This story was first published by New Mexico in Depth
A few months into his immigration detention at the Cibola County Correctional Center in rural New Mexico, Damian Soto, 31, almost gave up the fight. Baby-faced with a close-cropped mustache, he’d been trying to tell the authorities, in his native-sounding English, that he shouldn’t be locked up, that there must have been some kind of mistake. Born in Mexico, he was basically American, in this country since age six, and supposedly shielded from deportation by his approval for a special visa.
At that point in his imprisonment last summer, though, it felt as if he might be a forever detainee, languishing in a dorm with 40 other despairing men, shivering from the air-conditioning, subsisting on ramen from the commissary, and worrying himself sick about his family spiraling into debt without his income.
So when one day an officer told him, “Dude, if you fight this case you’re going to be here another year. You should just sign and self-deport,’’ he almost did. He almost bailed on his 25 years in the United States, on his cozy home in a California valley ringed by rugged mountains, on his job as a junior foreman at a pipeline company, on his high school sweetheart Claudia, and on their effervescent four-year-old daughter Viviana.
“I was just, like, man, I want out of here, I’m over this,’’ he said.
As the New Mexico Legislature prepares to take up the Immigrant Safety Act, it faces a different reality than a year ago, the last time it considered the measure, whose aim is to end the state’s collaboration with the federal immigration detention system.
Because of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign, the detainee population has changed, access to bail has withered, and federal lawsuits alleging unlawful detention inside the state’s three immigration lockups have skyrocketed and largely proved successful.
In 2024, New Mexico’s immigration jails primarily held asylum seekers who had recently crossed the border. Now, with the border effectively sealed, these detention centers confine ever more people with deep roots in this country and no criminal history whatsoever.
What’s more, immigrants like Soto, if apprehended at all, used to be eligible for release. But early last summer, the Trump administration adopted a new policy, later bolstered by the Board of Immigration Appeals, that denied bond hearings to almost all detained noncitizens.
Overturning decades of precedent and settled law, this practice, along with the drive to pursue third-country deportations, provoked an explosion of habeas corpus petitions.
Habeas, a centuries-old tool to challenge arbitrary detention, was infrequently used in immigration cases previously. In New Mexico, only one such claim was made in 2024. Last year, 104 petitions were filed, crowding the dockets of the seven U.S. district judges. Nationally, immigrant habeases increased 20-fold to more than 9,200, turning federal courts into a case-by-case battleground over executive power and immigrants’ rights to due process.
“This is supposed to be the most extraordinary remedy, and now we’re basically having to clog the system with habeas petitions to get people out of detention who never should have been detained in the first place,’’ said Natalie Shepherd, a civil rights attorney at Los Angeles Legal Advocates who won a client’s release from Cibola late last fall.
While immigration records are private, habeas petitions, are litigated in federal court and are public. They offer a rare snapshot of the population inside the state’s three detention centers, which are run by private prison companies hired by the counties that host the jails. The counties have intergovernmental service agreements with ICE; those agreements are what the Immigrant Safety Act seeks to ban, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said last September she would add the act to lawmakers’ agenda during the legislative session that begins next Tuesday.
In a review of the habeases filed, one thing stands out: the paucity of New Mexican plaintiffs, although ICE made 10 times as many arrests here in 2025 as in 2024. ICE often transports detainees across state lines even when beds are available close to home, and many local arrestees end up detained in El Paso or further afield, lawyers say.
New Mexico, meanwhile, serves as a repository for those scooped up during jobsite raids, traffic stops and immigration check-ins in ICE-targeted urban areas across the country.
“I think readers in New Mexico and legislators should be outraged that our facilities are a dumping ground,’’ said Zoe Bowman, a managing attorney at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center. “Especially since our detention centers are so rural and there are so few pro bono attorneys in the area.’’
To be sure, some detainees do have criminal convictions, but very few – 5.3%, according to analysis of a six-week period last fall by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank – have convictions for violent crimes.
