Sunland Park, county residents seek delay for Project Jupiter vote - Algernon D'Ammassa, Albuquerque Journal
Doña Ana County commissioners are set to vote Friday morning on an unprecedented $165 billion industrial revenue bond and other tax incentives in a bid to lure a “next generation” campus of AI-supporting data centers to Santa Teresa.
But the City of Sunland Park has joined community organizations and residents seeking more time to evaluate the proposal, which participants at several town halls have characterized as rushed and skimpy on key details.
On Sept. 9, the Sunland Park City Council unanimously passed a resolution asking the county to delay Friday’s vote and allow time to fully assess the proposal, particularly with respect to impacts on housing prices, water supply, roads, stormwater management and public safety.
BorderPlex Digital Assets and Stack Infrastructure are the builders behind Project Jupiter, which would comprise four data centers, a power plant and an office campus.
On Monday the developers announced a new $50 million commitment to upgrading drinking water and wastewater infrastructure across the county, including $10 million in Sunland Park and an additional $6.9 million to support “shovel-ready” community projects such as facilities for the Boys & Girls Club and career and technical education offices.
The companies also offered a 20% increase in promised direct payments to the county in lieu of taxes, from $300 million to $360 million over 30 years, according to a news release from BorderPlex Digital Assets.
County commissioners have indicated support for the IRB, under which the county would hold the property and act as a lessor to the company for the 30-year bond period, during which the business is shielded from property and general receipts taxes. The IRB does not allow for direct investment of public money into the project and does not entail borrowing money, as with general obligation bonds.
In a news release, County Manager Scott Andrews said, “The Board is looking forward to discussing how an investment of this magnitude could expand our economic footprint and significantly improve the quality of life for all who call Doña Ana County home.”
The water-intensive project raised questions and concerns in a region that has faced long-term problems with water supply and quality. The Camino Real Regional Utility Authority (CRRUA), the water utility jointly formed by Sunland Park and the county in 2009, is in the process of dissolving after the county commissioners voted to separate from it in May.
Project Jupiter has met with organized opposition as well as skeptical questions by community members about the project’s benefits compared to its costs. At a series of town halls, the developers offered scant detail on where they would acquire the water needed to fill the center’s closed-loop cooling system or specific needs for power.
“A promise is meaningless without real, written commitments and hard data, and the track record of data centers nationwide tells a different story than the sales pitch,” Zac Egan, an organizer with Stop Project Jupiter, told the Journal. “Even the most basic promise that we’ve been given, that the company will hire local, is non-binding. ... Until those protections are actually in the agreement, this is another empty corporate promise from a company based out of state looking to capitalize on our people and our environment.”
The developers said the center would supply its own power on-site initially using natural gas for an unspecified length of time before transitioning to renewably-sourced energy to comply with New Mexico’s statutory zero-emission targets.
The project, which has projected approximately 2,500 jobs over a decade of construction and 750 permanent staff positions, has the backing of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration.
The project, state Economic Development Secretary Rob Black said in a news release, “would uplift the entire region — creating thousands of new jobs, driving business growth, and strengthening supply chains to promote long-term prosperity along the border.”
Calls to delay vote
The developers have indicated that other sites are also under consideration and the county’s selection depends on passage of the historically high industrial revenue bond.
However, community members have called on the county to delay the vote since the industrial revenue bond question was introduced at a county meeting in August as answers to many questions were shielded from the public as trade secrets or under nondisclosure agreements. Other questions about the center’s proposed power plant and cooling systems went unanswered at town halls because, according to Stack representatives, engineering plans were not yet complete.
While the process followed legal requirements for public notice, the public had limited time to review complicated agreements before the hearing. The leases, contract terms and text of the IRB ordinance, totaling nearly 350 pages, were uploaded to the county’s website on Monday, ahead of a Friday morning hearing.
Commissioners will also consider, on a separate vote, an ordinance offering state tax incentives under the Local Economic Development Act for Project Jupiter, with provisions that include the $50 million in water infrastructure investment as well as penalties if the company does not meet targets.
