By Merilee Dannemann
Triple Spaced Again
© 2026 by Merilee Dannemann

Some things simply should not be done by a for profit business. It’s inconsistent. It’s illogical.

One of those things is running a prison. If you are in business for profit, your job is making money for the owners of the business. If you are running a prison, the people you work with are not customers – they are prisoners. So it is only logical that you will save money by providing no more service than you have to. Another way of saying that is that you will do whatever you can get away with. If that means providing spoiled food or no food at all, you will be tempted to do that.

The issue of cost versus service exists in any institution where managers have control over people who are locked up.

The worst situation is a place where the residents are not only inmates who have no rights, but also are from other countries and may have no contact with family or advocates who might speak on their behalf. Reports allege that inmates are deliberately moved from where they were living to a distant state to make it harder for their families to stay in touch.

It should not surprise anybody that inhumane conditions are regularly reported at the immigrant detention facilities in New Mexico.

New Mexico houses three privately run federal detention centers – in Cibola, Torrance and Otero counties — that hold inmates who are not criminals and are incarcerated only because there’s some flaw in their immigration status, and New Mexico tolerates these inhumane conditions that only begin with spoiled food.

House Bill 9, which so far is moving on a fast track, proposes to prohibit New Mexico public bodies from participating in the federal civil immigration detention system. It prohibits public bodies from entering into, renewing, or maintaining any agreement, such as an intergovernmental service agreement, that facilitates the detention of individuals for federal civil immigration violation.

The practical effect would be to prohibit the three counties from contracting with the private prison companies. Advocates hope that will force the prison companies to stop taking non-criminal immigrant detainees, and, as part of national policy, that if the available beds are reduced that will force ICE and the Border Patrol to reduce the number of people they detain.

The legislation is moving at an opportune moment, as national attention is focused on the rampant mismanagement and purposeless cruelty of the Trump administration’s handling of the immigration issue.

A few days ago in Minneapolis, a 5-year-old child wearing a funny hat with rabbit ears was taken – I don’t know if this could be called kidnapping –by federal immigration agents in broad daylight while being filmed by witnesses. Some of the inmates in these federal detention centers are just as innocent as that child. Doing what we can on the policy level to help free those inmates is the least we can do to literally save the soul of New Mexico.

I’ve seen news reports that all around the country, including Republican districts in Republican-majority states, community members and local governments are blocking proposals to convert existing buildings into immigrant detention facilities. Consensus seems to be growing that jailing innocent immigrants, including those who followed legal process in coming here, is a violation of American values and will not be accepted.

If House Bill 9 is passed, and that leads to serious economic impact on the affected counties, New Mexico will have a moral obligation to devote some state resources to making up for the economic loss to those counties. Let’s have economic development we can be proud of. It will be worth the cost.

And then, let’s yell our loudest at the do-nothing cowards in the majority of what used to be the Congress of the United States to enact a 21st century update to our national immigration laws.

Merilee Dannemann’s columns are posted at www.triplespacedagain.com. Comments are invited through the web site.