09/20/2026
Attorney General Raul Torrez is right to challenge expedited water permits for Project Jupiter. The OSE has has a pervasive pattern of skipping due process for powerful corporations, even when the courts have stepped in to correct the agency. The emergency permit granted to Project Jupiter shuts out affected communities from giving input while the corporation gets immediate access to water. This reeks of the past practice of granting "preliminary approval" in water leases that were detrimental to acequias.
The decision by the State Engineer to grant the emergency permit is part of a longer pattern of overappropriating New Mexico water and expediting water transfers for corporations. The basis of our system of water law is to protect existing water rights from new uses. The process to uphold those protections is to ensure that communities have a say in the water transfers that affect them.
Now is the time, more than ever, that we need a strong watch dog like AG Torrez. Furthermore, let's go in and fix our laws to stop the State Engineer from overcommitting our water at the expense of our communities, agriculture, and future generations.
Here is the op-ed by Torrez:
A recent op-ed in the Sept. 13 Sunday Journal argues that my office should stay silent while the Office of the State Engineer fast-tracks water for Project Jupiter, urging us to “let the state engineer do her job.” But deference to agency expertise is not a blank check, and the job the Legislature created for the state engineer means more than rubber-stamping applications for Big Tech. It means following the notice-and-hearing process state law requires for every New Mexican who depends on our water.
That process is exactly what got skipped here. The Office of the State Engineer approved a two-day “emergency” authorization letting Santa Teresa Capital repurpose an agricultural well to supply construction water for a data center project backed by some of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. Since April, that well has pumped more than 100 million gallons of water, and to date, no public hearing has been held. Months have passed, and although the water has now stopped flowing, the people who have a right to protest, to be heard and to make their case before a neutral decision-maker are still waiting.
This is not the first time I have raised this concern and, until the Legislature updates our water code, it will not be the last. In January 2023, in my very first formal opinion as attorney general, I told the Office of the State Engineer that its practice of issuing “preliminary” approvals, letting change-of-use applications proceed before or without the hearing state law requires, has no basis in the Water Use Lease Act or anywhere else in our water code. The emergency exception the Legislature actually wrote is narrow by design. It applies only to a genuine threat of crop loss or serious economic loss to an existing water use. It was never meant to let a well repurposed for a $165 billion industrial campus skip the line.
I have watched small farmers and acequia parciantes, people like my family, who have irrigated the same fields for generations, wait years for a hearing, while a well-lawyered, well-lobbied developer gets an answer in 48 hours. That’s not due process; that’s cronyism. It’s a system that rewards whoever can afford the best lawyers and the loudest lobbyists, at the expense of the people with the deepest roots in this land and the least capacity to fight a state agency in court.
But this is not a new story in New Mexico. For much of our territorial history, the Santa Fe Ring, a network of lawyers, politicians and speculators, used connections in the capital to strip land and water from Hispanic and Indigenous families who had worked it for generations. One of its leading figures even served as territorial attorney general, using this office to favor insiders in land grant rulings. But I will not let history repeat itself and remain silent while powerful interests use their connections to circumvent the law that protects our air, our water and our communities.
In his critique of my office’s challenge to this permit, John D’Antonio identifies himself as the former state engineer. But what he fails to mention is that it was his unlawful practice of granting “preliminary” approvals that routinely left farmers, ranchers and small communities without meaningful due process. He also curiously omits the fact that he now works in business development for a private engineering firm whose water-resources practice serves private developers.
But I don’t work for developers, lawyers or lobbyists — I work for the people of New Mexico. Whenever a state agency, a global corporation, or both acting together try to bend the rules, my office will stand with the small farmers, the acequias and every New Mexican who expects equal treatment under law. I’ll also keep pressing the Legislature to close the loopholes powerful interests have learned to exploit. D’Antonio and his clients may not like it, but that is the job, and I intend to keep doing it.
Raúl Torrez is attorney general of New Mexico.
