The Reporter's Notebook from The Las Cruces Sun-News

This week, we’re talking to New Mexico State University Chancellor Dan Arvizu. Ahead of this year’s 60-day legislative session, we wanted to find out what sorts of legislation the university would like to see passed. We’ll take a deep dive into how proposed legislation may impact NMSU.

Some of the things Arvizu and his colleagues in higher education around the state would like to see are a 10 percent average increase in compensation, fully funding the mandated 1 percent increase in retirement benefits for the next two years, a five percent increase in instruction and general funding, and $10 million to invest in workforce training.

While New Mexico is looking to have an historically large budget in the coming fiscal year, no one seems to have much of an appetite for allocating it to recurring costs. Instead, the thinking seems to be focused on ways to make one-time, non-recurring investments that will benefit the state in the long run. NMSU is also hoping to get a healthy dose of capital outlay and general obligation bond funding — totaling nearly $60 million — to improve facilities on its campuses around the state.

We’ll also be talking to Clayton Abbey, NMSU’s Interim Assistant Vice President for Government and Community Relations, who will be doing much of the work for the university in convincing lawmakers in Santa Fe to make these investments, and Sherry Kollmann, associate vice chancellor for digital learning.

This week, I’m grateful to have Chancellor Arvizu, Sherry and Clayton joining us.

This week, we’re talking to Lucas Peerman, the outgoing news director of the Las Cruces Sun-News, and Jessica Onsurez. Until recently, Jessica was the news director of the Carlsbad Current-Argus, the Alamogordo Daily News and the Ruidoso News — a role she'll continue into 2023. All of the aforementioned papers are owned and operated by Gannett — the largest newspaper company in the United States.

On Jan. 1, Jessica took over as the news director for the Sun-News. We’ll talk to Lucas about his time at the paper and his future plans, and to Jessica about how she intends to pick up the torch and carry it forward — what this might mean for the future of the newspaper.

This week, I’m grateful to have Lucas and Jessica joining us.

This week, we’re talking to Rajaa Shindi, an assistant professor at New Mexico State University.  Shindi received a $150,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to continue an effort to improve the lives of Afghan refugees in southern New Mexico through education and job training. 

She has partnered with Angela Owens, college assistant professor and director of the Glass Family Research Institute for Early Childhood Studies at NMSU, to provide free child care for Afghan refugees who participate in free English and computer literacy classes.

Shindi received the one-year grant in June of this year — less than a year after she and her daughter started the NMSU Afghan Refugee Response Project, an initiative that gained widespread attention for its efforts to aid refugees who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban seized control of the country in August 2021.

We talk about Shindi's background as an Iraqi immigrant, how she ended up in Las Cruces — which she now considers a second home — why this project was important to her and what she hopes it will accomplish. We also talk about how multi-denominational religious groups in the community have come together to achieve these goals using governmental funds.

This week, I’m thankful to have Rajaa joining us.

This week, we’re talking to Dulcinea Lara, the academic department head and professor of Borderlands and Ethnic Studies at New Mexico State University.

Borderlands and Ethnic Studies began in 2019 as a multi-disciplinary program at NMSU to build awareness and cultural understanding of what it means to live along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Known as BEST, the department in the College of Arts and Sciences offers a multi-disciplinary graduate certificate to address the growing need for knowledge in the areas of cultural competency, equity and inclusion to work effectively with diverse populations.

Lara championed the program from its inception and advocated for its designation as a department. Her goal is to guide students in examining the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and other identities and how those identities impact people living in border communities.

We also talk at some length about Critical Race Theory, which has become a hot topic in education — and, for various reasons, particularly in New Mexico — as of late. We talk about what it means, and how it can be put into practice at various levels of instruction.

I’m grateful to have Dr. Lara joining us this week.

This week, we’re talking to Las Cruces Sun-News News Director Lucas Peerman, and Mario Moccia, the director of athletics at New Mexico State University. We’re talking about NMSU football’s Cinderella season — how a team that started NM State started the season 0-4 and they lost a home game to Florida International where the Aggies were actually 14.5-point favorites to drop to 1-5. 

Then came the rally. NMSU tore back to finish the season 6-6 — including a clobbering of Valparaiso on Dec. 3 — the team’s 12th game, after its homecoming game against San Diego State was canceled due to the tragic automobile death of 18-year-old Spartans’ freshman Camdan McWright, who was killed in a traffic crash near the San Jose State campus. The Spartans never made the trip to Las Cruces.

Of course, that’s certainly not the only news surrounding NMSU athletics. We’ll also talk a little about the recent shooting on the campus of UNM in the early morning hours of Nov. 19 involving NMSU’s starting power forward, Mike Peake, in the hours ahead of the Aggie/Lobo rivalry — and all that has happened since, including his suspension from the team. 

