Arizona’s top two Democrats face huge decisions as the Trump administration unleashes ICE and Border Patrol on the streets of Phoenix — starting with how to handle growing federal presence in Arizona.
So far, Gov. Katie Hobbs has played it safe. Literally.
Hobbs has been asked about Phoenix becoming the next Minneapolis a half-dozen times in the past few weeks. She always answers with some variation of she doesn’t know what is going to happen, but she wants to make sure Arizonans are “safe.”
Attorney General Kris Mayes, on the other hand, isn’t holding back.
Whenever the topic of ICE goon squads comes up, she’s quick to call out their lawlessness in the harshest terms possible, including this week, when she said she’d understand if an Arizonan shot a masked, plainclothes agent who was hassling them.
The two Democratic leaders agree that the federal government can send in ICE at the Trump administration’s discretion. The U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause says the feds have the final say.
But their response to that reality could not be more different.
As we’ve seen in other states, the hands of state officials aren’t completely tied — they can use the power of their offices to push back against the dragnet-style enforcement.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker backed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the “unchecked federal agents” who “terrorized our communities,” and he signed an executive order creating a new accountability board to document alleged civil rights abuses by federal agents. His state’s Department of Human Rights is investigating landlords for housing discrimination after they allegedly tipped off the feds ahead of a raid of an apartment building.
Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz ordered Minnesota’s National Guard into a state of preparedness to support residents who are “exercising their Constitutional rights to express their disagreement with federal immigration enforcement policies and tactics.”
Standing up to President Donald Trump has consequences, both legally and politically.
If Hobbs were to follow that path, she might end up on the business end of a bogus federal investigation, like Walz is dealing with right now. And she could alienate the kind of swing voters that she’s counting on to win her reelection campaign.
But there’s certainly no shortage of ways that Hobbs could use her office to more forcefully stand up to the kind of Home Depot raids, street sweeps and mistaken arrests of even Native American residents that Arizona is already seeing.
She could even look to local officials in Arizona for tips on how to stand up to ICE.
The Tucson City Council is drafting an ordinance to block ICE and Border Patrol from using city-owned property to stage immigration sweeps.
Over in Pinal County, which is a lot less blue than Tucson, the county supervisors are trying to back out of a cooperation agreement with federal immigration agencies.
Playing it safe
Most of what Hobbs is saying sounds like muddled doublespeak attempting to please her progressive base, without offending conservative swing voters.
Her main talking point has been that she supports ICE coming to Arizona if it makes us “safer.” But she says she doesn’t think that’s what they’re doing with “indiscriminate roundups that gin up fear in communities.”
“My message to communities is we’re going to do everything we can to keep people safe, and I welcome additional law enforcement if it means our communities are safer,” Hobbs said during a visit to Tucson earlier this week.
The most strident she’s gotten is saying she’s talking with the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the National Guard about how to respond and keep communities safe and orderly.
“I certainly would not hesitate to use the National Guard to help ensure safety and orderliness in our communities if that needs to happen,” Hobbs told KTAR.
Last year, Hobbs vetoed the Arizona ICE Act, which would have forced every jurisdiction in the state to cooperate with ICE. And she said it was “very concerning” that ICE agents impersonated utility workers in Tucson to gain access to people’s houses.
But over and over again in recent weeks, Hobbs has dodged direct questions about whether she wants ICE squads to come to Phoenix, instead saying it was still “rumors and speculation.” At the same time, she still leans on her conversations with Trump officials as if they were reliable sources of information.
“We’ve been in contact with the administration. I can say that I have nothing to report about increased activity. We want to make sure we’re getting in front of rumors. I’m not gonna operate on rumors and speculation,” she said recently.
In a way, her waffling has put her to the right of Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who said he didn’t want ICE agents going on school campuses and disrupting classes.
The political calculus Hobbs is using has to do with winning over Republican voters. For example, read the following paragraph and think about whether that sounds like a Democratic or Republican governor.
“We’ve consistently picked up the slack for the federal government – racking up a tab of over seven hundred million dollars in border security expenses over the last five years. I made it clear to both the Biden and Trump Administrations that we expect to be paid back. Today, I’ll say it again: Arizona is tired of footing the bill for the federal government’s inaction.”
