OPINION: How power shapes New Mexico's water crisis

For a population of about 1,400 in the heart of Torrance County, drought is no longer an abstract warning about the future. This summer, Estancia declared a water emergency after its reserves fell critically low. Residents are being asked to restrict their usage while commercial consumption dominates the municipal system. Commercial customers, the main drivers of Estancia's tripled water consumption since 2019, account for around 85% of the town's water use so far in 2026. The Torrance County Detention Facility, operated by CoreCivic under a federal immigration detention arrangement, is Estancia's largest commercial water user. Months before the emergency was declared, people detained inside the facility reported water shortages. When jugs of safe drinking water ran out, they were reportedly told to drink tap water that, due to compromised infrastructure, was cloudy, foul-smelling and associated with skin irritation. Once the crisis was announced, the Torrance facility began trucking water in from outside sources, but jugs of safe drinking water still regularly run dry. What happens when people have no meaningful power to leave or change the conditions in which they live? This question became inescapable this summer following the deaths of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, both at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. These fathers lost their lives not as a direct consequence of Estancia's water emergency, but within the same national system that attempts to commodify and exploit both our neighbors and the natural resources we depend on. Border wall contractors in New Mexico have drawn heavily from wells drilled without state authorization, prompting a lawsuit. The current regime is operating outside the bounds of law and basic human dignity, enabling irreversible decisions that severely undermine community safety, public trust and democracy. New Mexico is a beautiful state filled with deserts, mountains, plains and rivers that many call home — humans, animals, birds, detention facilities and most recently … data centers. It is a place where water has long determined where people can live and thrive, but we are seeing increasingly low river flows and it is expected that Albuquerque will have a dry Rio Grande until November. Meanwhile, the construction of Project Jupiter, Oracle's data center campus in southern New Mexico, has already used over 100 million gallons of water this year, all from a borderland drought zone characterized by long-standing water insecurity due to arsenic contamination in the groundwater. A familiar pattern with a familiar result: Enormous entities shape local survival by prescribing who is allowed to consume and who is expected to sacrifice. Water is finite. Human lives are finite. Yet institutions with the greatest political and economic power repeatedly find ways to threaten the future of both. A sacrifice zone is not just a place where something goes wrong. It is a place where damage is acceptable because someone else benefits. As New Mexicans who plan to spend our lives here, we cannot afford to stand by while multimillion-dollar companies continue to profit at our expense. History has shown that when communities raise their voices and refuse to accept injustice as inevitable, power dynamics can be rebalanced. There is still time to make a meaningful impact for our state, but that time is not unlimited. Our current governor and gubernatorial candidates must hear us clearly: We are watching, we are organizing and we demand that local communities have a decisive voice in protecting the waters that sustain us. Alberto Del Campo is with the New Mexico Dream Team and Christine Carmen Dobbin is with Healthy Climate New Mexico & Fight Chihuahuan Desert Xtraction.