Las Cruces resident Arturo Uribe, who is undecided about the project, said he doubted the commissioners themselves had enough time to properly review the proposal before Friday.
“This is the most important decision these commissioners will make, and they’re rushing it. They’re not doing their due diligence,” Uribe said.
“We are not yet saying we are against the $165 billion bond or the data centers,” Sunland Park Mayor Javier Perea said in a written statement. “What we are saying is that we need adequate time to study the massive project before making a determination.”
New Mexico probation officers accused of referring ‘problem’ probationers to ICE for deportation - Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
New Mexico probation officers repeatedly provided immigration status information to federal immigration authorities, including after the Legislature made such a practice illegal this year, according to a new lawsuit from the state Ethics Commission.
The lawsuit filed Friday and announced Tuesday alleges that the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained three men with the help of state probation officers, who allegedly lured the probationers to state offices under false pretenses.
Two of them remain in ICE custody, and one was deported to his unspecified home country, according to the lawsuit, causing “hardships to their New Mexican and American family members.”
The lawsuit names those three men and alleges that the practice of ICE referrals is somewhat common and ongoing since at least 2024. However, it does not estimate how many people have been detained or deported with state probation officers’ help.
As one piece of evidence, the lawsuit contains a screenshot of a December 2024 email from a state probation officer who typed a probationer’s name and date of birth into the subject line and asks: “Are you able to tell me anything on this guy?”
It also alleges that probation officers began contacting ICE agents to remove “problem probationers,” which means they “committed serious criminal offenses or … are otherwise difficult to supervise.”
That practice has “more recently extended” to “any individual who certain probation officers suspected of having an unlawful presence in the United States,” according to the lawsuit.
Brittany Roembach, a spokesperson for the Corrections Department, declined to comment on those allegations in an email to Source New Mexico on Tuesday morning. She said the department has not yet been served with the lawsuit, which names Secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero as the defendant.
The three men the lawsuit identifies are Juan Lamas Aguilar, Moises Llaguno and Melvin Escobar-Arauz.
Aguilar and Llaguno, who are engaged or married with children and have each lived in New Mexico for more than 15 years, allege that ICE agents picked them up July 10 at a probation office in downtown Albuquerque. Both were on probation for driving under the influence.
Llaguno was deported four days after being detained, according to the lawsuit.
Escobar-Arauz, who has a wife and young daughter in Pecos, N.M., said that ICE detained him Aug. 18 at the Santa Fe probation office. He alleges that ICE also detained other New Mexico probationers who showed up that day, but he does not specify how many.
Escobar-Arauz was sentenced to three years probation in June 2025 after pleading guilty to three counts of battery upon a peace officer, according to the lawsuit.
In all three cases, the detainees accuse their probation officers of requiring them to show up to the probation officers under “false pretenses,” including to provide a urine sample or complete paperwork.
Escobar-Arauz and Aguilar are both being held at an ICE detention center in El Paso, according to the lawsuit. Aguilar is from Mexico, and Escobar-Arauz is from Guatemala.
The lawsuit seeks a judge’s signoff on the commission moving forward with a separate legal action against the Corrections Department alleging that the probation officers’ behavior violates new state law that went into effect July 1.
The Legislature during the legislative session this year passed the Nondisclosure of Sensitive Personal Information Act, which prohibits state employees from providing immigration or other sensitive personal information to anyone outside of the agency except in limited circumstances.
The law also empowers the Ethics Commission to file lawsuits if violations of that law occur or or are about to occur. But, before it files the lawsuit, the commission wants a judge to rule that federal statutes do not conflict.
In a news release about the lawsuit, Ethics Commission director Jeremy Farris said a judicial ruling in the commission’s favor would free up the commission to enforce the state law.
“Seeking a declaratory order at this stage ensures that any future actions by the Commission to enforce NSPIA are fully compliant with both state and federal law,” he said.
It’s not clear from court filings when a judge might weigh in on the lawsuit.
