Bernalillo County expecting 10 USDOJ monitors on Election Day - by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
The United States Department of Justice will send approximately 10 monitors to polling sites in New Mexico’s most populous county on Election Day, county officials told Source NM on Thursday, amid the federal government’s recently announced expansion of its nationwide election monitoring effort.
The USDOJ announced this week that it intends to send1,000 election monitorsto polling locations in all 50 states on Nov. 3, marking an expansion of its previous election monitoring efforts. But federal officials declined to say which polling locations they’ll target for the expanded effort.
Bernalillo County officials told Source NM on Thursday that the USDOJ informed the county approximately three weeks ago it would be sending monitors, but did not specify why they had selected the county.
In an emailed statement, Bernalillo County Clerk Michelle Kavanaugh noted that the USDOJ has previously deployed monitors to the county and said local officials are “prepared for their arrival” this year.
“This is not unusual for us, and we’ve accommodated DOJ monitors in previous elections without incident,” she said.
Trump’s DOJ sends 1,000 election monitors to 50 states; locations not yet disclosed
The USDOJ’s expanded monitoring effort has sparked fears of federal meddling in elections across the country during a mid-term election that will determine the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.
Other New Mexico locations where federal monitors may show up remains unclear. Lindsey Bachman, the secretary of state’s communications, legislative and executive affairs director, told Source NM on Thursday that her office has been made aware only of their presence in Bernalillo County, but the USDOJ has reportedly reached out directly to county clerks in other states.
Doña Ana County Clerk Amanda López Askin told Source NM on Thursday in a text message that she has not heard from the USDOJ about monitors in the state’s second-most-populous county. The county will also likely process the largest percentage of the votes cast in the closely watched 2nd Congressional District race between incumbent U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) and Republican challenger Greg Cunningham.
During the last mid-term election in 2022, former President Joe Biden’s USDOJ sent 289 monitors to 24 states, including Bernalillo County and San Juan County in New Mexico. San Juan County officials did not immediately respond to Source NM’s request for comment Thursday about whether they expect the federal government’s presence at their polling sites again, as much of the county recovers from recent flooding.
Fears of federal interference in the state’s elections prompted state lawmakers this session to pass Senate Bill 264, which aims to prevent intimidation by federal immigration and others in local elections. The Secretary of State and Attorney General’s Office earlier this month issued a voter advisory that underscored voters’ rights to cast ballots with interference.
The prospect of federal interference has also prompted third party groups and political parties to step up their presence at polling sites across the country.
In New Mexico, the Secretary of State’s Office has credentialed 571 watchers from six different organizations to monitor elections this year. Bachman could not immediately say how that number compares to previous years.
But Carmen Lopez, co-lead for Observe New Mexico Elections, which employs the majority of the state’s election watchers, told Source NM that the group has nearly twice as many volunteer observers this cycle than the 2024 general election. Approximately 325 observers affiliated with her group are approved this year, compared with about 170 in 2024, she said.
“We had more interest in our observation program this year, partly because more people know about it, and also because people want to participate,” she said. “There are all of these other observation efforts, both inside the polls and outside the polls, that have garnered a lot of interest.”
New Mexico poll workers in rural county required IDs to vote during June primary, observers say
The other groups that the Secretary of State’s Office has approved for election observation, Bachman said, are Disability Rights New Mexico, League of Women Voters of New Mexico and Southern New Mexico, Taos United Indivisible and Land of Action.
Land of Action is a recently formed, nonpartisan civic association and hub for progressive groups throughout the state. Executive director Heidi Li Feldman told Source NM on Thursday that her group of approximately 80 watchers will fan out primarily to rural counties like San Juan, Grant, Luna, Hidalgo, Otero and Rio Arriba counties.
Feldman said the volunteers are on alert for federal monitors on Election Day, especially since the USDOJ has not said where they will be.
“Since no one really knows, we’ve trained our watchers to be alert to people who are agents, DOJ monitors,” she said, “and to be extra sensitive to whether they are following New Mexico state law about what law enforcement, federal or otherwise, may and may not do at the polls.”
Source New Mexico is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.
Project Jupiter in ‘potential breach’ of county agreement
—Algernon d’Ammassa, Albuquerque Journal
In a surprise move, Doña Ana County’s Board of Commissioners unanimously voted Tuesday to notify Project Jupiter’s developers of a “potential breach” of its $165 billion industrial revenue bond agreement, approved in 2025 to support financing for the data center.
Commission Chair Manny Sanchez made the motion after the panel met in closed session to discuss a number of matters confidentially with the county legal department for over two and half hours.
At about 3:30 p.m., the commissioners returned to public session and took action on Project Jupiter without elaborating. Sanchez simply stated that the potential breach concerned “their proposed power generation plan,” and directed county management to “engage in discussions to identify a potential path forward working with Doña Ana County.”
