Firm behind New Mexico Medicaid campaign recruits influencers to promote Project Jupiter data center – Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
The marketing agency behind New Mexico’s award-winning Medicaid re-enrollment social media campaign is recruiting influencers to promote Project Jupiter, the controversial artificial intelligence data center under construction in Doña Ana County.
New Mexico social media personalities posted over the weekend that they had received emails from a California-based firm called Xomad, which advertises “services that help brands, governments and media agency partners engineer virality.” In a recent email to New Mexico content creators, it offered a “PAID social media opportunity for creators in NM who want to see their community thrive.”
It said creators would promote a development that would create 4,000 construction jobs and “up to” 1,500 long-term jobs, in addition to $600 million in tax revenue and hundreds of millions of dollars to support water systems, infrastructure and schools.
While the email did not call out Project Jupiter by name, one creator who received the offer told Source NM she recognized those as the talking points from an anonymous mailer campaign that asked New Mexicans to support the data center’s air quality permit applications. The New Mexico State Ethics Commission later sued the group behind those mailers for allegedly violating the state Lobbyist Regulation Act.
“Because I’ve gotten those mailers, I recognized the talking points,” Adrian Martin, an Albuquerque resident who recently made a sarcastic Instagram post opposing the project, told Source NM. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK, I know who you are.’”
She is one of several influencers Source NM interviewed who turned down the gig.
Indeed, a Powerpoint presentation prepared for influencers reviewed by Source NM confirms the campaign is for Project Jupiter.
“When our communities grow, we all grow, and right now, New Mexico has the opportunity for a generation investment for all of us. Project Jupiter is committed to the community,” the presentation says. “It will bring thousands of local jobs and $360 million in investments for schools, infrastructure, and workforce development, all while protecting public resources like energy and water.”
The presentation directs creators to submit social media content for review as part of the paid partnership, which it says is scheduled to run from June 17 through the end of the month. The public comment on Project Jupiter’s pending air quality permit application was recently extended from July 1 to July 6.
The partnership has three goals, according to the slide deck: Discuss the “positive benefits of Project Jupiter,” “build trust” by saying the project’s fuel and water systems won’t impact the surrounding community and “help increase positive comments” on Project Jupiter’s website.
While AI “tech changes may cause concern for New Mexico residents, Project Jupiter is a generational investment in New Mexico, its economy, its infrastructure and local communities that we’re deeply proud of,” the slideshow says. “For this social media project, we are partnering with you and other local trusted messengers to share transparent and accurate information about the new data center in New Mexico called Project Jupiter.
Through your content, we want you to help us break down what is happening, and the positives surrounding it.”
The push for positive messaging about the project comes as a long-awaited town hall meeting on the development quietly transitioned from a county-run meeting to an “open house and career fair” sponsored by its developers and tenants, including OpenAI and Oracle.
Rebekah Apodaca, an Albuquerque resident who said she has mostly stopped doing social media influencing, said she was surprised to receive the pitch at all, but was initially inclined to hear out a paid opportunity.
“There’s always a form you fill out with your handle, your following. Everything seemed standard, until I got to one question where it mentioned a data center, and I’m like, ‘What in the world?’” she told Source NM. “I don’t like deception…they’re trying to sway public opinion by deceiving influencers into promoting jobs and economic growth.”
Neither Xomad nor any of the companies affiliated with Project Jupiter responded to Source NM’s requests for comment Monday. In an email, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Health Care Authority told Source NM that the agency hired Xomad during its “Renew NM” Medicaid campaign but had no knowledge of the company’s efforts regarding Project Jupiter.
Becky Wood, whose Instagram account ABQ Adventures has nearly 40,000 followers, posted over the weekend that she had turned down “a big chunk of $$$ to promote Project Jupiter, the giant AI data center being built down south that will skyrocket NM’s emissions and suck up precious groundwater from an already drought-stricken desert.”
“If you see your favorite NM create posting about Project Jupiter in the coming weeks, know they sold out,” she wrote. “I know it’s hard to turn down work in this economy — but we can’t drink data!”
In an interview Monday, Wood told Source NM that she’s opposed to large AI projects because she’s seen AI search results “cannibalize” the work she’s done on her travel blog without giving her any traffic or pay.
“I’m opposed to AI at scale in general. I think it’s being force-fed to us as something that most people aren’t asking for,” she said, adding that she also has major environmental concerns. “I look out my door and I see the Rio Grande completely dry in Albuquerque in June. It’s just going to get worse and worse and worse.”
Conservation groups sue feds over killing predators in wilderness areas—Algernon d’Amassa, Albuquerque Journal
On its website, the U.S. Forest Service says of wilderness areas, “These are special places where nature still calls the shots.”
