The number of federal immigration enforcement arrests is expected to greatly increase in New Mexico and across the country thanks to a massive infusion of funding in the reconciliation bill President Donald Trump signed July 4.
Immigrant legal and advocacy groups here are doing their best to shield as many community members as possible, they told Source New Mexico in recent interviews. In particular, leaders of three prominent groups said they’re focusing on “know your rights” workshops as a way to not only increase public awareness of what to do during a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but also to strengthen community ties in different immigrant communities.
“They are a key way in which we are lessening isolation, increasing engagement and connection,” said Rachel Lazar, director of El Centro de Igualdad and Derechos, in an interview Tuesday with Source. “And they’re an entry point into organizing and continuing to give the community the opportunity to speak out.”
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” contains $170 billion for Trump’s immigration crackdown, including $30 billion for ICE. That makes it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country.
The funding will go toward hiring 10,000 ICE officers within five years, along with upgrades of ICE facilities and the hiring of ICE immigration lawyers for enforcement and removal proceedings in court.
The bill also allocates $45 billion to build new immigrant detention centers. ICE’s 2024 immigrant detention budget was about $9 billion.
The funding boost supercharges ICE as the agency aggressively targets immigrants in arrests and raids. Even before the bill passed, a coalition of local immigrant advocacy groups warned of a sharp increase in ICE operations, including workplace raids and doorknocking at homes of families and individuals.
“So far in this administration that there’s been an uptick in immigration enforcement activities in communities across New Mexico at businesses and homes as well as out in the streets, and we’ve also seen a significant increase in the number of people detained day-to-day in detention facilities within New Mexico to hold people in immigration custody,” said Rebecca Sheff, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico.
High-profile federal immigration law enforcement operations in New Mexico include reported arrests of about 50 people in early March arrested in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Roswell, along with a dairy farm in Lovington in early June. This month, ICE appeared to target gig-worker delivery drivers in a sweep at a Rio Rancho Walmart parking lot and also executed a violent arrest of a driver last week inside an Albuquerque Walmart.
Lazar said El Centro is hosting workshops, roughly every week, tailored to counteract what it sees ICE doing on the ground here. That means offering guidance to, for example, business owners concerned about worker audits; nonprofits representing domestic violence victims; as well as partner organizations.
“We get dozens and dozens of calls every week from the community when there’s a detention that takes place,” she said. “And so we’re able to track patterns and tailor our [workshops] depending on the patterns that we’re seeing. What we’ve been seeing in the past week is an uptick of ICE knocks on the door, sweeps taking place in public places, inside and outside of Walmart.”
El Centro has a page on its website providing details of what people should do if ICE questions them. The same is true for the ACLU, and the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center.
Sophia Genovese, a Georgetown Law School professor who worked at NMILC until recently, said the organization is going to be “much more aggressive” when it comes to education and outreach.
“People are not remembering their rights. They’re saying who they are, they’re saying where they’re from, and that is enabling ICE to detain them and hold them in detention and swiftly deport them,” she said. “That’s a big piece that I think continues to be overlooked.”
The center and its partners are also focusing on building safety plans for families that contemplate whom they can call if someone is detained.
“Having things mapped out so families have a plan is really critical,” Genovese said.
Fabiola Landeros, El Centro’s immigration organizer, said a woman at one of their workshops recently said she’s most afraid of being “kidnapped” and her family not knowing where she is.
“She said: ‘I’m afraid, and my family is afraid, to not know if I get detained where I’m going to end up, if I’m going back to my family,’” Landeros said. “And that’s the scary part for our communities, not to know where our loved ones are.”
Landeros denounced the ICE expansion as, among many other flaws, a misuse of resources that will harm the economy, particularly in New Mexico. According to El Centro, immigrant workers in New Mexico represent about 13% of the state’s workforce in key industries, and 16% of small business owners.
Landeros and Lazar also called on local elected officials to “hold the line” and “be bold” when it comes to fighting against Trump’s push for mass deportations. That means expanding local immigrant-friendly protections and passing statewide policies to ensure that “our hard earned tax-payer money isn’t used to fuel Trump’s deportation machine,” Landeros said.
