On the New Mexico Legislature’s opening day Jan. 21, climate justice protesters blockaded the street in front of the Roundhouse, demanding state lawmakers take immediate climate action.

Demonstrators parked vehicles on Old Santa Fe Trail, while a crowd of young people painted a clock on the pavement to show the urgency of the climate crisis and demand protection for stolen, sacred lands and of their futures.

The group escalated to a blockade after disrupting the governor’s State of the State address in 2024, and staging a die-in inside the capitol rotunda in 2023.

Protesters included members of YUCCA, Pueblo Action Alliance, Southwest Organizing Project, the Santa Fe Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine and students from United World College in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

YUCCA Policy Campaign Manager Ennedith López said since her organization was founded six years ago, lawmakers have largely ignored climate and environmental justice. Her group plans to support legislation focusing on human rights, housing, and specific proposals creating a one-mile buffer zone preventing oil and gas operations around schools, day cares, parks and playgrounds, and limiting ozone air pollution.

YUCCA plans to oppose Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s strategic water supply proposal, López said. That program would receive $75 million under a bill sponsored by Rep. Susan Herrera (D-Embudo) that would make the state government a middleman to solicit projects to develop treatments for salty water deep underground or oil and gas wastewater, and to create rules to regulate those projects.

“Knowing that there isn’t science to back safety for human consumption or even simply the Earth, it’s just too risky of an investment for our communities,” López said.

Today’s protest follows yesterday’s executive order from President Donald Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. Gov Lujan Grisham, co-chair of the United States Climate Alliance, yesterday released a letter with Co-Chair New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reiterating the Alliance’s commitment to its climate goals: “This is not the first time we’ve responded to this challenge in the U.S,” the letter noted. “Our coalition was launched after the President’s decision to withdraw our country from the Paris Agreement back in 2017. Since then, our reach, resolve, and impact have only grown.”

Climate change legislation during this year’s session includes The Clear Horizons Act, which would codify Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 2019 executive order to reduce 2005 level emissions by at least 45% by 2030. The bill would set the goals of reducing emissions by 50% by 2040 and 100% by 2050, and charge the Environmental Improvement Board with inventorying progress towards the goals.