Both candidates for New Mexico governor said in interviews with New Mexico In Depth that, if elected, they’d create a task force to address the high rates at which Native people go missing and are murdered.
Republican Gregg Hull, a former mayor of Rio Rancho, said he sees a task force as a way to improve law enforcement coordination, partly to make sure confusion between agencies about who has jurisdiction doesn’t slow down investigations. A federal commission identified improved coordination as key to bringing missing Native people home and solving homicides.
“Families are afraid,” Hull said. “They want to know where their loved ones are. And we’ve seen how this affects people, even on a national level, whether it’s Native America or not.”
An “Indigenous public safety” plan on Hull’s website also mentions strengthening New Mexico’s Turquoise Alert system for missing Native people and tackling human trafficking and domestic violence.
Democrat Deb Haaland’s public safety plan includes providing stable funding for investigations of missing or murdered Indigenous people and increasing resources for victims’ families. Asked in an interview where she’d start, Haaland said she’d revive a state task force that was focused on the crisis.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham quietly disbanded the task force in 2023 to the outrage of some of its members, New Mexico In Depth reported at the time. The move came several months after task force members criticized Lujan Grisham’s pick for cabinet secretary of Indian Affairs, the department that oversaw the task force. Lujan Grisham’s administration defended the group’s dissolution, saying it was always meant to be temporary.
State lawmakers in early 2024 called on Attorney General Raúl Torrez to convene a new task force. That group — made up mostly of advocates, police and affected families — has been meeting for the past two years under the New Mexico Department of Justice, the agency led by Torrez.
But to Haaland, the Indian Affairs Department seemed like “a good home” for the task force, she said. She suggested the attorney general’s agency could have a seat at the table.
A renewed task force “would be very beneficial, not too large, enough to where folks can meet and move issues forward, making sure that they’re working with the federal government,” she said.
Hull also said he’d convene a task force with members including law enforcement and tribal members. He didn’t say who he’d want to oversee it but added that he’d be open to the Indian Affairs Department taking that role.
“I know they have to be housed somewhere,” Hull said. “I just hate to see things, when they become siloed and all of a sudden territorial, if you will. ‘This is my jurisdiction. No, this is my jurisdiction.’ I think that is a huge impediment to solving some of these crimes. And so, figuring out through a task force how we remove those barriers so that we can bring answers to the families that are looking for them.”
Haaland championed legislation addressing the crisis while she was in Congress, including the Not Invisible Act, which created a commission that toured the country before issuing recommendations to the federal government.
Later, during her time as Interior secretary in the Biden administration, Haaland established the Missing and Murdered Unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).
A federal audit of the unit published in early September found it had a significant backlog of case referrals from other agencies as of November 2024. And from 2021 to 2023, 39% of the unit’s funding was redirected to other BIA units, including to purchase vehicles. Those years were during Haaland’s tenure as Interior secretary.
Haaland didn’t directly respond to a question about the audit’s findings.
“I am not afraid of traveling to Washington, D.C., of traveling to the BIA here in Albuquerque,” Haaland said. “I would speak with our legislators, our federal delegation about the issue. I would speak to the head of the BIA, the assistant secretary. Whatever I had to do to start those conversations and help them understand how important this issue is, that’s what I would do.”
