On Aug. 2, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency asked the state of New Mexico for unfettered access to the state’s employment database, which contains information on virtually all the state’s employers, workers and those on unemployment, some of it sensitive and personal.
The state of New Mexico replied not only “No,” but “Hell, no.”
Just day before the migrant worker raids in Mississippi, ICE sent an email to New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions Secretary Bill McCamley asking for direct access to the agency’s employment database, according to the Albuquerque Journal. Workforce Solutions is the state’s labor agency. ICE said it already had access to Texas’s database, and needed access to New Mexico’s for criminal investigations, McCamley told the Journal.
McCamley denied the request based on the lack of specificity in the ICE request about what why it wanted the information and how it would be used.
“It’s not a secret what they want this information for,” McCamley told the Journal. He said refusing the request was “the right thing” to do, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has backed him up on the decision, with both of them defending it as upholding the rights of New Mexico employers and workers.
While the department does have procedures for providing records to other agencies either by request or court order, McCamley said the ICE request was unprecedented and the database contains personal information which ICE has no need to access.
“Neither Gov. Lujan Grisham nor I will work to destroy families,” he told the Journal. “We need communities where people feel safe.”
Despite the cabinet secretary’s denial of the request, ICE in subsequent days sent the same email request to other Workforce Solutions employees asking for the same access, attempting to circumvent the secretary. Attempts by the Journal and multiple other New Mexico media to get a comment from ICE went unanswered the past two days.
It’s no secret that the Trump campaign, desperate for electoral votes, is targeting New Mexico, a reasonably solid blue state, in the 2020 election, and has made numerous attempts to embarrass Lujan Grisham and the Democratic-majority state legislature, but no one has explicitly called the ICE request politically motivated.
Read the complete Albuquerque Journal story www.abqjournal.com/....