At her Wednesday morning press conference, a day after the Senate approved legislation dubbed the “Spy Law,” President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected claims that security authorities will be able to access citizens’ personal data, including on their cell phones, without first obtaining a judicial warrant.
She also declared that the federal government “is not going to spy on anyone.”
Her remarks came after various politicians, non-government organizations and media outlets stated that security authorities will be able to access citizens’ personal data without obtaining a court order.
The National Action Party’s leader in the Senate, Senator Ricardo Anaya, asserted in a social media post on Tuesday that the ruling Morena party “consolidated the #SpyGovernment: geolocation, access to your health, bank and biometric data without a judge.”
The Network in Defense of Digital Rights, a non-governmental organization, said on social media on Tuesday that the Senate had granted the government “permission to spy.”
“Legalizing surveillance and access to our [personal] information without controls, judicial orders or any safeguard, through public and private databases, is an abuse of human rights,” the organization said.
Sheinbaum denies any intent of government to spy on citizens
During her Q&A session with reporters, Sheinbaum called for the front page of the Wednesday edition of the Reforma newspaper to be displayed on a screen behind her.
A headline in the newspaper referred to opposition parties’ warning that a “spy state” will be created as the result of the Mexican Congress’ approval on Tuesday of the National Investigation and Intelligence System Law.
“The opposition in the Congress yesterday accused [the ruling party] Morena and its allies of imposing a ‘spy state,’ through laws that authorize security and law enforcement authorities to request the geolocation of citizens without a court order,” stated the opening sentence of Reforma’s report.
“They also questioned the authority granted to authorities, in the Investigation and Intelligence Law, to have access to any public or private record with useful data to ‘create intelligence products,'” the report continued.
Senate grants Security Ministry broad data access powers, sparking ‘police state’ fears
After reading out the report’s headline, Sheinbaum requested that Article 16 of the Mexican Constitution be displayed, and reminded reporters that “no law can violate the Constitution.”
The president read out two sections of Article 16, with which she sought to refute claims from opposition politicians and others that the government will be able to access people’s personal data and track their location without first obtaining a court order.
The sections she read out — as translated in English-language copies of the Mexican Constitution available on the websites of the Organization of American States and Mexico’s Electoral Tribunal — are as follows:
“Private communications shall not be breached. The law shall punish any action against the liberty and privacy of such communications, except when they are voluntarily given by one of the individuals involved in them. A judge shall assess the implications of such communications, provided they contain information related to the perpetration of a crime. Communications that violate confidentiality established by law shall not be admitted in any case.”
“Only the federal judicial authority can authorize telephone tapping and interception of private communications, at the request of the appropriate federal authority or the State Public Prosecution Service. The authority that makes request shall present in writing the legal causes for the request, describing therein the kind of interception required, the individuals subjected to interception and the term thereof. The federal judicial authority cannot authorize telephone tapping nor interception of communications in the following cases: a) when the matters involved are of electoral, fiscal, commercial, civil, labor or administrative nature, b) communications between defendant and his attorney.”
“It’s what the laws say, it’s what the Criminal Code says,” Sheinbaum said.
“There can only be an intervention, a GPS location, etcetera, under court order, unless it’s a missing person, a kidnapping, where the information is requested directly to the telephone company in order to attend in an extraordinary way to a case of this type,” she said.
“… It’s false, it’s a lie that the laws approved [by the Senate on Tuesday] have to do with the state spying. False, they’re lying deliberately,” Sheinbaum added.
#Lamañanera | 📢 “Es falso, es mentira, el gobierno no va a espiar a nadie como nos espiaron a nosotros”, afirmó la presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum (@Claudiashein) sobre la reforma de Telecomunicaciones. #MananeraDelPueblo #Mañanera pic.twitter.com/qwfBUcfNps
— OSCAR MARIO BETETA (@MarioBeteta) July 2, 2025
“The government is not going to spy on anyone, like they spied on us,” she said, referring to alleged espionage carried out by previous governments, including the 2012-18 administration of former president Enrique Peña Nieto.
“In fact, I believe that all of us here were spied on in one way or another, because all of the colleagues have been members of the [Morena party] movement for many years,” said Sheinbaum, who was joined by various federal and state officials at her morning press conference.
“So we were all spied on [but] we don’t spy on anybody, nobody, absolutely nobody,” she said.
“What we want is to build a safe country, in peace,” Sheinbaum said.
In accordance with the constitution and Mexico’s laws, “a telephone intervention can only be approved by a judge,” she said.
“At no time is anyone being spied on. Let that be clear,” Sheinbaum said.
By Mexico News Daily chief staff writer Peter Davies ([email protected])
