Etta Arviso didn’t have running water when she first moved to her home in Bloomfield in the early 1990s – it wasn’t even connected to the city’s water system.

So Arviso, a Navajo citizen and lifelong San Juan County resident, went to a meeting of the city’s water district, demanding her home be connected to the system.

“I was told, ‘Why don’t you just take your backhoe and dig water from the river to your house?’ and I got up and I raised my hand and I said to the committee ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’” Arviso said. “I said ‘How dare you, I like to flush my toilet like the rest of you.’”

Arviso eventually got her water connection via a direct water line. But in more than a half-dozen interviews around the large, mostly rural county, Navajo residents told the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico that their needs and priorities continue to often be ignored, minimized, and misunderstood by local officials.

Among the most basic barriers, they said, is a lack of county representation. Indigenous residents, the vast majority of whom are Navajo, are about 40 percent of San Juan County’s population. That makes them the largest single racial or ethnic group in the county. The Indigenous share of the population is likely higher – the U.S. Census Bureau has admitted Indigenous residents were severely undercounted in the 2020 decennial census.

"Who are we going to vote for if we don’t have any person in there that is going to know our concerns?”

Despite that, San Juan County commissioners approved a new redistricting plan that packs Indigenous voters into just one of the five commission districts, diluting their voting power. A map proposed by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission (NNHRC) would’ve given Indigenous voters a majority in two districts.

“The current redistricting map adopted by San Juan County repeats the long and shameful history of disenfranchising Indigenous communities,” ACLU of New Mexico’s Indigenous Justice Attorney Preston Sanchez said. “The county is obligated under law to ensure that the redistricting process results in Indigenous voters having adequate legislative representation by candidates of their choice.”

In February, the ACLU of New Mexico alongside the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, and DLA Piper sued on behalf of the NNHRC and five Navajo voters. The lawsuit seeks the implementation of a new map where Indigenous voters are able to elect representatives of their choice in two districts.

Debra Yazzie, vice president of the Navajo Nation’s Shiprock chapter, said she was upset when she saw how the map was drawn by the commission.

“It is imperative that we have representation from our communities,” she said, adding that those elected leaders can be “representing us and advocating for us at the county, state and federal levels.”

‘If you need help … there’s nothing’

Nestled in the Four Corners region of northwestern New Mexico, San Juan County’s cultural and natural richness is perhaps only matched by its geological wealth. The county is home to vast oil and gas reserves, as well as coal and uranium.

It’s also covered in large part by the Navajo Nation, which extends into parts of Arizona and Utah and covers part of the Navajo people’s traditional homeland.

But for many Navajo residents living in rural and semi-rural communities disconnected from running water and electricity, living on unpaved roads far from emergency services, the region’s beauty belies its harshness.

“There’s a lot of unmet needs that we have in our communities,” said Joseph Hernandez, 34, a Navajo resident of the small community of Beclabito near the Arizona border. “There’s a whole bunch of layers to it that you really have to live there to truly understand it.”

He said San Juan County could help provide basic infrastructure needs like paved roads and bridges that would better connect rural residents with larger towns and necessary services. They could also provide rural addresses to homes, which would help with mail service and emergency response.

“You expect to make a phone call and 911 will answer,’ he said.

But for many Indigenous residents in San Juan County, that’s not the case.

“Even if the fire department and the ambulance come, they can’t find you because they’re trying to locate your house because there’s no rural addressing.”

“There’s a lot of unmet needs that we have in our communities. There’s a whole bunch of layers to it that you really have to live there to truly understand it."

Those concerns were echoed by Ramona Begay, who lives in White Rock, a rural community near Chaco Culture National Historical Park. She used to work for the park, she said, but her commute involved crossing multiple washes that would be impassable during the rainy season. She had to pack four days’ worth of clothes every time she went to work, in case she’d be unable to return.

“If you need any help of some sort, there’s nothing,” she said.

The unpaved roads are in such bad condition, she has to go to Farmington twice a year to get new tires for her truck, as well as replacement parts for the wear and tear. That’s where she also has to go to get her groceries, as well as gas for her hours-long commute, something she said is common among rural Navajo residents.

“We’re just boosting the economy of San Juan County and that’s all we’re good for,” she said. “But none of those revenues come back to us.”