In contrast, some three-quarters of those booked into immigration detention during that period had no convictions at all. In New Mexico’s jails, they included many Californians, like Generoso Velasquez, 57, who has lived in the United States for almost 40 years, and Christobal Dominguez, 49, who has been here for almost 30. One is a gardener, the other a construction worker. Both have children who are U.S. citizens.
In their habeas petitions, they, like others, claimed that ICE picked them up arbitrarily, due to ethnic profiling, and without a warrant.
In mid-June, after Dominguez loaded his truck with paint for a construction job in Los Angeles County, an unmarked car blocked his exit and a masked, armed agent approached him. “I showed him my rights card,’’ Dominguez said, referring to the card many immigrants now carry that instructs officers they will be exercising their right to remain silent. “He threw it at me.’’
About a week later and 15 miles away, Velasquez was seized by ICE while landscaping. According to his booking form, he was arrested during a “criminal alien” enforcement operation. Yet he had never been arrested or convicted of any crime.
Velasquez spent nearly three months in Cibola based on the government’s argument, used in many cases, that he was “seeking admission” into the United States rather than “already present’’ and thus entitled to due process rights that cover non-citizens regardless of status. U.S. District Judge David H. Urias rejected that theory, given documentation that Velasquez had lived in the country since the late 1980s.
“The Court has determined that Petitioner has been unlawfully detained,’’ he wrote in a September decision, ordering Velasquez be granted a bond hearing within a week. Released on a minimal bond of $1,500, Velasquez returned to tending lawns in Southern California, deeply shaken by his experience.
Dominguez, whose wife had just completed cancer treatment before his arrest, is still behind bars just east of Albuquerque.
“This poor man has never been in jail before and now he’s been in Torrance for four months,’’ his lawyer, Alfonso Morales, said. “Mentally, it’s very taxing. How long more can he take?’’
Two-thousand miles from his family in New York, a 20-year-old Indigenous Guatemalan man detained in Cibola is also at wit’s end. ““He feels alone every day,’’ his habeas petition claims. “He does not understand why he is there. He cries on the phone to his aunt, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ ”
Represented by Stephanie Norton of the National Immigration Project and Alexander Flores of Albuquerque, the young man experienced what is called a collateral arrest. ICE officers stopped his car in mid-November because they were after his passenger. He had been en route to pay his cellphone bill, theoretically free to move about without fear because he holds Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, having fled Guatemala at 16 when his mother died to live with his aunt in upstate New York.
Like this Guatemalan and like Damian Soto, many plaintiffs possess presumed safeguards against deportation. The most public case in New Mexico involved an El Paso man named Paulo Gamez Lira, 28, who arrived in the United States as a baby and won Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) over a decade ago. Married to an American citizen and father of four, he was seized by ICE in August after three unmarked cars blocked his arrival at his mother’s house. He had three of his kids in his truck at the time, including an infant daughter.
Gamez was freed after 43 days at the immigrant jail in southern Otero County.
It took Daniela Salazar-Martinez, 26, of Colorado, a lot longer. She is a different kind of plaintiff, one who like many detainees have judicial orders barring removal to their homelands.
ICE kept Salazar-Martinez, who is 26, confined at Otero despite a ruling that she not be deported to Mexico due to her legitimate fear of persecution from her ex-boyfriend’s paramilitary gang. The government told the court it was searching for a third country that would accept her. But Guatemala and the Dominican Republic said no, and requests to El Salvador and South Sudan went unanswered. Seven months crawled by.
Finally, New Mexico’s Chief U.S. District Judge, Kenneth J. Gonzales, ordered her freed. “The mere possibility of repatriation to third countries without concrete progress is insufficient to justify continued detention,’’ he wrote in November.
Across the country, many habeas petitions have proved successful, especially those challenging denial of bond hearings. Late last year, a California judge certified a nationwide class of detained immigrants and declared the mandatory detention unlawful. Advocates are awaiting the administration’s reaction.
In the meantime, though, most detainees cannot find or afford a lawyer to file a habeas on their behalf.
“So for all the hundreds of cases that we’re winning in New Mexico and nationwide on this issue, there are five, ten, maybe a hundred times more who are just as worthy of getting out,’’ said Dan Kowalski, a Santa Fe resident and retired immigration lawyer who writes an online newsletter called Involuntary Departure. “And many of them will give up, sign, and go.’’