Project Jupiter is among the largest data center projects currently under development in the U.S. Located within 1,400 acres of industrial land in Santa Teresa, Stack Infrastructure is building four data center structures, cooling infrastructure and office space for Oracle Corp. and OpenAI. Yucca Growth Infrastructure and Bloom Energy are seeking air quality permitting for a natural gas-powered fuel cell installation to produce 2.45 gigawatts of power on site.
For more information on this story, visit the Albuquerque Journal website.
New Mexico DOT to proceed with Gorge Bridge railing project despite governor's directive, advocate says
—Taos News
In Northern New Mexico, the state Department of Transportation plans to build higher railings at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge in order to deter suicides. The Taos News reports the agency intends to do so despite a directive from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office to explore different options.
Help Outreach Taos Executive Director Stephanie Waters has been working with the New Mexico Department of Transportation to address the bridge's safety issues. She told the Taos News that acting Transportation Secretary David Quintana called her this week to reaffirm his agency’s commitment to the railing project.
The governor’s directive to look at other options came after NMDOT had already chosen a design and received funding for construction.
Some estimates say the project could result in the bridge being closed for as long as two years. However, a Department of Transportation spokesperson told the Taos News that a closure of that length is not viable, given the bridge’s importance to the communities of the region.
Santa Fe County commissioners approve plan for 24-lot subdivision
—Santa Fe New Mexican
A proposed 24-lot subdivision northwest of Santa Fe is moving forward.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that La Vida Estates is planned for 125 acres off La Vida Trail and Los Suenos, west of state road 599.
The average lot size of the subdivision would be three acres. 43 acres, or about 35%, of the property, would remain undeveloped. Four of the 24 lots in La Vida Estates would be considered “affordable units.”
Santa Fe County commissioners approved the conceptual plan for the project at their meeting this week. In June, commissioners rejected a much larger 158-home subdivision proposed for the Camino La Tierra area in the same part of the county. The developer has filed an appeal in district court.
New Mexico immigrant advocates, police to propose streamlined visa process for undocumented victims — Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
New Mexico immigrant advocates and law enforcement leaders on Wednesday told state lawmakers they plan to reintroduce a bill in the upcoming legislative session in January that would streamline the process for undocumented crime victims to obtain visas.
Under current federal guidelines, undocumented immigrants who survive certain violent crimes and then cooperate with a police department’s investigation or a district attorney’s prosecution are eligible for a U Visa, which provides lawful status for four years. Typically, an official within the police department or prosecutor’s office handling the crime has to certify the victim’s eligibility for the visa.
However, advocates and law enforcement leaders told state lawmakers on the interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee that New Mexico lacks uniform standards for how police and prosecutors should certify U Visa eligibility. In some cases, the victim’s attorneys don’t even know who the certifying official is within a police department.
That jeopardizes a victim’s ability to stay in the country, and can also jeopardize a police department’s ability to investigate the crime and refer charges to a prosecutor, Albuquerque Police Department Commander Paul Haugh said.
“Victims need to know that they can come forward,” he said, adding that their cooperation is “fundamental to us as an agency being able to prosecute crimes.”
Haugh spoke alongside New Mexico Immigrant Law Center Associate Managing Attorney Valeria Garcia Tavarez and Santa Fe Dreamers Project Legal Director Deshawnda Chaparro. The three said they plan to introduce a bill in next year’s legislative session that would require law enforcement agencies to make decisions on whether to certify an undocumented victim’s U Visa eligibility within a specific timeframe, which would be expedited if the victim was simultaneously undergoing deportation proceedings.
They said they’re also considering how to add penalties for law enforcement agencies that don’t comply with the proposed requirements.
“Rarely are we having to argue with law enforcement agencies on the actual merits,” Garcia Tavarez said. “What we are seeing more uniformly — and the major reason why we’re hoping to enact this piece of legislation — is the vast majority of time, there’s just no response.”
Garcia Tavarez added that this proposal would mark the fourth time a similar bill has come before the Legislature.
Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (D-Albuquerque), who has sponsored previous iterations of the proposal, said she’ll support it in the 2027 legislative session because she’s heard of too many undocumented victims receiving “uneven treatment between jurisdictions.”
Senate Majority Whip Cindy Nava (D-Bernalillo) similarly supported the bill, saying that her family has undergone the burdensome process of obtaining a U Visa.
She said that Santa Fe police helped her sister, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, certify her eligibility as she sought a U Visa after being attacked outside Santa Fe’s Target store. Enshrining stronger guidelines and timeline requirements in state law would help to streamline the process, she said.