Yazzie, in Shiprock, spent her childhood playing basketball in the Four Corners. She won a state basketball championship with Arizona’s Window Rock High School and spent the summers playing against members of the state championship-winning Shiprock High School girls’ basketball team.

Now 51, she still coaches youth basketball sometimes, among other sports, but as a first-time chapter official, she’s focused on issues like a lack of waste transfer stations and dangerous speeding on US-64. The road connects Bloomfield and Farmington through Shiprock and into Arizona and is a frequent site of car and semi-truck crashes, she said. It’s also the road many school buses take to and from picking up Navajo children.

The community has been pushing for additional signs and traffic enforcement to slow down vehicles, Yazzie said, with mixed results.

‘If we had people that ran from our community and were elected,” she said, “then a lot of these issues would be addressed.”

‘It comes down to priorities’

All residents who spoke with the ACLU of New Mexico said many of their basic issues are complicated by San Juan County’s checkerboard jurisdiction.

Parcels of land belonging to private owners, the county, state agencies, the federal government and the Navajo Nation are jumbled and interspersed throughout the region. That can make it hard at times to know which government is supposed to provide which services in any given location.

But they also highlighted how county officials could often do more to take ownership of county responsibilities, as well as be a stronger advocate for ensuring services are provided to all county residents, regardless of jurisdiction.

"If we had people that ran from our community and were elected then a lot of these issues would be addressed.”

“I think it comes down to priorities,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez first became aware of a lack of representation when he went before the district’s school board to advocate for his middle school as a member of the student council. There was only one Indigenous person on the school board, he said.

“There’s a limitation on representation and it’s a reality here,” he said.

That lack of representation is reflected in a lack of Navajo-speaking elected officials, he said. That can hinder communication with voters because many community members prefer the language and feel less comfortable voicing their concerns in English.

“If you don’t speak the language, you’re not getting the whole picture,” he said.

Indigenous voters often don’t even get the kinds of outreach and visits from candidates during election seasons, let alone in regular years, that other parts of the county get. That’s according to Elvira Dennison, who lives in the small community of Naschitti, roughly halfway between Shiprock and Gallup.

Speaking at the Naschitti chapter house while the outside wind swirled, threatening a haboob, Dennison talked about how her community often gets overlooked by county officials who don’t even know where it is – some have incorrectly told her they can’t help her because she’s in neighboring McKinley County.

“We’re always left out our community,” she said.

“There’s a limitation on representation and it’s a reality here."

Dennison lived in Albuquerque for a while and since coming back, she said she spent time serving as a poll worker as well as at the community’s laundromat where she’d try to educate residents about upcoming elections. People struggle to choose between candidates they’ve never met and often have never even heard about.

“We’re voting for people who we don’t even know,” she said. “We don’t know their background, we don’t know if they’re willing to work with the community.”

Dennison said candidates from bigger cities or outside the Navajo community struggle to understand life in the small enclaves that dot San Juan County’s vast rural landscape. They almost never even campaign in places like Naschitti or do outreach to understand the needs.

“San Juan County elections, we’re not being heard, we’re not being involved, we’re not being counted,” she said. “We’re being left out, we’re just pushed aside.”

That was echoed by Yazzie, in Shiprock, who added that non-Indigenous officials are often unaware of or forget vital historical context such as the treaties between the Navajo Nation and the U.S. government.

Instead, she said, Navajo residents end up shut out of elected office. She said efforts to dilute their vote is intended to hurt Navajos’ electoral power.

Yazzie, like all the residents interviewed by the ACLU of New Mexico, is not a party to the redistricting lawsuit but said she hopes for commission lines that allow for districts representative of the community. The alternative is disenfranchisement.

“That redistricting does hurt us,” she said, “because who are we going to vote for if we don’t have any person in there that is going to know our concerns?”

Today, the ACLU published thousands of pages of previously unreleased records about how Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other parts of the Department of Homeland Security are sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures by buying access to, and using, huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps.

