By Bella Davis, New Mexico In Depth
New Mexico is set to become the fourth state to create an alert system meant to help find Native Americans who have gone missing. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham plans to sign Senate Bill 41 into law, establishing a Turquoise Alert system, according to her office, after the bill passed both chambers of the Legislature unanimously.
Operating much like the state’s Amber Alert system for abducted children, Turquoise Alerts would be issued for people who are enrolled in or eligible for enrollment in a federally or state-recognized tribe and are missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances or are at heightened risk due to health concerns or disabilities.
Colorado, California and Washington have established similar alerts. Since Washington’s system was created in 2022, 114 alerts had gone out as of August last year, and 111 of those people were located, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.
Lawmakers in New Mexico have passed a couple other bills in recent years responding to a national crisis of Indigenous people disproportionately going missing and being killed. There are 186 Indigenous people missing from the state, according to the state Department of Justice, and the average number of days missing is 1,662, or about four and a half years.
The alert is especially needed on reservations, where jurisdictional confusion and understaffed law enforcement agencies are major obstacles to public safety, said Rep. Michelle Paulene Abeyta (Diné), a Democrat from To’hajiilee and one of the bill’s sponsors.
“When someone goes missing, we’re combining our own resources outside of law enforcement and any actual government-run entity to try to locate our missing loved ones,” Abeyta said Monday in an interview. “We know how important this is and how the lack of resources just isn’t fair for us and the jurisdictional issues that get in the way. It’s not right.”
In the ‘90s, when she was a child, Abeyta’s mother went missing. She was taken to a remote area and “beaten and left to die,” Abeyta said, before being found a few days later by a person who happened to be in the area. She was brought to a hospital and survived, but her recovery was difficult.
Abeyta and her co-sponsor Sen. Angel Charley (Laguna/Zuni/Diné), D-Acoma, are “excited to see how this is going to help improve the lives of so many families that for a long time needed some type of solution, some type of resource to go to,” Abeyta said.
While helping solve logistical barriers, the alert system would also raise awareness about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people, Charley said in an interview Friday.
Charley, who used to be the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, referenced Ashlynne Mike, an 11-year-old Diné girl who was kidnapped and murdered in northwestern New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation, in 2016. Law enforcement didn’t issue an Amber Alert until the day after she went missing due to “misunderstandings and jurisdictional hurdles,” according to the Justice Department.
“You never know if coordination would have happened in a way that was quick and efficient” if there had been greater awareness at the time, Charley said. After lawmakers passed the bill last week, Ashlynne’s father contacted Charley, telling her he was going to write to Lujan Grisham and urge her to sign it.
“We do not want other families to go through the trauma we felt,” he wrote in a message Charley shared with New Mexico In Depth with his permission.
Indigenous advocates, tribal leaders and police, and lobbyists representing several pueblos also spoke in support of the bill during the session.
The bill requires the Department of Public Safety to develop a plan for getting alerts out as quickly as possible and keeping records on each alert, with information including the municipality where the missing person report was made, the date the alert was issued and the date the missing person is recovered.
“Too many Native American families have faced crisis and the heartbreak of a loved one disappearing without the swift response they deserve,” Indian Affairs Secretary Josett Monette, whose agency developed the bill, said in a statement. “The Turquoise Alert system is a critical step forward in ensuring that missing Native American people are prioritized in the same way as other emergency alerts.”
The alert aligns with a state response plan issued by a task force in 2022, Monette told lawmakers last month.
That now-defunct task force discussed an alert system for missing Indigenous people, said Darlene Gomez, a task force member and attorney who represents affected families. Gomez suggested that New Mexico should create such an alert during public comment at a December meeting of a new state task force focused on the crisis.
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