“This is something nobody actually wants to do,” she said. “It is not an easy process in any way, shape or form.”
Garcia Tavarez, the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center attorney, told Source NM after the committee hearing that she and other advocates are still examining whether an undocumented victim could expose themselves to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents by cooperating with a local police department’s investigation. She said recent immigration arrests in New Mexico are partly why the bill will include an expedited U Visa certification timeline for victims who are in deportation proceedings.
“If one victim doesn’t feel safe, none of us do,” she said.
New Mexico lawmaker seeks to scrutinize insurers’ ‘catastrophe models’ used to deny home coverage —Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
A New Mexico lawmaker on Wednesday previewed a bill she said will shed more light on how insurance companies use sophisticated “catastrophe” modeling to justify canceling an increasing number of policies in wildfire-prone areas of the state.
Rep. Anita Gonzales (D-Las Vegas) told lawmakers on the interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee that she intends to introduce a bill at the upcoming legislative session that aims to curb a recent trend of rising premiums and insurance non-renewals in the state.
The bill would require insurance companies to provide more information to homeowners about how they evaluate wildfire risk to homes and neighborhoods. It would also require companies to provide premium discounts to homeowners that have taken established risk reduction steps, and give them a means to appeal company determinations homeowners think are in error.
Faced with a growing number of expensive natural disasters, insurers are increasingly relying on complex and secret so-called “catastrophe” modeling that informs their decisions to raise premiums or not renew policies, Gonzales said Wednesday.
Christian Myers, chief actuary for the state Office of the Superintendent of Insurance, said Wednesday that the systems insurance companies use to determine risk remain something of a “black box.”
But he said “catastrophe” modeling generally incorporates simulations of thousands of wildfire or other disaster scenarios to determine average expected losses in particular ZIP codes and also contemplates how a “worst case scenario” — like a once-in-a-1,000-year wildfire — would play out in an area given its insurance rate, housing profile and other factors.
Gonzales said New Mexico homeowners deserve to understand how insurance companies make such a determination, especially if it costs them coverage.
“The question isn’t whether insurers should assess risk. They must,” Gonzales said. “The question is whether homeowners and regulators understand how that risk is being assessed; whether investments that reduce risk are being recognized; and whether homeowners have a meaningful path to improve that risk classification.”
The Office of the Superintendent of Insurance, the state’s insurance regulator, recently announced that insurers opted not to renew more than 6,600 policies in 2025, marking the highest-ever number of non-renewals in state history and a near-tripling of that number since 2021.
Meanwhile, theFair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, which offers insurance to homeowners who can’t find coverage on the private market, has seen a steady increase in enrollees, from approximately 7,400 in December 2024 to more than 7,800 in August 2026, according to data from the OSI Gonzales presented Wednesday, alongside the office’s chief actuary.
While most FAIR Plan holders live in eastern New Mexico, where wind and hail often make homeowners insurance difficult to procure, data state officials presented Wednesday show the most significant FAIR Plan growth in recent years has been in wildfire-prone areas like Lincoln, Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Mora, and Otero counties.
Gonzales’ district includes San Miguel County, which the 2022 Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire hit hard. The number of homeowners relying on the FAIR Plan has increased in that county nearly 18% in that 21-month period, Gonzales noted, from 286 policies to 337 policies.
The lawmaker noted the increasing reliance on the “insurer of last resort” in her county and elsewhere, along with increasing number of non-renewals in a state that already has among the nation’s highest uninsured rates, makes it all the more important that homeowners receive more information about their policies and what they can do to keep them.
Gonzales’ bill would require insurers to disclose information about the catastrophe models they use to state regulators; take into account property- and community-level mitigation in their premium prices; disclose to consumers how high-risk they deem their homes; and outline steps homeowners can take to improve their risk certification.
For homeowners, wildfire mitigation often involves establishing a buffer around homes cleared of brush or other fire fuels and using fire-resistant materials in their roofs or siding. But Gonzales said homeowners currently don’t have guarantees that implementing those changes will reduce their premiums or keep them covered.
If the Legislature fails to act during the session beginning Jan. 19 next year, Gonzales said, “Homeowners may continue spending thousands of dollars on mitigation without knowing whether those improvements affect their classification.”
Gonzales also said she is considering language in the bill that would require insurers to be more up-front about modeling in “other hazards that have been indicated in our state, again as recently as the last few weeks,” she said, referring to recent flooding in northern New Mexico.
Insurance Superintendent Alice Kane told lawmakers that her office supports Gonzales’ bill and would lobby for it at the upcoming session.
Gonzales introduced a similar bill in the 30-day session earlier this year, but it never received a hearing. Bills that are not budget-related need special designations from the governor to be heard during 30-day sessions, and House Bill 204 did not receive one.
