The Side Door
New Mexico barred its counties from the detention contracts; the federal government rewrote them to route around the state — and the public's view of the cost went with it.
In May, New Mexico drew a line. A new state law — the Immigrant Safety Act — told the state’s counties they could no longer sign contracts to hold people for federal immigration enforcement, and barred the use of public land for that purpose. For years, three county governments had stood between federal agents and the private companies that run New Mexico’s immigration detention centers, renting out beds under agreements the counties signed and could be asked about. The law closed that arrangement, and by its effective date the counties had begun to step back.
The detention did not stop. In the weeks around the law taking hold, the arrangements were simply remade — the state’s line met with two different ways around it. At two of the facilities, Cibola and Torrance, the counties stepped out of the deal and the federal government signed directly with the private operator instead, leaving no county in the middle to vote on it, budget for it, or answer for it. At the third, Otero, the county went the other way and renewed its own contract outright, in open defiance of the new law. Same buildings, same beds, the same detention going on inside them. By one route the public body the state could regulate was removed from the deal; by the other it simply refused to leave. New Mexico closed the front door, and the contracts found their way around it.
What went dark
Consider what that side door costs the public, beyond the principle of it. When a county was the contracting party, the deal left a trace anyone could follow: a commission has to vote, a county budget has to carry the line, a local official has to answer for it. Move the contract directly between a federal agency and a private company, and the trace disappears. What does the government pay to hold one person for one day? What are the monthly totals? What did the new five-year deal at Otero lock in, and for how many beds? The figures exist. A contract number and a lump-sum ceiling surface on the public spending record; the terms inside — the rate per person per day, the monthly counts — do not. When a New Mexico newspaper asked the federal agency for the new contracts, it declined to hand them over.
This is not, at bottom, an immigration story, and it is worth saying so plainly. Strip out the subject and what remains is a question that belongs to everyone: when your government spends public money to hold human beings, are you allowed to know the terms? The answer has nothing to do with who is inside the building. It is about whether power that has moved out of public view still has to leave a receipt.
The line and the ledger
This is the territory of the limits we track — two of them at once. The first is whether a state’s own public bodies and resources can be pulled into federal civil enforcement; New Mexico drew that line clearly. The second is quieter and far rarer: whether any of this has to be documented and disclosed at all. New Mexico closed its door but did not require the record — and that gap is the whole lesson. A state can bar its counties from the contract, but if it does not also demand to see the terms, the federal side can route around the public body and take the ledger with it. The line and the ledger have to be drawn together, or the first is quietly undone by the second.
Most states have drawn neither. The average state scores just over three out of eighteen on the limits we track, and the one measuring public documentation sits among the lowest of all. New Mexico’s own line is now being tested in federal court — the federal government has sued to undo the law, and the state agreed to pause enforcement at one of the three facilities while that fight proceeds. Which only sharpens the point. When the authority itself is contested, the public’s clearest window may be whatever record it can pry loose.
What we asked
So we asked. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request directly with the federal immigration agency for the records it has been unwilling to volunteer, covering all three New Mexico facilities:
The 2026 contracts themselves — including the new direct deals (one of them carried on the public spending record as contract 70CDCR26D00000029) and the per-diem and bed-day rates written into them.
The monthly population and the actual dollars paid, facility by facility.
The federal deputization agreement a New Mexico sheriff signed to let his deputies act as immigration agents.
The correspondence between the federal agency and any New Mexico government about the use of these facilities.
One honest note, in the spirit of the transparency we ask of others. This was our first request of its kind, and it did not land cleanly: it reached the wrong office inside the same department, which took five days to say the records were not theirs and point us to the right one. The rules required that office to forward a misdirected request itself; instead, we had to correct the aim and re-file.
What comes next
We are not expecting a quick answer. Federal immigration offices answer few records requests on time — one watchdog filed 137 with these agencies last year and got a single substantive response — so a slow walk or a flat denial is the likely first reply. We are ready for it. The appeal is built and waiting — courts have pried these daily rates loose before, over the same secrecy the agency will likely claim — and we will file it the moment the federal side stalls or refuses. And when the federal door closes, a second front opens: New Mexico’s public-records law still requires the counties to answer their own residents, even for records the federal side will not release. One request federal, one state — the same question from two directions.
The point was never a single document. It is to put a price on going around a state’s line, and to make that price visible — so the next state writing its own limit knows to require the record in the same breath.
What you can do
Look up your own state. See which limits on federal authority the law where you live has actually drawn — whether your public bodies can be pulled into federal enforcement, and whether anyone is required to keep a record when they are — and which it has left as assumptions no one ever wrote down. Then tell the people who represent you which gaps to close.
Check your state: www.FederalLimits.org/federal
Reach your representatives in a minute: https://FederalLimits.org/#take-action
A state can close a door. Whether anyone is allowed to see what walks around it is a second choice — and we have, on the record, asked to see. This far, and no farther.
— Federal Limits
Federal Limits is a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) nonprofit tracking the legal limits on federal authority — the due-process protections that apply to every American — across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. Our methodology, our sources, and every state’s full scorecard are public. This work is funded by people who believe those limits are worth defending. If that’s you, help keep it going at www.FederalLimits.org/support.