The records, which the ACLU obtained over the course of the last year through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, shed new light on the government’s ability to obtain our most private information by simply opening the federal wallet. These documents are further proof that Congress needs to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would end law enforcement agencies’ practice of buying their way around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

ICE’s and CBP’s warrantless purchase of access to people’s sensitive location information was first reported by The Wall Street Journal in early 2020. After the news broke, we submitted a FOIA request to DHS, ICE, and CBP, and we sued to force the agencies to respond to the request in December 2020. Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date.

The released records shine a light on the millions of taxpayer dollars DHS used to buy access to cell phone location information being aggregated and sold by two shadowy data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street. The documents expose those companies’ — and the government’s — attempts to rationalize this unfettered sale of massive quantities of data in the face of U.S. Supreme Court precedent protecting similar cell phone location data against warrantless government access.

Four years ago, in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the government needs a warrant to access a person’s cellphone location history from cellular service providers because of the “privacies of life” those records can reveal. That case hinged on a request for one suspect’s historical location information over a several-month period. In the documents we received over the past year, we found Venntel marketing materials sent to DHS explaining how the company collects more than 15 billion location points from over 250 million cell phones and other mobile devices every day.

With this data, law enforcement can “identify devices observed at places of interest,” and “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life,” according to a Venntel marketing brochure. The documents belabor how precise and illuminating this data is, allowing “pattern of life analysis to identify persons of interest.” By searching through this massive trove of location information at their whim, government investigators can identify and track specific individuals or everyone in a particular area, learning details of our private activities and associations.

In the face of the obvious privacy implications of warrantless access to this information, these companies and agencies go to great lengths to rationalize their actions. Throughout the documents, the cell phone location information is variously characterized as mere “digital exhaust” and as containing no “PII” (personally identifying information) because it is associated with a cell phone’s numerical identifier rather than a name — even though the entire purpose of this data is to be able to identify and track people. The records also assert that this data is “100 percent opt-in,” that cell phone users “voluntarily” share the location information, and that it is collected with consent of the app user and “permission of the individual.” Of course, that consent is a fiction: Many cell phone users don’t realize how many apps on their phones are collecting GPS information, and certainly don’t expect that data to be sold to the government in bulk.

In scattered emails, some DHS employees raised concerns, with internal briefing documents even acknowledging that “[l]egal, policy, and privacy reviews have not always kept pace with the new and evolving technologies.” Indeed, in one internal email, a senior director of privacy compliance flagged that the DHS Office of Science & Technology appeared to have purchased access to Venntel even though a required Privacy Threshold Assessment was never approved. Several email threads highlight internal confusion in the agency’s privacy office and potential oversight gaps in the use of this data — to the extent that all projects involving Venntel data were temporarily halted because of unanswered privacy and legal questions.

Nonetheless, DHS has pressed on with these bulk location data purchases. And the volume of people’s sensitive location information obtained by the agency is staggering. Among the records released to us by CBP were seven spreadsheets containing a small subset of the raw location data purchased by the agency from Venntel. (Although the location coordinates for each spreadsheet entry are redacted, the date and time of each location point are not.) The 6,168 pages of location records we reviewed contain approximately 336,000 location points obtained from people’s phones. For one three-day span in 2018, the records contain around 113,654 location points — more than 26 location points per minute. And that data appears to come from just one area in the Southwestern United States, meaning it is just a small subset of the total volume of people’s location information available to the agency.

The documents also highlight particular privacy concerns for people living near our nation’s borders. A 2018 DHS internal document proposed using the location data to identify patterns of illegal immigration, threatening to indiscriminately sweep in information about people going about their daily lives in border communities. There is also the potential for local law enforcement entities to gain access to this large mass of data in ways that they would not usually be able to. This is illustrated by a troubling request to DHS from a local police department in Cincinnati, seeking location data analytics pertaining to opioid overdoses in their jurisdiction.

DHS still owes us more documents, but whatever they show, it is already abundantly clear that law enforcement’s practice of buying its way around the core protections of the Fourth Amendment must stop. There is bipartisan legislation in Congress right now that would do exactly that. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act would require the government to secure a court order before obtaining Americans’ data, such as location information from our smartphones, from data brokers. The principle here is simple: The government should not be allowed to purchase its way around bedrock constitutional protections against unreasonable searches of our private information. There is no end run around the Fourth Amendment.

Lawmakers must seize the opportunity to end this massive privacy invasion without delay. Each day without action only allows the government’s covert trove of our personal information to grow.