This week, I’m truly grateful to have Lucas and Mario joining us. 

This week, we’re talking to El Paso Times reporter Lauren Villagran, who covers immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border for the Times and the USA Today network of newspapers.

The journey of Kristian González Pérez and his family of four is not particularly unique — insomuch as his was one of thousands of families bussed to other parts of the country, sometime for practical reasons, sometimes for political reasons.

They were four of 10,713 asylum seekers who took the same route to New York on city-chartered buses. The family captured the journey on cameras provided by the El Paso Times and the USA Today Network.

As Lauren notes, it was just hours earlier on Oct. 19 — exactly 35 days after they left Venezuela — González Pérez and his family had lined up in the parking lot of El Paso's Migrant Welcome Center. They smiled into the cellphone camera as the bus idled beside them.

Lauren, and Times photojournalist Omar Ornelas, were not allowed to be on that bus. But they flew to New York to meet the family when they arrived, and they continued chronicling the family’s journey.

This story was a collaboration between the El Paso Times and USA Today for the fifth episode in the series “States of America.” The full episode of “States of America” exploring the migration crisis premiered on Nov. 25 on USA TODAY NETWORK’s streaming channel. You can also find it on YouTube.

This week, I’m grateful to have Lauren joining us.

This week, we're talking to Las Cruces Sun-News lead sports reporter Jason Groves and News Director Lucas Peerman.

On Friday, Nov. 18, NMSU's men's basketball team traveled to Albuquerque to take on the Lobos Saturday in The Pit. But that game never happened. On the morning of Saturday, Nov. 19, we learned there had been a shooting on the UNM campus at around 3 a.m. Then we learned that the men's basketball game had been postponed.

As our reporters sprang into action, we began putting the pieces together and learned that 21-year-old Mike Peake, NMSU's starting power forward, had been involved in the shooting that left a 19-year-old UNM student - later identified by New Mexico State Police as Brandon Travis - dead.

Peake was hospitalized with a bullet wound to the leg. On Saturday afternoon, the team's bus was pulled over south of Socorro, according to NMSP, "as part of the ongoing investigation into the homicide at UNM." The bus was later released and allowed to return to Las Cruces. In the days that followed, police arrested two UNM students - 17-year-old Mya Hill and 19-year-old Jonathan Smith. Smith appeared before an Albuquerque judge Wednesday for a pre-trial detention hearing, at which his mother asked that the teenager be released into her custody until the case is resolved. Ultimately, the judge agreed to let him out of jail and release him into his mother's supervised care.

Throughout the week, information trickled out - sometimes from State Police, sometimes from UNM, sometimes from NMSU. At times, more than half of the Sun-News staff was working on chasing down information, piecing it together and exploring various aspects of this story. This lasted for the greater part of Thanksgiving week. 

We should note that this podcast is being recorded on Friday, Nov. 25. Any developments that may happen in the not-so-distant future will, obviously, not be discussed, unfortunately. 

On a week like this, I couldn't be happier to have Jason and Lucas joining us.

This week, we’re talking to Las Cruces Sun-News reporter Justin Garcia. Justin covers local government and public safety for the newspaper. Through a public records request, he recently obtained Las Cruces crime statistics for this year through June — the last month for which stats are currently available.

What we’ve found, in raw numbers, is that more crimes have been reported in every category, year-to-date, except for robbery and rape. But, as Justin will explain, it’s not that simple. In fact, it can be really difficult to compare "apples to apples," so to speak, because of external factors that change from year to year.

We’ll talk about that — and some of the caveats that, as reporters, are important for us to consider when crunching the numbers.

This week, we’re pleased to be joined by Justin.

In this week’s episode, we’re talking to Algernon D’Ammassa. Algernon has been a reporter for the Sun-News since 2018. Before that, he was at the Deming Headlight. Earlier this month, Algernon returned to the Headlight as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. The Headlight was recently purchased from Gannett by the Silver City Independent Publishing Co., which owns the Silver City Daily Press and Independent.

During his time in Las Cruces, Algernon was a great asset to our newsroom — and to our community. He’s not one to shy away from a big, hard-to-report story — particularly if the reporting is of vital public interest. And during his time at the Sun-News, he reported a great number of genuinely impactful stories.  

This week, we’re grateful to be joined by Algernon.

This week, we’re doing something a little bit different. I’ll be talking to Walt Rubel, a longtime reporter and editor in southern New Mexico who has covered New Mexico politics for many years — and many of THOSE at the Las Cruces Sun-News.

We’re talking about the 2022 midterm elections, redistricting, and some of the state’s biggest offices up for grabs.

We should note, this podcast was recorded Saturday, Nov. 5.

This week, we’re grateful to be joined by Walt.