State Police Chief Troy Weisler

By CLARA BATES
The Santa Fe New Mexican

An effort to restrict out-of-state agencies from using license plate camera data in New Mexico to enforce things like immigration laws or other states’ abortion bans is moving forward.

The “Driver Privacy and Safety Act” passed the state Senate Judiciary Committee Monday afternoon with unanimous support, despite some misgivings from a pair of Republicans on the committee. It will head next to the Senate floor for a vote.

“If we don’t put basic guardrails on, this is a really dangerous tool,” Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, one of the bill’s sponsors, said of automatic license plate readers.

The measure, Senate Bill 40, would keep out-of-state agencies from using license plate camera searches for immigration enforcement or from investigating or prosecuting a “protected health care activity” in New Mexico, including reproductive and gender-affirming care. It would also forbid agencies from using the data to investigate people participating in constitutionally protected activities. 

Under the bill, users of automated license plate reader would be required to obtain written declarations from out-of-state entities stating the shared information would not be used for those purposes.

Wirth said he was prompted to file the bill after learning from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico that license plate data was being accessed by out-of-state law enforcement agencies nationally.

New Mexico law enforcement agencies were among thousands nationally to have data accessed by a Texas sheriff’s office to search for a woman alleged to have self-administered an abortion, the New Mexico ACLU found through public records requests. 

“Had an abortion, search for female,” an officer from the sheriff’s office in Johnson County, Texas, wrote last May as a justification for the national search of automatic license plate reader cameras owned by Flock Safety, in records obtained by the ACLU and shared with The New Mexican. The company’s system allows police departments to make data from their cameras available to other agencies.

Other out-of-state law enforcement agencies that searched license data from New Mexico cameras last year cited immigration as the reason for their searches, according to the ACLU records.

“We have thousands of documented instances of cameras in our state being accessed for reasons given like immigration, ICE, migrants,” Daniel Williams, policy advocate with the ACLU of New Mexico, told the committee.

“I don’t trust ICE with this information in any way, shape or form,” said Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque.

The bill previously passed the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation Committee on a party line vote. 

Wirth said he’s been “working with law enforcement to get these exceptions right.” In the version of the bill that passed Monday, changes from the prior version of the bill included that the Department of Public Safety would be responsible for enforcing the provisions rather than the Department of Justice, and that there would be a higher threshold for law enforcement agencies to be punished if they transfer data in violation of the act — they would only be assessed for civil penalties for an “intentional” violation of the act. 

State Police Chief Troy Weisler said Monday that he supported the changes.

“While there are still some additions and specific changes we’d like to see made, we do feel this version is in a much better place than the original bill,” Weisler said.

Two Republicans on the committee voiced concern about the bill narrowly targeting federal immigration enforcement, but ultimately voted for the bill.

Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, said the issues of immigration and protective health care activity are “highly politicized” whereas a broader data protection bill could have had more support.

“I just see it as more of a messaging bill unfortunately. I wish it was much broader,” Brantley said. 

Brantley said license plate readers are “an excellent tool for law enforcement,” but she added, “it’s very Big Brother to me.”