Meta New Mexico Civil Penalty: State Wants $40 Billion, Meta Says $1.53 Billion Is the Constitutional Limit

The Meta New Mexico civil penalty is now a fight over a single number: the State asks Judge Francis Mathew for $35 billion to $40 billion for Meta's roughly 43.9 million willful violations of the Unfair Practices Act, while Meta's latest brief says anything above about $1.53 billion would be an unconstitutionally excessive fine. Reduced to a per-violation rate, the gap is roughly $35 against roughly $800 to $900, and Judge Mathew has said he expects to decide later in October 2026.

That per-violation framing is what the coverage has largely missed, and it is how the court will have to think about the problem. Section 57-12-11 of the New Mexico statutes does not tell a judge to pick a total. It tells the judge to set a penalty "not exceeding" $5,000 for each willful violation. Every number on the table, from Meta's floor to the State's ceiling, is a choice of dollars per violation multiplied by a count the jury has already fixed. What follows sets out each side's position, converts it into that unit, and walks through the doctrine and the comparable penalties the court is likely to weigh.

What is Meta arguing about the New Mexico civil penalty?

Meta's written position, reported by Law.com on October 9 and by MediaPost on October 14, 2026, asks Judge Mathew to impose no more than about $1.53 billion. MediaPost described the proposal as a range running from about $154 million to $1.54 billion. The small difference at the top of the range ($1.53 billion against $1.54 billion) appears to reflect rounding in the reporting rather than two separate proposals, and the brief itself has not been posted publicly.

The brief makes three main arguments:

• Excessive fines. Meta argues that a $35 billion to $40 billion penalty would violate both the federal and the New Mexico constitutional bans on excessive fines, and calls the request "grossly disproportional" to what the jury found. That phrase comes straight from the Supreme Court's test for the Excessive Fines Clause.
• No proof of injury. Meta says the State never proved that any New Mexico resident was actually harmed, or even actually misled, by the statements at issue. At the hearing its lawyers added that the trial evidence did not show Meta sold user data.
• Mismatch with the trial theory. According to Courthouse News, Meta argued at the hearing that the size of the penalty the State wants does not match the conduct the State focused on at trial. On this view, a handful of executive statements and blog posts is being multiplied by the whole state's Facebook audience.

The brief also marks a retreat from Meta's own number at the October 1 hearing. There, Meta attorney Matt Nicholson proposed setting the per-violation amount so that the total would fall between $345 million and $3.45 billion. He told the court that even that range would be "constitutionally problematic." The written cap of about $1.53 billion is nearly $2 billion below the top of that spoken range. This is a deliberate move: Meta is now anchoring the court near the bottom of its own earlier proposal.

What penalty is New Mexico asking for against Meta?

At the October 1, 2026 hearing in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, special prosecutor Randi McGinn asked the court for $35 billion to $40 billion. Several outlets reported the mechanics in slightly different ways. Bloomberg Law described a request to apply the $5,000 statutory maximum and then cut the total to the $35 billion to $40 billion range. Courthouse News described a request to reduce the penalty to about 20% of what the verdict would support.

Under either description, the State has already conceded something important. McGinn told the court that applying the full $5,000 to every violation would produce a penalty too large to satisfy the due process protections of the US Constitution. She argued that $35 billion to $40 billion was large enough to affect Meta's stock price while still meeting that constitutional standard. As a result, the State has given up the $219.5 billion figure that dominated the September headlines, and the fight is now about a range the State itself regards as constitutionally limited.

The request is also lower than the figure Meta disclosed before trial. Meta's second-quarter 2026 Form 10-Q told investors that the Attorney General intended to seek up to $62.85 billion. At $5,000 a violation, that is the equivalent of about 12.6 million violations, far below the 43.9 million the jury found. Courthouse News reported that the State also wants an injunction against similar practices, and that Attorney General Raúl Torrez has said any money awarded would go to a fund for the State's education system.

The Meta New Mexico civil penalty, per violation

The table below divides each proposal by the New Mexico Department of Justice's count of 43,899,725 violations. The per-violation figures are this publication's arithmetic, rounded to the cent. The totals come from the sources listed.

Proposal	Who / when	Total	Implied rate per violation
Statutory ceiling	NMSA 1978, Section 57-12-11	about $219.5 billion	$5,000.00
Pre-trial disclosure	Meta Form 10-Q, Q2 2026 (State's intended ask)	$62.85 billion	about $1,431.67
State's request, top	McGinn, October 1, 2026 hearing	$40 billion	about $911.17
State's request, bottom	McGinn, October 1, 2026 hearing	$35 billion	about $797.27
Meta at hearing, top	Nicholson, October 1, 2026	$3.45 billion	about $78.59
Meta brief, top	Reported October 9 and 14, 2026	about $1.53-1.54 billion	about $34.85-35.08
Meta at hearing, bottom	Nicholson, October 1, 2026	$345 million	about $7.86
Meta brief, bottom	MediaPost, October 14, 2026	about $154 million	about $3.51
Child-safety case (for scale)	Separate NM jury, March 2026	$375 million	$5,000 on about 75,000 violations

Laid out this way, the dispute looks less extreme than the headlines suggest. The State is asking for less than a fifth of the statutory maximum per violation. Meta is offering less than 1% of it. A court that wants to show it exercised real discretion, rather than simply adopting one side's number, has a great deal of room between $35 and $800.