But a new federal lawsuit alleges that when it comes to predators on protected public lands, the government is deferring more to ranchers than Mother Nature.
Conservation groups are suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management over the killing of predator animals by federal employees in designated wilderness areas, arguing the practice violates a law preserving “untrammeled” natural places.
WildEarth Guardians joined the Western Watersheds Project and Wilderness Watch in filing the complaint last month in New Mexico’s U.S. District Court.
The organizations are asking a court to review “predator control” actions by Wildlife Services, a division of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, known as APHIS.
Among its activities, Wildlife Services kills predators as part of a strategy to manage wildlife and protect against livestock depredation, crop loss and property damage. A spokesperson for APHIS declined to comment on the litigation.
The plaintiffs argue that “federally subsidized wildlife killing” has been practiced “solely to promote the private economic interests of producers that are already afforded the heavily subsidized privilege to commercially graze livestock on federal public lands.”
The legal question is whether the 1964 Wilderness Act allows Wildlife Services to kill natural predators in 803 designated wilderness areas, covering 111.7 million acres of public land nationwide. While the law allows for grazing in areas where it has taken place since before the wilderness area designation by Congress, the lawsuit argues this does not authorize the government to kill carnivores that may hunt those animals.
Yet, according to the most recent data posted by APHIS, Wildlife Services killed 2,625 coyotes in New Mexico in 2024, trapped six Mexican gray wolves and relocated two mountain lions.
In an interview, WildEarth Guardians' senior staff attorney, Jennifer Schwartz, emphasized, “This isn’t a challenge to anyone’s privilege to graze in wilderness. … Congress specifically provided for livestock grazing, but it did not provide for killing native wildlife on behalf of commercial grazing operations. It didn't provide for taxpayer-funded predator control. That is very antithetical to the other core purposes of the statute, in terms of keeping wilderness untrammeled, where the forces of nature prevail.”
She said the agencies have reasoned that, since Congress did not forbid predator control practices in wilderness areas, they could interpret it as implicitly permitted.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chevron U.S.A v. Natural Resources Defense Council, courts have given executive branch agencies discretion to interpret ambiguities in statutes. If the agency’s interpretation was reasonable, the courts deferred to them.
That deference, nicknamed the “Chevron doctrine,” fell in 2024 under a pair of decisions where the high court upheld a provision of the Administrative Procedure Act that says reviewing courts “shall decide all relevant questions of law.”
The fall of the Chevron doctrine opened the door to ask the court to enforce a plain reading of the statute, Schwartz said.
“This is our most strictly construed conservation law,” she said. “To perversely expand the narrow grazing exception to also include killing native wildlife, on behalf of private grazing operations, is a gross misreading of the statute.”
The lawsuit has been assigned preliminarily to federal Magistrate Judge John Robbenhaar in Albuquerque. Further proceedings have not yet been scheduled.
As pedestrian deaths decline in New Mexico, cyclist deaths double to highest number in 20 years —John Miller, Albuquerque Journal
When he was a student at New Mexico State University, Matt Mason biked as many as 1,000 miles each semester — far enough in a school year to crisscross the width of the Land of Enchantment at least four times.
But while biking to campus along a familiar route on North Telshor Boulevard in 2012, Mason’s relationship to the sport changed when he was struck by a driver, who veered into his path while making a left-hand turn.
“I slammed on my brakes and sort of rolled across their hood,” Mason said. “I ended up landing on my feet right next to the driver on their side of the car. It was just kind of a miraculous thing — I was more or less unhurt, but the bike was bent in half and destroyed.”
It was the last road bike Mason ever owned.
This spring, for the first time in about a decade, New Mexico improved from the most dangerous state in the nation for pedestrian deaths to ninth in the Governors Highway Safety Association ratings.
Using crash data from the first half of 2025, the nonprofit projected that pedestrian fatalities in New Mexico fell to 1.27 deaths per 100,000 people last year, from a 2.49 death rate in 2024.
The projection appears on track with full-year data from the University of New Mexico, which notes pedestrian fatalities declined from 102 deaths in 2024 to 88 in 2025.
State officials this week celebrated the improved safety rating, attributing it to new initiatives aimed at keeping people safer on or near New Mexico roadways.
“New Mexico’s progress in pedestrian safety is the result of dedicated work happening across the state,” Shannon Glendenning, New Mexico Department of Transportation traffic safety division director, said in a statement.
But over the same year-to-year period, UNM recorded a separate yet related metric moving in the opposite direction and at a much higher rate.
From 2024 to 2025, deaths among pedal cyclists — bicyclists or any other vehicle propelled by human-powered pedals — doubled, rising from seven in 2024 to 14 in 2025.