After months in custody, Damian Soto wondered if he would ever see a judge. In criminal court, defendants get arraigned within days, and this was civil detention. Had his case gotten lost in the system?
At Cibola, the days were monotonous, punctuated by repeated headcounts and occasional trips to the yard, where he sucked in the fresh air and scanned the arid landscape that looked like “the middle of nowhere.’’ He sometimes distracted himself by playing poker or making baby booties out of ramen wrappers. But he was scared.
“It seemed like nobody was being let out except to get deported,’’ he said, and officers were always circulating with voluntary departure paperwork, “putting stuff in my head, doubts.’’
On the day he felt most tempted to sign, he called his 56-year-old mother, Lucinda. Sitting at the kitchen table in the extended family’s ranch house, beneath a picture of The Last Supper, she cried. That broke his heart. He agreed to hang in there, and soon thereafter his sister-in-law found help from the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center.
Soto retains only a fuzzy memory of Mexico. Home for him is Southern California, specifically the inland region east of LA, where he grew up in a Mexican-American community brimming with mixed-status families. Nobody was differentiating between those born there and those who arrived as children. So he didn’t give his own undocumented status much thought.
He met Claudia Carlin at San Bernardino High School. It was years into their relationship before she found out he was not a citizen like her. She was shocked but only because she knew everything else about him. And then, “Well, it didn’t matter to me at all.’’
As they do now, the couple lived with his parents in a squat rental house in a working-class neighborhood. Carlin worked as a forklift operator, Soto as a handyman and gardener before apprenticing at the pipeline company.
In the darkness before one dawn several years ago, Soto was startled from sleep by gunfire, multiple bullets striking his house, with one whistling clear through into an interior bedroom. At daybreak, he ventured out, collected five cartridge casings and called the cops. It had been a random drive-by shooting, and nobody was hurt, but they were rattled. They installed a security system and bought a guard dog.
That incident formed the basis for Soto’s application for a U visa, which offers noncitizen crime victims who cooperate with the police a special status and a pathway to legal residency. To qualify, Soto had to submit fingerprints, undergo a background check, and provide a signed document from the local sheriff’s department. Despite an 11-year-old driving-related misdemeanor, he passed muster.
Last March, he was given preliminary approval, called a “bona fide determination.’’ Because the number of U visas per year is capped and the system is profoundly backlogged, Congress created this interim designation, which comes with work authorization and, theoretically, protection from removal.
All the same, at the crack of dawn one morning last June, when Soto left home to install a sewer pipeline in a housing project, federal agents arrested him. “Hey, I have, like, a visa!’’ he tried to tell them.
As he was transported from San Bernardino to Los Angeles to El Paso and eventually to Cibola, the other thing Soto kept telling the officers was that he had a very good credit rating. He was proud of it, and considered it a kind of merit badge of Americanness. “They didn’t care,’’ he said.
Months later, though, the government mounted no opposition to Soto’s habeas petition.
His girlfriend texted him: “You’re coming home!!’’ Heart racing, he ran to the pay phone, then paused to pray before he called. When Carlin confirmed the news, he started to cry and hid in the showers to conceal his tears. He was to be released without posting bail and without having to strap on an ankle monitor though eventually he would need to return to immigration court.
Stepping out of the jail into the glare of freedom, he stumbled into Carlin’s embrace. They drove 10 hours back to Southern California, and Soto couldn’t stomach his welcome home meal of carne asada. It took weeks to recover his appetite and vanquish his nightmares, to settle back into his job and stop looking over his shoulder.
“It’s still there, the paranoia,’’ he said during a December interview in his home, his daughter clambering on and off his lap in a cheery Christmas sweater. “Like I want to put all this behind us. But it’s not the same, and it’s not over, is it?’’
Nestled in his arms, Viviana smiled up at him with saucer eyes and asked for marshmallows.
This article was produced in collaboration with Main Street Media Cooperative, which offers the services of experienced journalists to help local outlets report about the effect of changes in Washington on their communities.