The New Mexico Ethics Commission on Friday urged a federal judge to return to state court its lawsuit seeking to sue the Corrections Department over allegations that probation officers colluded with federal immigration agents to detain and deport New Mexico immigrants.
In September, the Commission asked a local judge to allow its suit against Corrections Department Secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero for allegedly violating a new state law —the Nondisclosure of Sensitive Personal Information Act — that prohibits state employees from sharing personal information, including immigration status, to anyone outside of their agency except in limited circumstances.
The Commission received a complaint, which it then investigated, that alleged state probation officers referred information about at least three probationers’ immigration status to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency after July 1, when the law went into effect.
At the time of the lawsuit, ICE held two of the probationers in ICE custody, and deported one to his unspecified home country, causing “hardships to their New Mexican and American family members,” according to the lawsuit. The other two probationers’ status remained unclear as of Monday.
The Ethics Commission alleges probation officers lured the probationers to meetings “under false pretenses” at their local probation offices, where ICE agents were waiting to detain them.
While the NSPIA empowers the Commission to sue alleged violators, the agency asked a First Judicial District judge in Santa Fe to weigh in on whether a pair of federal laws conflicts with the new state law.
Those 1996 federal statutes say local and state governments can’t “be prohibited, or in any way restricted, from sending to or receiving from the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” which became ICE in 2003.
In response to the Ethics Commission’s request in state court, the Corrections Department on Oct. 17 filed a motion in federal court that argued a federal judge is best suited to weigh in on the Commission’s request, given that the Commission’s motion seeks interpretation of federal law.
In that filing, the department did not address the underlying allegations about its probation officers’ collusion with ICE.
But the Ethics Commission pushed back against the suit’s removal to federal court in its Oct. 31 motion, saying that federal courts have routinely ruled they don’t have jurisdiction to take over requests like the one the Commission made in state court. It also argues that state courts are fully capable of evaluating the potential conflict between state and federal law.
“The exercise of federal jurisdiction here would not only upset this longstanding federal-state balance, but also would improperly suggest that New Mexico courts are somehow incompetent” to decide the matter, Ethics Commission Director Jeremy Farris wrote.
