News & Commentary

Fourteen months ago Manuel Pérez* lay on the ground unconscious in the sloping mountains of Sierra de los Cuchamatanes, Guatemala. His skull was fractured. His teeth were broken. And his brain was hemorrhaging blood.

When Susan was three months into her first pregnancy, her doctor delivered the kind of news every expectant mother hopes never to hear. And yet the worst was not over.

Just when Southwest border communities most needed a few champions in their corner, NM Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich stepped forward and answered the call. This week they rejected two immigration proposals in Congress that would have squandered $25 billion to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Our senators understand that Dreamers’ lives cannot be ransomed in a cynical tradeoff for President Trump’s wasteful, damaging wall. We need a permanent solution for immigrant youth that does not sacrifice the interests of border communities.

After six years of litigation, the ACLU of New Mexico’s Ten Commandments lawsuit, which wound its way from the New Mexico District Court to the very steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, has come to an end. On Monday, October 16, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it had denied the petition for certiorari in Felix v. Bloomfield, the case we filed in 2012 against the City of Bloomfield after they allowed a five-foot-high granite monument featuring the Ten Commandments (also known as the Decalogue) to be erected on the front lawn of City Hall. After the Supreme Court decides not to hear a case, there’s nowhere else to go. The two lower courts’ rulings on the monument’s unconstitutionality became final, and the city was forced to relocate the monument in November to private property at a nearby church.

John Martin makes a living soliciting donations for bottles of water on the side of the street. Every day he swallows his pride, puts on a smile, and offers the best service he can right now. Not too long ago he was homeless, but thanks to the generosity of strangers and strangers-turned-friends, he and his wife now have a roof over their heads – something he is beyond grateful for as the cold weather moves in. John knows all too well that those donations are all that’s standing between him and the cold hard floor of a tent or a shelter.

Early in December, the staff and I gathered to prepare a presentation on our efforts to resist Trump’s policies in New Mexico during 2017. Part of the presentation included a video we produced this summer about Kadhim Albumohammed and his family, describing how their lives would be rocked by Kadhim’s impending deportation to Iraq.

“There’s something in my chest that pounds with the thump, thump of desperate college dorm rooms and the thump, thump of rum soaked nights."

Long before Reverend Jim Collie took up preaching, he was taking to the streets, demonstrating in Washington D.C. during the height of the Vietnam War. He was even on the National Mall to witness the presidential helicopter whisk Nixon from his seat of power the day he resigned. The blades chopped at the air above, kicking up a cloud of dust that would not settle. Jim stood there at a loss. The president was gone, but the country was in chaos. 

By the third time Sherese Crawford got pulled over, she knew it was no matter of coincidence.