ALAMOGORDO — The New Mexico Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously rejected Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s emergency bid to void Otero County’s detention contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, preserving 284 jobs and shielding more than $14 million in county bond obligations from default.
All five justices — Chief Justice Julie J. Vargas, and Justices Michael E. Vigil, C. Shannon Bacon, David K. Thomson, and Briana H. Zamora — concurred in denying the petition for a writ of mandamus. The court also denied Torrez’s request for an emergency stay. The terse order, issued April 16 under Case No. S-1-SC-41362, offered no written explanation.
The ruling preserves the five-year Intergovernmental Service Agreement between Otero County and ICE for the continued operation of the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, which houses approximately 900 immigration detainees and generates $21 million in annual wages for county residents. The facility is operated by Management and Training Corp. under contract with the county.
Torrez filed the emergency petition on April 1, arguing the county lacked statutory authority to detain civil immigration detainees and had failed to obtain required approval from the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration before executing the contract. The attorney general also contended the agreement conflicted with House Bill 9, the Immigrant Safety Act, which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed in February and which bans local governments from contracting with ICE for civil immigration detention beginning May 20.
The county’s legal defense, led by County Attorney R.B. Nichols alongside outside counsel Samantha M. Adams of Adams+Crow Law Firm and Paul J. Kennedy of Kennedy, Hernandez & Harrison, P.C., argued that New Mexico had acquiesced to the facility’s operations for 18 consecutive years without challenge, and that federal law governing ICE detention agreements supersedes the attorney general’s legal theories.
At stake beyond the jobs was $14.3 million in outstanding Jail Project Revenue Bonds, Series 2007, whose debt payments depend exclusively on revenue generated by the facility. County officials had warned that a forced termination of the federal contract would have triggered an immediate default on those obligations.
“The legal arguments the County advanced were grounded in the plain text of New Mexico law, eighteen years of uninterrupted state acquiescence, and the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration detention,” Nichols said in a statement following the ruling. “The Court appears to have seen those arguments clearly.”
Commission Chair Vickie Marquardt said the court “did exactly what courts are supposed to do — apply the law as written, without regard to political pressure.”
The ruling does not resolve the broader conflict. The Immigrant Safety Act takes effect May 20, and Otero County has signaled it will challenge the law’s constitutionality, arguing it conflicts with federal statutes authorizing ICE to contract with local governments and violates the Contracts Clause. S&P Global Ratings has revised its outlook on the county to negative from stable, citing large general fund deficits that could worsen if the ICE contract is ultimately terminated.
Torrance and Cibola counties also operate ICE detention facilities in New Mexico. Those facilities are owned by CoreCivic, a private prison company, making direct ICE contracting more straightforward than Otero County’s arrangement, in which the county owns the land.
