New Mexico Election 2026: New Mexico attorney general

The New Mexico Department of Justice in recent years has garnered national attention for repeatedly taking the Trump administration and global companies such as Meta to court.

The office has also overseen a number of high-profile local cases, including criminally prosecuting police officers who used fatal force and seeking to claw back an alleged “golden parachute” for a former university president.

Incumbent Democrat Attorney General Raúl Torrez has found himself at odds with other state agencies. He has been highly critical of the troubled Children, Youth and Families Department under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s leadership, and recently sided with two environmental groups in their legal challenges against state agencies including the New Mexico Environment Department and Office of the State Engineer relating to the Project Jupiter data center.

He and his Republican challenger, Las Cruces-based personal injury attorney Samuel Kane, hold differing stances on the role of the attorney general. While Torrez has often taken on national cases, Kane told Source NM he would discontinue the office’s practice of signing onto multi-state lawsuits against the Trump administration.

The two will face each other in the Nov. 3 general election. The office comes with a $154,714 annual salary. Its prosecutors oversee a range of criminal and civil cases that broadly affect the state. While prosecutors in local district attorneys’ offices typically focus on trying individual crimes, the attorney general’s office is currently involved in litigation against Facebook for its alleged role in the Cambridge-Analytica data breach; the federal government for failing to release documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; and the U.S. Department of Justice for records related to allegations that drug enforcement agents knowingly let fentanyl flow into the state.

Source NM spoke with both candidates about the race, their priorities for the office and how they hope to work alongside a new governor. Their answers have been edited for clarity and concision.

Samuel Kane

Samuel Kane has lived in Las Cruces for more than 20 years after moving to southern New Mexico from Arizona.

Kane has run his own law practice since 2004, after clerking for Senior U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Brack, where he largely focuses on personal injury cases and has worked as a contractor for the Law Offices of the Public Defender.

While Kane has never worked as a prosecutor, he told Source NM he’s confident he has the experience needed to lead the New Mexico Department of Justice.

“I’ve spent over two decades working with folks that have been disadvantaged in a lot of different arenas; criminal defendants, injured folks, we did bankruptcies for a while,” he said. “I feel that I can come in and make a difference.”

What will be your top priority, if elected, for the New Mexico Department of Justice next year?

My focus would be exclusively on things that impact New Mexicans. I would say the single top priority would be crime.

We’ve got this revolving door. We’ve got police officers that are out making arrests only to find the person they arrested at the same location committing the same offense, like three days later.

What happens is the district court judges have very large dockets…I would propose bringing in a high level of technology where we can have a clerk upload all the information, sort of like an AI tool, streamline it and give a really quick synopsis for the judges to look at and make an easy determination on (pre-trial detention).

If elected, what bills would you support in the 2027 legislative session?

There is a bill that wants to increase the penalties for juveniles. If it’s a serious and heinous crime, absolutely. In full frankness, I have no experience on the prosecutor’s side. I’ve been a private attorney my entire career…it’s never been a desire of mine to see people put in jail.

I don’t want to come across as soft on crime, but I would put a lot of my energy on preventing it from happening in the first place. If it did happen, obviously we would want to make sure that they’re incarcerated.

But the bill that’s in the making of coming down more heavily on juvenile offenders, I think it’s certainly worth supporting because there are situations where if you kill in cold blood, then you need to be tried as an adult.

New Mexico will also have a new governor in January. How would you work alongside them?

I’ve read my duties and responsibilities vis-à-vis the statute and, really, it’s very limited. You’re working side-by-side with the governor and you’re essentially doing what she instructs you to do.

I’ve tried very carefully to remain neutral to the extent that I can. Obviously, I’m a Republican, but I think that I could work well with either one of them.

The New Mexico Department of Justice has been highly critical of the Children, Youth and Families Department, including publishing a lengthy investigative report and suing the department over allegations its staff left a foster child at the U.S.-Mexico border. What steps will you take if elected to continue oversight of that agency?

We do a lot of adoptions here in our office. I can tell you that a lot of the (CYFD) employees are overworked. They’re understaffed. 

What I think is the current pattern of the current attorney general is you wait until it’s a significant problem and then you research it, you write about it and you file a lawsuit and you have a news conference. But is anything really happening to address the underlying issue?

I would be more involved almost immediately to make sure that some of these things were being addressed, in conjunction with what the governor’s dictates would be.

What makes you a better choice for AG than your opponent?

My approach has always been to do the right thing when no one’s looking.

We don’t need to continuously file lawsuits against our own agencies. I think it could be handled less costly and more efficiently. I’m just going to get in and focus on areas where I don’t want you to hear about me. I just want to come in and make a difference.

The current AG has joined weekly calls with other Democratic AGs across the nation to determine which multi-state lawsuits to join. Is that a practice you’d continue?