New Mexico Foundation for Open Government sues NMSU, UNM over release of student athlete payments - Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government on Monday filed lawsuits against two of the state’s largest universities for allegedly refusing to release public records showing how the schools will pay millions of public dollars to student athletes resulting from an antitrust lawsuit.
A federal judge in June approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes. Under the settlement, schools may choose to share revenues with student athletes up to an estimated cap of approximately $20.5 million per institution for the 2025-26 academic year.
The suits against the board of regents and record custodians at University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University allege they are violating the state Inspection of Public Records Act by refusing to release their contracts with student athletes and other documents that would show how they would implement new revenue-sharing rules resulting from the settlement.
Both schools denied NMFOG’s records requests on the grounds that the documents include “educational records” and “trade secrets,” according to the complaints. The other plaintiff in the NMSU lawsuit, high school and college sports reporter Nick Nuñez, alleges that the school initially claimed that it didn’t have any records responsive to his requests, but Assistant Athletic Director of Media Relations Michael Navarette told him they in fact did possess the records.
NMFOG noted in a news release on Tuesday that before the settlement, private third parties paid student athletes to use their “name, image and likeness,” — known as NIL — and compensation terms were largely unknown to the public. After the settlement, public universities like UNM and NMSU are making direct payments to student athletes, and “records of these expenditures by state institutions should be public, like any other state expense would be,” the group said.
“In addition to the universities’ total secrecy on how they will spend millions of dollars,” NMFOG said in a statement, the schools also are “hiding the contractual terms they require students to abide by, meaning there is no way to know whether students are being treated fairly” or whether the schools’ agreements with the student athletes abide by Title IX, a 1972 law requiring schools that receive federal funding to provide equitable opportunities and treatment to men and women athletes.
The lawsuits cite other schools’ revenue-sharing contracts that have reportedly raised concerns, such as one at Florida State University that allowed the school to extend its contract with a student athlete without renegotiating the terms, and one for the South Carolina women’s basketball team that included a nondisclosure agreement prohibiting them from sharing their compensation with anyone.
“It calls into question, what are the terms here?” NM FOG Legal Director Amanda Lavin said in an interview. “Students aren’t necessarily the ones with bargaining power — it’s the universities.”
Neither university would comment.
“We’re just learning about this filing and have no comment at this time,” UNM Interim Executive Director of Strategic Communications Ben Cloutier told Source NM via email on Tuesday.
NMSU Spokesperson Amanda Bradford also said in a written response that NMSU had not yet “received service of the lawsuit” and would be “reserving comment until after that’s been accomplished.”
University of New Mexico President Garnett Stokes announces retirement - Noah Alcala Bach, Albuquerque Journal
University of New Mexico President Garnett Stokes, the first woman to hold the position, is retiring after more than seven years.
“As I approach eight years of service as your president — and after several wonderful decades of service in higher education leadership, it soon will be time for me to step away and begin a new chapter in my life with my husband, Jeff, who has served as my partner throughout this leadership journey,” she wrote in a campus-wide email Tuesday. “I have informed the Board of Regents that the 2025-26 academic year will be my last serving as your President.”
Stokes’ contract was renewed through July 1, 2026, by the Board of Regents on Tuesday. She began serving as UNM president on March 1, 2018.
Upon her July 2026 retirement, she will have headed the school for longer than any president since Richard Peck, who led the school from 1990 to 1998.
“But I want to be clear — I am not going anywhere yet. There is still a great deal of work ahead of us this academic year as we move forward in pursuit of our vision and face head-on the challenges being encountered by higher education institutions across the country,” Stokes wrote in the email.
Paul Blanchard, chair of UNM’s Board of Regents, thanked Stokes for her leadership and her “visionary stewardship and steadfast commitment to the University.”
“Her work has advanced UNM as a national leader in research, student success, and as a partner and major driver of economic development for communities across our state, including expansion and modernization of treatment facilities for UNM Health Sciences,” Blanchard said in a statement Tuesday.
The state’s Higher Education Secretary Stephanie Rodriguez also thanked Stokes for her time at UNM in a statement to the Journal and said she provided “much-needed stability for the university since 2018.”
