WASHINGTON — In August, Greg Cunningham said the immigrants swept up in ICE home and workplace raids were “collateral damage.” Now he is on New Mexico television, in a spot co-produced with the National Republican Congressional Committee, promising that his immigration enforcement would leave “families following the legal process” alone.
The ad, “Keeping NM Safe,” first logged by AdImpact on Oct. 2, is the clearest sign yet that the Republican challenger to Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., sees his deportation record as a liability in a swing district along the border. That district includes the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE detention facility Cunningham has fought to keep open. The ad does not mention it.
The Ad
Cunningham opens the 30-second spot on his police-detective résumé. Then he turns to Vasquez, who he says “sides with criminals and supports defunding the police.” No source for that claim appears on screen.
Nine seconds later comes the pivot. Cunningham promises to fix “our broken immigration system” by “focusing on criminals, cartels, and gang members, not families following the legal process.”
What He Said Before the Ad
Cunningham’s record from before the ad reads differently.
As Migrant Insider first reported Aug. 7, Cunningham said of undocumented people caught up in raids: “They got to go, so they are collateral damage to a system that put ICE in the position where they have to go locate this person.” The Santa Fe New Mexican confirmed the context three days later.
On a district podcast, he discussed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two U.S. citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. He called them “ideologically opposed … intent on disrupting,” and said “you do not have the right to actively interfere with law enforcement … and that’s what happened in both cases.”
Source NM asked him Sept. 29 whether he backed the Legislature’s push to bar public entities from contracting with ICE for detention, including at Otero. He said: “I don’t support that. … They want that facility. They need that facility for their community, for jobs, for opportunity, for stability.”
His complaint about the raids, he told the Washington Reporter on Sept. 16, is not about who ICE arrests. It is about where: “If we would just allow ICE to work at the jail level like they’re supposed to, we would eliminate a lot of what you’re seeing right now.”
President Donald Trump endorsed Cunningham on June 1. In the Truth Social post, he promised to “Stop Migrant Crime” and accused Vasquez of wanting to “stop deporting Criminal Illegal Aliens.” In September, Cunningham spoke at the RNC’s Midterm Convention.
The Bill Behind “Sides With Criminals”
Groups backing Cunningham have tied the “criminals” attack to Vasquez’s cosponsorship of H.R. 1589, the American Dream and Promise Act of 2025. That bill would open a path to conditional permanent residency for Dreamers brought to the U.S. as children and for holders of Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure.
The bill’s text does not extend that path to criminals. Anyone convicted of “any felony offense” is ineligible. So is anyone with three or more misdemeanors, other than traffic, cannabis and civil-disobedience offenses, and anyone with a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. Recent gang offenses disqualify an applicant. Every applicant must clear “security and law enforcement background checks.” Conditional status can be revoked from anyone who later runs afoul of those bars.
More than 4,000 DACA recipients live in New Mexico.
Who ICE Is Actually Holding
Cunningham’s ad describes an enforcement system aimed at “criminals, cartels, and gang members.” The numbers describe a different one.
As of July 11, 46,436 of the 65,765 people in ICE detention, or 70.6%, had no criminal conviction, according to TRAC at Syracuse University. When detention hit its record of 70,766 people on Jan. 24, 74.2% had no conviction. “Since the summer, nearly all of the growth in ICE detention has come from people without criminal convictions or charges,” Syracuse researcher Austin Kocher told Stateline in February.
The facility Cunningham wants to keep open in Otero County is not a jail for cartel bosses. It is an immigration detention center. And in centers like it across the country, seven in 10 of the people inside have never been convicted of anything.
Cunningham is hoping New Mexico voters forget what he said in August. We don’t forget. Subscribe and Migrant Insider will keep the receipts on every candidate rewriting his deportation record before November.
Thank you Pablo ! Mainstream tv should be reporting these facts. just makes me sick to see what is happening in our country !
The so-called immigration policy of the United States appears, from everything I have read and listened to, tattered and effectively useless in providing a reliable and understandable path to American citizenship for those who seek it. Instead, we have political detonation of bipartisan legislation (recall Langford’s efforts please), astronomical funding of ICE and CBP to perform heartbreaking and lethal thuggishness, plus several of the usual suspects raking in millions of dollars from cruelty at detention centers. Politicians are engaged now in complex dance moves to somehow shed their complicity. Good luck with that hubris. Where is the plug to pull that drains this miasma?