Posted July 24, 2025
To prepare to write this column, I finally watched the viral video of an ICE agent tasing a a man in an Albuquerque Walmart. As Source’s Patrick Lohmann reported, the man was Deivi Jose Molina-Peña, 33, whose friends and family say arrived in the United States legally under Temporary Protected Status about two years ago from Venezuela.
Watching videos of police violence has never been my thing, so as the 20-second clip ran, I found my eyes focusing on the other officer on the scene, a balaclava covering her face, who seemed intent on protecting a shelf of cheap blenders nearby from falling over, even while the victim, Mr. Molina Peña, collapsed and slammed his head on the tiled floor.
ICE’s spokespeople will tell us that their actions like this one– tasing an unarmed man in a shopping center– occur for our protection. They will tell us about non-citizens who are drug traffickers or, worse, sex traffickers. They will say some non-citizens are members of gangs like Tren de Aragua. They will tell us that any immigrant’s existence in our community is the real threat and that we are safer from drugs and sexual exploitation and gangs only if every last non-citizen is punished. We are meant to shrug and see a violent tasing in a public market as important collateral damage for the mission of Making America Safe Again.
They are here among us threatening the peace in our neighborhoods.
But ICE is the real public safety threat in our communities. Evidence is piling up in our cities and towns and in the media of the violent, lawless and inhumane tactics ICE employs to fulfill arrest quotas and the president’s mission of mass deportation. I listened to an NPR report the other day that included the sound clip of an ICE agent smashing a window of a truck while the person inside, a U.S. citizen (as if that should matter), screamed for their life. I contemplated the inchoate and speculative threat of violence I am told to fear because I live and work among non-citizens versus the very plain violence I can see and hear and feel coming from ICE.
I live in Santa Fe where our mayoral race and city council races are heating up. Albuquerque is also electing its mayor this year. One of the questions I have for people vying to lead our cities is how they plan to protect our communities from ICE. Many New Mexico municipalities have robust sanctuary policies, which are commendable and go a long way to prohibit the use of local resources in supporting ICE operations. But sanctuary policies do not restrict ICE agents from entering a city. They are here among us threatening the peace in our neighborhoods. Congressional Democrats are proposing legislation to ban ICE agents from wearing masks and require them to identify themselves. Attorneys general across the country — including New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez — back such measures. I want to challenge people running for local office to explore how municipal resources can also be proactively used to protect us from this public safety threat.
I recently shared the stage with Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller at an Indivisible Albuquerque event at which I was speaking and I asked him that very question: How could he creatively deploy the power of the Albuquerque Police Department to protect Burqueños? In the moment he didn’t really have an answer. While I understood why — because it’s a complicated question and he was put on the spot — I still felt a bit frustrated. I have been seeing politicians all over the country using very strong language to condemn ICE’s actions but when asked what they were going to do to intervene, they claim there isn’t much they can do to interfere with federal law enforcement. When people in elected office tell me they simply don’t have the power to change things, I always wonder if someone with an office, a title, a platform, a budget and, in this case, a police force at their disposal, has no power, what on earth am I expected to do as someone with none of those things?
So, I was impressed last week to hear that Keller’s team is now thinking about how to creatively deploy city resources to protect people in Albuquerque from ICE. Keller announced recently that the public can now contact APD to verify if ICE is operating in Albuquerque. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is an acknowledgement that a city can and should do more to protect its people from the exact sort of incident that recently occurred at Walmart.
And thankfully it is generating more debate about what we can do at the local level. Alexander Uballez, another Albuquerque mayoral candidate, responded to Keller’s announcement with an 11-point plan to strengthen the city’s response to CE’s presence. These are the exact conversations we need to be having as a community and I, for one, will be paying attention and participating as I decide who I am going to vote for. The election season is heating up and we need to continue to challenge candidates to explain how they plan to flex their power to protect our communities from ICE and the incredible threat it poses to our communal safety.
Allegra Love is an immigration attorney and educator from Santa Fe. This commentary is republished from Source New Mexico under a Creative Commons license.
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