The New Mexico attorney general’s office is not like an unlimited, fully staffed agency. You just can’t do it all.

I wouldn’t be a part of that. I wouldn’t do it on the Republican side of it, either. My focus is: Let’s deal with the issues here in New Mexico.

The NMDOJ has also filed individual lawsuits against the federal government, including over unreleased Epstein files and allegations that the DEA let fentanyl cross into New Mexico. Would you continue to litigate those cases?

Yes, I would, but let’s keep politics out of it.

With regard to the Epstein files, you’ve got that happening right in New Mexico. In a perfect world, let’s take politics completely out of it. We’re not going to go after somebody that’s in a jet or that has any type of unrelated association to the abuse, including Trump…Let’s hold the perpetrators accountable, but let’s not make this a partisan issue.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez

Raúl Torrez first won election as attorney general in 2022, after a stint as Bernalillo County’s district attorney. Before that, he served as a White House fellow under former President Barack Obama and worked as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Torrez, whose father was a longtime federal prosecutor, began his career litigating child abuse cases.

After nearly four years in this role, he draws parallels between his early work and the recent cases that have largely come to define his time leading the New Mexico Department of Justice, such as lawsuits against the state’s troubled child welfare agency and against Meta, which have often focused on themes of abuse, neglect and exploitation.

“When I learned how much social media platforms generally, but Meta in particular, had become a breeding ground for that type of exploitation at scale, it really motivated me to do something about it,” he said.

What will be your top priority, if elected, for the New Mexico Department of Justice next year?

We have a lot of work to do in both modernizing our consumer protection and our laws that regulate big tech.

It is both engaging in impact litigation along both of those lines and protecting consumers and kids online, but also pushing policymakers to really step up and to update and modernize our statutory framework to better protect citizens.

If elected, what bills would you support in the 2027 legislative session?

It’s going to be the biggest modernization of not only our consumer protection law, but I think any state’s consumer protection law in the country, probably in the last 50 years.

New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act was passed in 1967 and hasn’t really been touched significantly. It doesn’t really address a lot of the harms that we see in the modern digital economy — surveillance pricing, data brokering, the way in which technology companies use asymmetric information to target and take advantage of consumers.

We’re also going to push for new authority to investigate civil rights and we’re deeply involved in the process of trying to redesign our child protective services and CYFD, based on the investigation that we did.

New Mexico will also have a new governor in January. How would you work alongside them?

I have a really good relationship with Secretary Haaland. I expect her to be the governor, and I think we’re going to have a very positive and constructive relationship.

I haven’t had a partner on the fourth floor to really lift up the work of the office…I look forward to the opportunity to kind of reset that dynamic and that relationship.

The New Mexico Department of Justice has been highly critical of the Children, Youth and Families Department, including publishing a lengthy investigative report and suing the department over allegations its staff left a foster child at the U.S.-Mexico border. What steps will you take if elected to continue oversight of that agency?

We need to strengthen the Office of the Child Advocate. There were a lot of amendments that were supported by the governor at the last minute that stripped a lot of the essential investigative infrastructure that the office was designed to have.

I also think that passing clear civil rights legislation to give us the power to better protect any violations of a child’s rights while in state custody will be very important. 

What is the most meaningful accomplishment of your first term as AG?

The litigation against Meta and the trial victory.

I think it’s added a lot to not only the ability of other states to secure their settlements, but it’s also put a lot more pressure on members of our Legislature and members of Congress to step up and act.

I’m also extremely proud of the work that we’ve done defending the state against the Trump administration. I think it’s 59 lawsuits — I’ve kind of lost track at this point — but we’ve recovered something to the order of $885 million and counting in proposed federal budget cuts.

Why have you made litigation against Meta a cornerstone of your term?

I got my start as a child abuse prosecutor.

I used to do this work on the front line, one defendant at a time. Now that I’m in this role, I have the ability to not just focus on one defendant at a time. I can go after the technological architecture that facilitates exploitation.

Your opponent has said you’ve been too slow to act when it comes to your involvement in cases that relate to CYFD, fentanyl trafficking and the Project Jupiter data center. How do you respond to that?

We took our time to do a comprehensive investigation and produced an over 200-page report and filed two lawsuits. I think we’ve been very aggressive and very detailed. When you’re going to wade into the dysfunction at the heart of an agency that complex, you have to get your facts right.

I think that’s exactly what we’ve done with respect to Project Jupiter. We have weighed in when the issues were ripe for our intervention. We, in our institutional capacity, have a role to play when the issues that came up with respect to the emergency water application and the air quality permit came up to the state. That was the opportunity for us to engage in those issues.

What we don’t do is circumvent the local governmental process from Santa Fe…I think it’s actually pretty unprecedented to have an attorney general side not with two state agencies, but with the two petitioners who have challenged two separate proceedings.