At least 469 people have died in custody in New Mexico

How deaths in custody are reported in New Mexico

The New Mexico Corrections Department runs eight prisons and oversees two that are privately operated; its average daily population in 2022 was 5,607.¹ The department does not announce deaths: its press release archive holds no notices of people dying in its custody, and its annual reports for 2020, 2021 and fiscal 2023 give no count of deaths.²³¹

Under the rules of the Office of the Medical Investigator, the death of anyone housed in a county or state institution, wherever the death occurs, and of anyone in the custody of law enforcement officers must be reported to that office or to the police. The office does not take jurisdiction on Indian reservations or military installations, where it acts only as a consultant when invited.⁴

The only New Mexico law on reporting deaths in custody is a 2006 statute that requires private correctional facilities to report them. By the state's own account, public prisons, county jails, police lockups and boot camps are "not under any state statutory authority to report deaths in custody." For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Department of Public Safety has collected aggregated quarterly spreadsheets since 2019 from the State Police, the Corrections Department, the Office of the Medical Investigator and the Department of Health, rather than records of each death from each agency. Its plan counts 8 state and 2 private prisons, 33 county jails and 247 local law enforcement agencies, and says the state has no website for the data.⁵ I have found no state publication of these data.

County jails are run by the counties. Bernalillo County's Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque, the state's biggest jail, has operated under a federal class action over its conditions since 1995.⁶⁷ Since 2021, Bernalillo County has posted a notice on its website when someone held at the jail dies, usually giving the person's name, age, booking date and the times they were found and pronounced dead, and stating that the Office of the Medical Investigator will determine the cause and manner of death.⁸⁹ Some notices give no name; one in 2025 withheld it because the family had not yet been told.⁹¹⁰ The county's own jail oversight board cannot learn much more: a member who resigned in 2022 wrote that it "lacks the authority to find out the context of in-custody deaths."¹¹ I have found no similar series from the state's other county jails.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held people in New Mexico at the Cibola County Correctional Center, the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral and the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, and publishes its own report on each death in its custody.^12131415

What has changed

1. 1980On February 2 and 3, people held at the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Santa Fe took over the prison. In 36 hours, 33 incarcerated men were killed by other prisoners and at least 90 were seriously injured. The state did not release a complete account of the living and the dead until March 6, four weeks later.¹⁶
2. 1995People held at the Bernalillo County Detention Center filed McClendon v. City of Albuquerque over overcrowding. The court capped the jail's population that year, extended its orders to the new Metropolitan Detention Center in 2003, and in June 2016 approved a settlement covering medical and mental health care, use of force and other areas.⁷
3. 2001On November 6, New Mexico executed Terry Clark by lethal injection; he had given up his appeals.¹⁷ It was the state's only execution after 1976.¹⁸
4. 2009New Mexico abolished the death penalty for future cases, leaving two men on death row. On June 28, 2019, the New Mexico Supreme Court vacated both sentences.¹⁸
5. 2018Roxsana Hernández, a 33-year-old transgender woman from Honduras who had asked for asylum, died in May after she was moved to the Cibola County Correctional Center. An autopsy found she died of complications of dehydration, with deep bruising on her rib cage and back; ICE had said the cause was cardiac arrest.¹³
6. 2019Johana Medina León, a 25-year-old transgender woman held at the Otero County Processing Center, died on June 1 at a hospital in El Paso, Texas. ICE said it had released her on parole the day she was taken to the hospital.¹⁴ On December 29, Samuelino Mavinga, 40, died in the hospital after he was transferred from Otero to Torrance.¹⁹
7. 2022In March, the Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General found the Torrance County Detention Facility so short of staff that it asked ICE to move everyone held there elsewhere; ICE did not agree.¹⁵ In August, Kesley Vial, 23, from Brazil, died at the University of New Mexico Hospital after attempting suicide at Torrance.²⁰
8. 2022Bernalillo County twice declared a state of emergency at the Metropolitan Detention Center over staff shortages, and in June county commissioners approved an order to hire 111 officers over two years.⁶²¹ In October, a member of the jail's oversight board resigned over its lack of power, including over deaths.¹¹
9. 2023House Bill 297, which would have created a corrections ombudsperson and an advisory board to oversee the Corrections Department, passed the House 46-22 and died in the Senate Judiciary Committee.²²
10. 2024Jhon Benavides Quintana, 32, from Ecuador, was declared dead at the Otero County Processing Center on June 15.²³
11. 2026On February 5, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 9, the Immigrant Safety Act, which bars state and local governments from agreements to hold people for civil immigration violations. The New Mexico Immigrant Law Center's announcement of the signing counted five deaths in custody at the state's three immigration detention centers in the years before.²⁴ By July 20, eight people had died in the custody of the Metropolitan Detention Center during the year.²⁵

How far the official numbers can be trusted

For state prisons, the only published yearly counts are federal. New Mexico reported 336 deaths in its prisons to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2001 through 2019, between 11 and 29 a year, and none of them by name.²⁶ The list the Corrections Department released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project matches the federal count for 2018, with 22 deaths, but has 19 for 2019 where the federal count has 18. It records 41 deaths in 2020, more than in any year of the federal series. It names the people who died from 2018 through 2020 and no one after, and for 2021 it gives no cause or manner for 16 of the 25 deaths.²⁷²⁶

For county jails, the federal count ended with 2019. New Mexico jails reported 269 deaths to the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2000 through 2019, from 29 to 35 reporting jurisdictions a year.²⁸ The state's own collection since then is aggregated by agency and unpublished.⁵

What counts as a death in custody varies. Bernalillo County also posts the deaths of people on the jail's Community Custody Program, who live outside the jail under its supervision, such as a man who died at an Albuquerque halfway house in April 2026.²⁹ The Albuquerque Journal's count of eight deaths at the jail by July 2026 includes him.²⁵²⁹ ICE's list of deaths in its custody does not include Johana Medina León, whom it said it had released on parole the day she went to the hospital.¹²¹⁴ People held in southern New Mexico have died in El Paso hospitals, so ICE lists some of their deaths, such as those of Hadayatullah Saylab in 2008 and Rafael Barcenas-Padilla in 2016, under a Texas place of death.³⁰ ICE's report on Roxsana Hernández's death is filed under a name she did not use.¹²

Deaths on Indian reservations fall outside the medical investigator's jurisdiction unless the office is invited.⁴ The state's federal reporting plan lists Bureau of Indian Affairs agencies and tribal police departments among the agencies that should report, but its collection runs through four state agencies.⁵