 Welcome to New Mexico’s capital outlay process — the way the state funds infrastructure and other projects every year. Its significance, particularly for rural areas that can’t fund their own projects, can’t be understated. For decades, this is how towns have gotten their Little League fields, counties obtain badly needed road repair, airports upgrade terminals.
If it sounds cumbersome, this isn’t the half of it — or even an eighth. The rush to get lawmakers to sign these precious pieces of paper is merely one part of an extremely complicated system that’s confusing to freshman legislators and burdensome to veterans. What’s more, many observers say it’s rushed and opaque from the start, meaning there’s a pronounced lack of public information about which projects the governor and lawmakers are proposing and ultimately support. (Read more)  The barrage of psychological and emotional suffering is the “vicarious trauma” attorneys from around the country say they experience after hearing cases of rape, torture and hardship suffered by their clients — many of them Central American and African migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. (read more)
 The general manager of this temporary workforce housing facility in Carlsbad goes the extra mile to keep hundreds of male oil workers in her lodge happy. But she’s also tough — and doesn’t take nonsense from anybody. (read more)
 This is the kind of banter one hears at the 24/7 cafeteria inside Permian Lodging’s temporary workforce housing facilities in Carlsbad, the epicenter of New Mexico’s portion of the go-go-go Permian Basin. Facilities like this one, more commonly known as man camps, have popped up all over the Permian because cities like Carlsbad lack enough housing to handle the huge influx of oil workers who operate the nearby fields. They’re also a convenient solution for companies that move workers from one area of the basin to another every few months.
 This is what's happening on the ground for local communities amid the oil and gas boom in the Permian Basin. There are positives and negatives. The income potential for local residents is huge, yet there are also labor shortages, bad roads and very expensive housing.
 A dispatch from a region that's producing 4.4 million barrels a day. If the area itself were its own nation, it would be a larger oil producer than all OPEC nations with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. (read more)
 While a federal judge issued an order last year largely stopping the separation of migrant parents from their children at the border, the practice of separating extended family members from children has continued. In some cases, when children arrive at the border accompanied by relatives who aren’t their parents, the minors are held in the U.S. while their caregivers are returned to Mexico under a program known as Migrant Protection Protocols. (read more)
 Since then, this town of fewer than 15,000 people has drawn on every ounce of strength — as well as donations from far and wide — to provide food, beds and roofs for more than 10,000 mostly Central American migrants. At a time when reports are surfacing about horrid conditions at federal migrant detention centers in Texas, Deming’s efforts have become a source of pride for the city and state. (read here)
 The danger migrants face in Juárez is only one of the challenges — albeit the most harrowing one — for El Paso lawyers representing people who are part of Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, a U.S. government program that requires many asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting their immigration court hearings.
Attorneys also have to deal with shifting U.S. policies around the program, the logistical and liability challenges of meeting with clients in Juárez, and the severe shortage of lawyers to handle the huge volume of asylum-seekers. All of this has created a situation in which very few asylum-seekers actually get attorneys, and most are left to navigate complex immigration court proceedings without representation. (read more)  Since June, the government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has deployed thousands of troops to its country’s southern and northern borders to crack down on migration. The effort has become one of President Donald Trump’s greatest assets in his efforts to slow the flow of asylum-seekers coming across the Southwest border. (read more)
 Many of the Central Americans who try to cross the border into El Paso and New Mexico do so in search of better economic opportunities, to reunite with family or to escape violence. But what many don’t know is that unless they can prove they’ve been persecuted in their home countries for specific reasons, their chances of migrating to the U.S. and obtaining asylum are extremely low. (read more)
 U.S. authorities say “Remain in Mexico” has helped reduce the volume of Central American migrants crossing into the U.S. to seek asylum. But as far as the protection of migrants is concerned, the program’s impact often has been the opposite of what its name might suggest. (read more)
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