That was Hobbs during her recent State of the State Address. She was talking about the federal government repaying Arizona more than $700 million the state spent on border security since 2021.
Incidentally, that money is key to balancing Hobbs’ budget proposal. In order to get it, she’d need to persuade the Trump administration not to give it all to Texas.
And cooperating with federal immigration agents is likely one of the qualifying factors for Arizona to get that money, as Republican Sen. John Kavanagh noted during the governor’s budget presentation to the Legislature this week.
“It's general knowledge, I believe, that the Trump administration looks more favorably in answering requests from those states which cooperate with internal immigration enforcement. So perhaps you might ask the governor to consider getting some of our state police 287(g) cross-trained so we can join the fight against illegal immigration,” Kavanagh told Hobbs’ budget chief.
Those are the types of issues a governor has to think about.
Mayes, on the other hand, doesn’t have to worry about balancing a budget and keeping the federal dollars flowing, compromising with GOP lawmakers or working with federal officials on myriad issues.
As Arizona’s top law enforcement agent, she’s worried about public safety and unconstitutional policing.
Guns-a-blazing
Mayes has never been much for parsing words. But during a lengthy interview with 12News’ Brahm Resnik this week, she came out guns-a-blazing.
While Hobbs refuses to comment on the “rumors and speculation” that ICE is ramping up its operations in Arizona, Mayes says we’re far past the rumor stage.
How does she know?
She didn’t need to ask the Trump administration. She just looked out her window.
The ICE office in Phoenix is right next to the AG’s office, and she and her staff have watched more ICE agents arrive in recent weeks, along with two truckloads of unmarked and marked cars. Not to mention the many documented cases of ICE descending on Phoenix streets.
Mayes also watched as masked ICE and Border Patrol agents rampaged through Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte and Minneapolis. That includes watching an ICE agent shoot a mom three times in the chest, and then call her a “fucking bitch,” an incident Mayes brought up in her interview with Resnik.
So what is Mayes going to do?
Well, she already learned a trick or two from officials in other states, like launching an online portal so regular people can upload videos and photos of misconduct by federal agents abusing their authority.
In fact, she’s imploring Arizonans to film ICE and report them to her agency.
And she said she’d prosecute ICE agents for assault, murder, unlawful imprisonment or anything that is “outside the scope of the regular duties of a federal agent.”
Simply put: “You cannot murder somebody in the state of Arizona,” Mayes said.
She even posted a warning directly to ICE agents on the AG’s website:
“As Arizona’s top law enforcement officer, I want to remind all federal agents of my expectations for them in our state: respect the law, do not mask, deescalate violence when possible and stay OUT of schools, hospitals, and churches.”
But the part of her interview with Resnik that really stood out was her comments about how gun-owning Arizonans can take advantage of Arizona’s Republican-backed “Stand Your Ground” law if a masked person in an unmarked vehicle tries to haul them away.
“If somebody comes at me wearing a mask and I can’t tell whether they’re a police officer, what am I supposed to do?” Mayes said.
And in an interview on KTAR’s “Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos” yesterday, she doubled down, saying federal agents are trashing our constitutional rights and the Second Amendment is the last line of defense against a tyrannical government.
“Let’s go back to our founding of this country, which is we were afraid and fearful and wanted to prevent the overreach of a tyrannical government led by a king,’ she said.
And while she said that she doesn’t want anyone using lethal force, she noted that it is Arizonans’ right to shoot and kill someone breaking into their home or car without identifying themselves as law enforcement.
“If you are really sure that they are ICE and they present a badge or they present identification, then I would not recommend using lethal force against them,” she said.
The comments earned her swift condemnation from police and Republican lawmakers, who accused her of recklessly stoking violence against law enforcement.
“This framing is deeply troubling and dangerous. Law enforcement officers at every level including state, local, and federal agencies do not always wear traditional uniforms,” the Arizona Police Association said in a press release.
And while Mayes’ comments might have been perfectly acceptable conservative talking points under, say, an Obama administration, they almost certainly aren’t helping her reelection chances in a state that Trump has won two-out-of-three times.
But for Mayes, unlike Hobbs, that factor doesn’t seem to be part of the equation.