewide policy governing those handovers — the informal referrals that happen person to person, booking desk to federal agent — and that, the advocates argue, is where the system is leaking. Their Friday release of emails and other evidence was presented as documentation of that trend, and their demand is for further state legislation to close it.
Sedillo Lopez is a familiar name in this fight. The Albuquerque senator previously sponsored the bill that became the detention-contract ban debate of earlier sessions and carried a separate measure (Senate Bill 177) that would have required law enforcement agencies to act on U Visa applications from immigrant crime victims and witnesses — a bill that passed only one Senate committee. Parajon, an Albuquerque representative, joins her in promising a referrals bill. Neither lawmaker's new text has been published yet; what exists so far is the commitment, made after the advocates' Friday presentation, to introduce it.
The law New Mexico already passed — and its known loophole
House Bill 9, the Immigrant Safety Act, passed the Legislature in the 2026 session and was signed by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in February. Sponsored by Representatives Eleanor Chavez, Angelica Rubio, Andrea Romero and Marianna Anaya and Senator Joseph Cervantes, among others, it prohibits state and local governments from entering into agreements to detain individuals for civil immigration violations, bans 287(g) agreements — the federal program that deputizes local officers to perform immigration duties — and stops the use of public land for immigration detention. The ACLU of New Mexico, which campaigned for the law, said it was meant to ensure local law enforcement is not entangled in ICE operations through formal agreements, so that crime victims and witnesses can approach police without fear.
Source: Bolts Magazine (Feb. 2026); ACLU of New Mexico
The loophole was described at the time by an immigration attorney quoted by Bolts: “What's legal right now, generally and statewide, is that police officers may communicate with ICE. Without 287(g), they're not allowed to interrogate someone about their immigration status or prolong a detention based on a suspicion, but there's no prohibition on police officers calling ICE and providing them with information.” In other words, the Act tore up the contracts; it did not — and, its drafters acknowledged, by itself could not — police every phone call, email or courtesy hold between a local jail and a federal field office. The emails released on Friday are the advocates' attempt to show that this is not a theoretical gap.
New Mexico is one of a small group of states — Bolts counted California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon and Washington among those with comprehensive bans on local ICE partnerships — testing how far a state can go in walling its own police and jails off from federal immigration enforcement. If referrals continue informally after a formal ban, the same question follows every one of those laws. For immigrant families, including Punjabi truck drivers who cross New Mexico daily on Interstates 40 and 25, the practical meaning is simple: a traffic stop or a county-jail booking can still end in an ICE transfer in places where no agreement exists on paper — which is exactly what the proposed bill aims to stop.
The fight has already been to court twice
In May, Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Torrance County and Curry County and their sheriffs, accusing them of maintaining 287(g)-style agreements enabling the transfer of local immigrant arrestees to federal custody despite House Bill 9. “Neither sheriff has the authority to defy House Bill 9,” Torrez said in a statement at the time, as Source New Mexico reported. Curry County's sheriff, Republican Michael Brockett, had defended cooperation with ICE before the law passed, telling Source New Mexico that “keeping our communities safe is a team effort.” Separately, in October the ACLU of New Mexico sued ICE in federal court on behalf of the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, seeking records of ICE's direct, non-competitive “sole source” contracts with the private prison company CoreCivic to keep detaining people at the Torrance County Detention Facility and the Cibola County Correctional Center after the state law cut off the county-contract route.
What happens next
The referrals bill Sedillo Lopez and Parajon promise would have to move through the Legislature's next session, and its shape — whether it bans information-sharing outright, requires agencies to log and report every ICE contact, or attaches penalties — has not been published. The attorney general's suits against the two sheriffs continue, as does the federal records case over the CoreCivic contracts. Friday's press conference also shared the Capitol with a changing of the guard: the same day, Governor Lujan Grisham welcomed Governor-Elect Deb Haaland — who won the governorship in the November 3 midterms — to the Roundhouse to discuss the transfer of power, and Haaland said she intends to protect and expand Lujan Grisham's legacy. Whether the incoming administration backs a referrals crackdown is one of the first immigration questions of her term.