That marks the most cyclist traffic deaths in a single year since 2006, when there were four, according to UNM.
That statistic didn’t get much airtime at a meeting of the Transportation Infrastructure Revenue Subcommittee on Tuesday and appeared nowhere in a news release issued two days later announcing the decline in pedestrian fatalities.
Cyclist deaths on or near roadways in New Mexico and nationwide are vastly outnumbered by pedestrian deaths, accounting for just 3% of the 454 total traffic fatalities recorded in New Mexico last year.
But while pedestrian deaths are on the decline — with the Governors Highway Safety Association noting an 11% dip in such deaths nationwide — fatalities among cyclists are on the rise in many American cities.
According to the National Safety Council, the “number of preventable deaths from bicycle transportation incidents (in the U.S.) increased by 1% in 2024 and 37% in the last 10 years (from 1,015 in 2015 to 1,392 in 2024).”
The 14 deaths logged in 2025 in New Mexico are more than double the average of the roughly 6.5 cyclist deaths recorded in the state each year since 2006.
While cyclist deaths have fluctuated in that time, the average number of these fatalities rose to 7.7 deaths per year in the last 10 years versus 5.5 deaths in the previous decade.
Dan Majewski, who regularly bikes to work in Downtown Albuquerque, knows which roads to take and which to avoid, giving preference to streets with wider shoulders and designated bike lanes.
With more deaths among cyclists reported in the state every year, he understands why some people choose to ride outside New Mexico’s metro areas or don’t pick up the sport at all.
“I think there’s a big barrier to getting started riding,” he said. “You have to kind of learn through doing. There’s signage out there, and the city certainly tries. But you have to plan it out, you know?”
Several bicyclist traffic deaths have made headlines in New Mexico in recent years.
In May 2024, an 11-year-old boy was charged with first-degree murder for allegedly intentionally hitting and killing a physicist named Michael Habermehl, who was riding to work on an e-bike.
A year and a half later, Santa Fe resident Steven Ballinger was struck by a pickup truck driver and later died in a hospital.
In July 2025, 19-year-old Albuquerque cyclist Kayla VanLandingham was struck and killed at a bike crossing on Carlisle.
Just over a month ago, 47-year-old Robert Montoya was also hit and killed while riding to work on an e-bike just north of Interstate 40 in Northeast Albuquerque, which consistently logs about half of all cyclist deaths in the state.
Majewski previously sat on the board for BikeABQ, a safety advocate organization founded in 1999 to raise awareness of bicyclists on the state’s roadways, which officials have worked to make safer in recent years.
Legislators in 2023 passed House Memorial 85, titled “Target Zero,” which aims to achieve an annual traffic safety record of zero vehicle-related deaths or serious injuries by the end of the decade.
In March, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed new legislation requiring student drivers to take at least three hours of training on “vulnerable road users,” such as bicyclists, pedestrians and emergency service providers.
The 2023 resolution committed NMDOT to following a national model called Complete Streets, which recommends roadway projects consider multimodal forms of transportation and road “equity.”
Some cyclists say reinforcing legislation will be necessary to give it teeth.
Carl Colonius, a longtime cyclist, Taos resident and program manager for the New Mexico Outdoor Recreation Division, is one of them.
He illustrated the problem with a recent example south of Taos.
“You know the road that goes down through Llano Quemado by the water treatment plant toward the golf course?” he said. “That road was just repaved, beautifully done, but it doesn’t have a shoulder because that’s not a sensitivity a lot of public works directors in New Mexico have. Why would you waste 10% of your project building a shoulder? Biking and walking are not something they necessarily recognize.”
Recently, Colonius went on a ride with Graveleros, a spring and summertime biking meetup that Mason started in Las Cruces, one of several cities developing a municipal trail system to give cyclists safer routes to ride.
“There’s a wide age range, culture, gender, type of bike,” Colonius said of the experience. “So you’ve got hardcore road bikers who show up in their lycra with a matching kit, to the dude on a cruiser wearing cut-off overalls who has a basket for his cat.”
The group is a kind of microcosm for the wider New Mexico cycling community. Stories of close calls with drivers, collisions and chilling stories of final rides that ended fatally — with a white-painted bike marking the spot — remain a dark trope here and among other cycling enthusiasts throughout the state.
As of last month, UNM reported that five pedal cyclists have died so far in New Mexico in 2026.
“I don’t like to say it because I don’t want to discourage people from riding,” Mason said. “But in my mind, I sort of say that every car that passes me when I’m riding on the road could be the one that kills me. I try to keep that number as close to zero as possible while still getting where I want to go.”