“President Stokes has not only kept UNM moving forward, but charted a path for sustainable growth in partnership with the state and our landmark scholarship programs for New Mexicans,” Rodriguez said. “My colleagues at the New Mexico Higher Education Department and I appreciate her service and we look forward to continuing our work with university leadership on supporting students and faculty, enhancing public safety efforts, and expanding opportunities for more New Mexicans.”
In a news release from UNM on Tuesday, the school touted enrollment increases, strides made in research and improvements in athletics during her tenure. She is the 23rd president in the university’s history.
“She’s been a great president, been very supportive,” UNM football head coach Jason Eck said Tuesday. “She’s obviously done a lot for this university, and should get to enjoy retirement. So hopefully we get somebody who’s really good and very pro-athletics for that spot.”
Stokes was not made available for an interview Tuesday.
“President Stokes looks forward to reflecting on her tenure and sharing her thoughts on her retirement plans at an appropriate time closer to her departure in 2026,” Ben Cloutier, interim spokesperson for UNM, said in an email. “At this point, she is focused on continuing the important work underway at the University.”
Early into her UNM tenure, Stokes and then-Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez recommended the school cut men’s soccer, men’s and women’s skiing and women’s beach volleyball to address budget shortfalls and federal Title IX equity concerns. The Board of Regents approved axing the teams after public meetings where droves of supporters tried to save soccer and the other sports.
During the early years of Stokes’ presidency, the university operated under an agreement with the Department of Justice that aimed to ensure the university responded appropriately to sexual harassment involving students. The school was released from that agreement in 2019.
Also in 2019, Stokes jumped from a plane, safely landing onto Johnson Field accompanied by a U.S. Army Golden Knight to raise awareness for the university’s ROTC program.
UNM grappled with a high auto theft rate on campus compared to other universities, and other high-profile crimes during Stokes’ tenure — including the Nob Hill shooting of Lobo baseball player Jackson Weller in 2019. Then, in November 2022, UNM student Brandon Travis was fatally shot on campus by New Mexico State University basketball player Mike Peake, in what was later ruled self-defense.
Most recently, in August, 14-year-old Michael LaMotte was fatally shot in an on-campus dorm room leased to a student enrolled in the college’s Gateway Program.
Stokes also guided UNM through the pandemic, adhering to the governor’s lockdown orders and resuming in-person instruction fully in August 2021.
Before coming to New Mexico’s flagship university, Stokes worked from 2011 to 2014 as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Florida State University. Following the resignation of then-president Eric Barron, she briefly held the title of interim president for FSU.
She then served for three years as provost and subsequently executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Missouri at a time when the school was receiving national attention over the Concerned Student 1950 protests about turbulent race relations on campus, leading to the resignation of then-president Tim Wolfe and main campus chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.
In a 2018 article from the Columbia Missourian, just weeks before she took the post at UNM, her colleagues credited Stokes, saying she would be remembered for “her leadership during turbulent times.”
Robert Redford remembered for his deep legacy in environmental activism and Native American advocacy - By Hillel Italie, AP National Writer
Lorie Lee Sekayumptewa, a former administrator with the Navajo Nation Film Office, remembers seeing Robert Redford at traditional cultural dances at the Hopi village of Hotevilla in New Mexico. It was more than 30 years ago and he was serving as executive producer of the 1991 release "The Dark Wind," a drama about Navajo life.
Redford stood out for his Hollywood looks and for his un-Hollywood behavior, from his earnest desire to learn more about the tribe's spiritual knowledge to his visits to the Navajo Nation, where Sekayumptewa's father served as the dean of students at the tribal college and would show Redford's movies at the student union building.
"Even at home, he would bring that camera and film home to us, put up a sheet and we would invite our neighbors and the kids and we would all be there in our living room, watching these movies," the 54-year-old Sekayumptewa, who is Navajo, Hopi and Sac and Fox Nation, said of Redford.
"We were all fans."
Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89, was hardly the only liberal activist to emerge out of Hollywood, but few matched his knowledge and focus, his humility and dedication. Fellow actors and leaders of the causes he fought for spoke of his unusually deep legacy, his fight for Native Americans and the environment that began at the height of his stardom.
In the mid-1970s, around the same time he was appearing in such blockbusters as "The Sting" and "The Way We Were," he immersed himself in the emerging environmental movement. He successfully opposed a power plant being built in his adopted state, Utah, and lobbied for the landmark bills the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. He also joined the board of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, where he remained a guiding force up to his death.
"His legacy was extraordinary," says NRDC CEO and President Manish Bapna. "One of the things that was most extraordinary about him was that he understood the power of storytelling. He could talk about climate change and the toll it was inflicting on people and communities — the fisherman coping with rising seas, a family fleeing for their lives from a raging wildfire. He would record messages, give talks or speak in front of Congress."
Bapna last saw Redford a few months ago, when they dined in New York City.
"He chose his words carefully, and every word he said was profound. He said we must continue to find ways to tell stories that reach people," Bapna said.
Redford had a longtime affinity for the environment. After growing up in Southern California in the 1930s and '40s, he was disheartened to see Los Angeles transform after World War II into a mecca of pollution and traffic jams. In the early 1960s, when he came upon Provo Canyon, Utah, during a cross-country motorcycle trip, he was so awed and invigorated by the landscape that he eventually settled in the area.
Entertainers over time have come to identify and, be identified with, a given cause: Harry Belafonte and civil rights, Paul Newman and nuclear disarmament, Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War. Redford, as much as anyone, helped make the environment an issue for the Hollywood elite, whether for Fonda or Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Leonardo DiCaprio, a fellow NRDC board member who called Redford's death "a huge loss to our community" and cited his legacy an actor and activist.
"More so than anything, he was a staunch environmental leader," DiCaprio said Monday.
In 2013, Redford joined with then-Gov. Bill Richardson to create the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife to fight efforts by a Roswell, New Mexico, company and others to slaughter horses. The following year, the foundation reached an agreement with the Navajo Nation to manage thousands of wild horses on the reservation and keep the animals from being sent to slaughter houses.
For Redford, the wild horse was representative of the American West. His advocacy also was channeled through the nonprofit group Return to Freedom, Wild Horse Conservation. The group posted on social media Tuesday that they were heartbroken.
"We have all lost an irreplaceable artist, activist and environmentalist," said Neda DeMayo, founder of RTF. "Robert Redford was and is an iconic and inspiring human being forever interwoven with the beauty and majesty of the West. I feel very grateful to have known him and to have had his support."
Redford's activism extended to some of his film projects, whether the probes of the political system in "All the President's Men" and "The Candidate" or the drama "The Milagro Beanfield War," in which a local resident fights a real estate mogul for control of his land. His final work was "Dark Winds," an AMC show that premiered in 2022 and is based, like "The Dark Wind," on the fiction of Tony Hillerman.
John Wirth, the series showrunner, said that "Dark Winds" wouldn't exist without Redford, who served as an executive producer and appeared in a short cameo that aired earlier this year. The show, Wirth said, gives audiences a look into the Navajo community, with actors and writers largely holding Native identities.
Redford "endeavored to give people a shot at making art, you know, where they maybe hadn't had the ability to have access to mainstream media."
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Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Itzel Luna in Los Angeles; and Sian Watson in London contributed to this report.
Santa Fe mayoral candidate forum set for Wednesday - Santa Fe New Mexican, KUNM News
In Santa Fe Wednesday evening, local media are scheduled to host a mayoral candidate forum.
The Santa Fe New Mexican along with radio stations KSFR and KSWV are hosting the event at Santa Fe Community College.
The New Mexican reports that the eight candidates for mayor will be questioned by a three-person panel composed of reporters from the newspaper and the radio stations.
The forum is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, in the Jemez Room of Santa Fe Community College’s campus at 6401 Richards Ave.
The event will also be live-streamed at the newspaper’s website, santafenewmexican.com.