The last row helps explain why the gap exists. In March 2026, a different Santa Fe jury in the State's child-safety case imposed the full $5,000 rate, but on a count of about 75,000 violations, which came to $375 million. Together with the $567 million abatement fund ordered in August, that case has produced about $942 million. Meta has filed post-judgment motions in that case and proposed a $1.8 billion bond to pause collection. The Cambridge Analytica verdict involves a count almost 600 times larger, so the per-violation rate matters far more.

How did the jury count 43 million violations?

The count does not reflect 43.9 million separate statements. The jury reviewed 29 public statements by Meta and its leadership, mostly about users' control over their data, about how evenly content rules were enforced, and about the investigation Facebook promised after Cambridge Analytica became public. It found 26 of them misleading. Courthouse News reported that the jury then assigned an audience to each misleading statement: about 2.1 million violations for each statement carried in major news outlets and about 1.4 million for each statement made through Meta's own channels. Those figures are roughly the size of New Mexico's population and of its Facebook audience.

That method is the real pressure point in the case, because the count drives the total far more than the rate does. If a statement is treated as one violation for every resident who could have seen it, a single interview becomes a seven-figure count. Meta's argument that the State never proved anyone was actually misled is at bottom an attack on that multiplier. For now, though, the count is the jury's finding. Judge Mathew's discretion runs to the rate, and any challenge to the count itself belongs in post-trial motions and on appeal.

What is the maximum civil penalty under the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act?

The maximum is $5,000 for each willful violation, and it is the only fixed number in the Meta New Mexico civil penalty dispute. Section 57-12-11 allows the attorney general, in an action under Section 57-12-8, to petition for a civil penalty "not exceeding" that amount once the court finds a willful unfair or deceptive practice. The statute sets a ceiling, not a fixed price, and it gives no list of factors. That leaves the size of the penalty to the trial judge's discretion, subject to constitutional limits.

Two features of the statute matter here. First, willfulness is the gateway: without a willfulness finding, a category of statements cannot support any penalty at all, which makes those findings the obvious target on appeal. Second, the penalty goes to the State, not to consumers. That is why the Attorney General can promise the money to an education fund, and why this case has none of the claims-administration costs of a Class Action.

Does the Excessive Fines Clause limit civil penalties against companies?

Yes, at least in principle, and that is why Meta's brief chooses its words carefully. The Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment under Timbs v. Indiana (2019). In United States v. Bajakajian (1998), the Supreme Court held that a fine violates the Clause if it is "grossly disproportional" to the gravity of the offense. New Mexico's own constitution, in Article II, Section 13, separately provides that excessive fines shall not be imposed. Meta is invoking both.

Whether a civil penalty paid to a state counts as a "fine" depends on whether it serves at least partly to punish. A per-violation penalty payable to the State for willful deception is hard to describe as anything else, so the State is unlikely to win by arguing the Clause does not apply. The real dispute is over proportionality, and here Meta is borrowing from the due process cases on Punitive Damages, BMW of North America v. Gore (1996) and State Farm v. Campbell (2003). Those cases weigh how reprehensible the conduct was, how the sanction compares with the actual or potential harm, and what civil penalties apply to comparable conduct. Meta's "no proof of injury" point is aimed directly at the harm factor.

The State's answers are just as clear. The legislature set the $5,000 rate, so a penalty within the statute already reflects a legislative judgment about proportionality. The jury found the conduct willful. And a court that sets a rate far below the maximum is doing the kind of case-specific weighing due process requires. McGinn's 20% framing was designed to show exactly that kind of restraint.

How other state per-violation penalties have landed

The most useful precedent is a California consumer-protection case built on the same structure: a per-violation penalty applied to a large count of marketing communications.

Case	Forum	Structure	Outcome
People v. Johnson & Johnson (pelvic mesh)	San Diego Superior Court; Cal. Ct. App. (2022)	UCL and False Advertising Law penalties: $1,250 on 153,351 and 121,844 marketing communications	$343.99 million at trial; reduced to about $302 million on appeal after spoken communications were excluded; US Supreme Court left the award intact in 2023
New Mexico v. Meta (child safety)	NM First Judicial District Court	UPA penalties: $5,000 on about 75,000 violations	$375 million penalty plus $567 million abatement (about $942 million); post-judgment motions pending
Texas v. Meta (biometrics)	Texas state court	Statutory privacy claims	$1.4 billion settlement (2024)
Texas v. Google (biometrics, location, Incognito)	Texas state court	Statutory privacy claims	$1.375 billion settlement (2025)
New Mexico v. Meta (Cambridge Analytica)	NM First Judicial District Court	UPA penalties on about 43.9 million violations	Pending: $154 million to $40 billion on the table

The Johnson & Johnson case is the clearest guide. The California Court of Appeal accepted a per-communication count, rejected the excessive-fines challenge, and pointed out that the penalty was less than 1% of the company's net worth. It reduced the award only because of a counting problem, not a rate problem. A New Mexico court looking for a precedent that supports large but restrained per-violation penalties will find one there. A court looking for a reason to trim the count will find one too.