Leon Casiquito. Michelle Morgan. Jolene Nez. They are some of the 15 people who we know have died in the custody of New Mexico’s largest jail since April 2020. While the causes of death differ — homicide, suicide and medical neglect — they have one thing in common: Their deaths were avoidable.

Casiquito, Morgan and Nez, as well as a majority of the other deaths, can be attributed to severe over-incarceration and poor medical care at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), located a few miles outside of Albuquerque. Simply put, there are far too many people detained for no real public safety reason at MDC, which is in turn incapable of taking appropriate care of them.

Time and time again, we have watched and read news reports that provide a glimpse into the deplorable conditions behind the walls of MDC. A January Albuquerque Journal article shed some much-needed light on deadly deficiencies in medical care at MDC, which is run by private contractor Centurion. That article helps explain why most of the recent deaths at MDC were related to treatable medical conditions. 

There have been other warnings. On October 21, 2021, MDC Sargent Robert Mason sent a letter to the Bernalillo County Commission and the Detention Facility Oversight Board warning county leaders of the horrifying conditions at the jail, only to be ignored. Five days later, Casiquito’s cellmate beat him to death in an attack that went unnoticed for several minutes, despite the efforts of many other men in the pod who frantically pressed the call buttons in their cells hoping to attract the attention of  jail guards who would stop the brutal attack. 

An additional risk are the frequent lockdowns at MDC, which can last for days at a time. When lockdowns occur, people detained there cannot shower or make phone calls, and are often alone without any staff available to assist in case of a medical crisis or other emergency. That means people are not getting access to appropriate medical care, including life-saving medications and treatment for chronic conditions. 

It’s so bad, MDC has had to declare a state of emergency on several recent occasions, reporting that there were simply not enough staff members to operate the jail without endangering the safety of both the large in-custody community and MDC employees.

Media reports and jail officials have falsely characterized the crises as a problem with understaffing as the primary reason conditions at MDC have become so acutely inhumane. It seems that recruiting and retaining people to fill the 50% of staff positions currently vacant has proven to be an insurmountable task, which is not surprising considering the conditions in which those staff are expected to work. 

In truth, the conditions at MDC represent an over-incarceration crisis – one which is not new, but is newly drawing attention because of the current, extremely dangerous conditions at MDC. 

MDC holds individuals who have been charged with but not convicted of a crime, as well as individuals who have been sentenced to less than one year in detention. Some people in MDC are detained simply because they were unable to pay court-imposed fines and fees, which is nothing more than a criminalization of poverty.

Over the past year, individuals have been booked into MDC because they failed to appear in court for minor charges like not getting their pet vaccinated, not providing an ID to law enforcement, and driving a car with an outdated registration. In most cases, individuals booked into the jail for these sorts of offenses spend only a night or two behind bars. But this steady stream of unnecessary arrests contributes to the overpopulation at MDC. Common sense tells us that these arrests do not make any of us safer. 

Even more people are shoved into MDC because of minor technical parole or probation violations, like a positive drug test or missing an appointment with their parole officer. 

The current conditions at MDC demonstrate with horrifying clarity what we already knew: It is long past time to reevaluate our approach to public safety and address our dependence on mass incarceration to solve every public safety problem. Mass incarceration does not improve public safety, and actually has the opposite effect as it reinforces cycles of poverty, addiction, and violence within our communities.

Law enforcement professionals and the New Mexico judiciary have an obligation to help ease the suffering at MDC by halting unnecessary arrests and detentions that contribute to over-incarceration. These measures would not be unprecedented in response to an emergency. For example, during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the courts, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies throughout the state took steps to mitigate the spread of deadly virus by reducing unnecessary incarcerations. 

State of New Mexico and Bernalillo County officials cannot create safe and humane conditions for our community members detained in MDC. It is for that reason they are obligated to reduce the number of incarcerated people held there. It is unconscionable that a member of our community could die in jail due to lack of medical care, let alone for the simple mistake of failing to register their vehicle or vaccinate their pet.

We’ve said it over and over, and we’ll never stop saying it: mass incarceration is an unmitigated disaster and we must end its use in New Mexico. Public safety and our public conscience demand better.