Judge temporarily halts New Mexico governor’s gun restrictions in Albuquerque

A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily halted a 30-day order from New Mexico’s governor suspending the open and concealed carrying of guns in the Albuquerque area that had sparked bipartisan condemnation.

The executive order, which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued on Friday in response to recent shootings in the area, had drawn extensive blowback from the state’s elected Republicans for violating gun rights and also some Democrats and gun control advocates who questioned its constitutionality.

Local law enforcement officials said they would not enforce the order, and the state’s Democratic attorney general, Raúl Torrez, had written to Lujan Grisham to declare that he could not legally defend it while also questioning its efficacy. She based the ban on a public health emergency she’d declared one day prior over gun violence.

During the hearing, U.S. District Judge David H. Urias, an appointee of President Joe Biden who took his seat on the bench last year, indicated that the numerous Supreme Court precedents on the Second Amendment suggested that the governor’s order would cause irreparable harm to citizens seeking to exercise their gun rights. Thus, he said, he had to issue a temporary strike of the ban — a move that does not rule on its merits.

“To be honest with you, I think you have kind of a hard road here to get up,” Urias told Holly Agajanian, the attorney for the governor’s office defending the rule.

In briefs and during Wednesday’s court session, lawyers for the various gun rights groups argued that Lujan Grisham and her administration went far beyond constitutional powers in issuing the order.

“The Second Amendment has no exception. It has no part of it that says as long as the state governor can issue an emergency, you’re allowed to take our citizens’ firearms,” Jason Bowles, an attorney representing the National Association for Gun Rights, said during the hearing. “There’s no historical evidence of that. There’s no support for it.”

On numerous occasions, the lawyers cite in their argument as precedent New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, a 2022 Supreme Court case that in effect boosted open-carry laws and specified that Second Amendment restrictions must mesh consistently with historical rules on firearms in the country. The New Mexico order goes beyond these prescriptions, many of the lawyers argued.

Criticizing the Bruen decision, Agajanian said that Lujan Grisham was acting out of an emergency and that the court should let the 30-day order play out to see what happened.

“The governor rejects the notion that she can’t even try to keep the streets safe,” Agajanian said. “She rejects the notion that other people in this city have lesser rights than other people.”

Last Wednesday, Froylan Villegas, an 11-year-old boy in Albuquerque was fatally shot in a suspected road rage episode — an event that catalyzed Lujan Grisham’s eventual decision to launch the health emergency and temporary gun ban.

In a statement after the judge blocked her directive, the governor said the decision “recognized the significant problem of gun violence in this state.”

“I refuse to be resigned to the status quo. As governor, I see the pain of families who lost their loved ones to gun violence every single day, and I will never stop fighting to prevent other families from enduring these tragedies,” Lujan Grisham said in the statement. “Over the past four days, I’ve seen more attention on resolving the crisis of gun violence than I have in the past four years.”

The court will hold a hearing to evaluate the merits of arguments on the rule on Oct. 3, Urias said on Wednesday. The temporary restraining order will extend until then, even though it would normally be limited to 14 days. The extension was accepted by both parties because counsel on both sides did not have availability for a court date within that two-week time frame.

The judge specifically enjoined two sections of the executive order that restricted gun use. Other parts of the governor’s order not in contention included instruction for various state agencies to analyze the sale and use of guns in New Mexico and monitor the presence of illegal substances such as fentanyl in the wastewater.

Six Republican senators — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tom Cotton of Arkansas — wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday asking him to step in and stop the order, which they called an “unconstitutional power grab.”

“This is a chilling action,” the senators wrote, “and it is imperative that your Department act immediately to show that this kind of unconstitutional abuse will not be tolerated in New Mexico or anywhere else in the United States.”