The two Texas settlements matter for a different reason. They show what large platforms have been willing to pay voluntarily in state privacy enforcement, at roughly $1.4 billion each. Meta's proposed cap of about $1.53 billion sits just above that figure, which is unlikely to be a coincidence.

When will the judge decide the Meta New Mexico civil penalty?

Judge Mathew has told the parties he expects to rule on the Meta New Mexico civil penalty later in October 2026. Reuters and the Associated Press reported the timing after the October 1 hearing, and no specific date has been confirmed in the public record.

Date	Event
2021	New Mexico files suit (State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. D-101-CV-2021-00132)
September 25, 2026	Jury verdict: 26 of 29 statements misleading; about 43.9 million willful violations
October 1, 2026	Penalty hearing; State seeks $35-40 billion; Meta proposes $345 million to $3.45 billion
October 9 and 14, 2026	Meta brief reported, seeking no more than about $1.53 billion
Later in October 2026	Expected ruling on the per-violation rate and any injunction
After judgment	Post-trial motions; appeal expected, as Meta has signaled

Expect the appeal to focus on three issues: whether the evidence supports the willfulness findings, whether the exposure-count method is valid, and whether the chosen rate is proportional. The child-safety case, which is further along, will probably reach the appellate courts first, and whatever they say about New Mexico's penalty provision will carry over to this case.

What it means for attorneys general, defense counsel and the plaintiffs' bar

For state attorneys general: Even at Meta's own number, a single state with about 2.1 million residents is looking at a penalty above $1.5 billion for public statements made by executives. Parens patriae enforcement under a per-violation statute avoids every obstacle that has worn down private consumer litigation: no Class Certification, no Rule 23 Predominance fight, and no Arbitration Agreement to enforce, because the State never agreed to Facebook's terms. The State's 20% concession may become a template: claim the maximum, then offer a principled reduction so the court can adopt it as a reasoned exercise of discretion.

For defense counsel: The lesson from Meta's position is that the count, more than the rate, has to be fought at trial. Once a jury has turned 26 statements into 43.9 million violations, the defense is left arguing about cents and dollars per violation. Requests for jury instructions that tie violations to actual exposure or reliance, rather than potential audience, are where this case was largely decided.

For plaintiffs' firms and mass-claims practitioners: The same arithmetic drives private per-violation claims under statutes such as the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. It also drives the settlement value of a Mass Arbitration, where companies face thousands of individual statutory claims and the related filing fees. Courts that accept a proportionality ceiling on a sovereign's per-violation penalty will find it easier to apply similar reasoning to aggregated private statutory damages. Where the rate falls in Santa Fe will be cited in arguments about Claim Value well beyond New Mexico.

For investors and insurers: A Meta New Mexico civil penalty anywhere in Meta's proposed range is easily absorbed. A penalty in the State's range is not trivial even for Meta, which is exactly why McGinn tied her request to the stock price. Directors and officers and general liability insurers should note that the conduct at issue is executive public statements, a category many policies treat differently from data-security incidents.

FAQ

How much will Meta have to pay New Mexico in the Cambridge Analytica case?

No amount has been set yet. Judge Francis Mathew will choose a per-violation penalty of up to $5,000 for about 43.9 million violations. The proposals in front of him range from Meta's roughly $154 million to $1.53 billion up to the State's $35 billion to $40 billion.

What is the maximum civil penalty under the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act?

Section 57-12-11 caps the civil penalty at $5,000 per willful violation, payable to the State on the attorney general's petition. Applied to the jury's count, that produces a theoretical ceiling of about $219.5 billion, which neither side is defending.

Why does Meta say the penalty would be unconstitutional?

Meta argues that $35 billion to $40 billion would be "grossly disproportional" and violate both the federal Excessive Fines Clause and Article II, Section 13 of the New Mexico Constitution. It points to the State's failure to prove that any resident was harmed or actually misled.

How did the jury reach 43 million violations?

The jury found 26 of 29 Meta statements misleading. It then counted each misleading statement once for every New Mexican in its likely audience: about 2.1 million per statement in major news outlets and about 1.4 million per statement on Meta's own channels, according to Courthouse News.

When will the judge rule on the Meta penalty, and can Meta appeal?

Judge Mathew said he expects to rule later in October 2026. Meta has signaled it will appeal any judgment, and post-trial motions and an appeal to the New Mexico appellate courts are expected to follow.