Arizona's Democratic governor starts state partnership with the Trump administration on immigration
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order Tuesday directing state and local law enforcement agencies to partner with Customs and Border Protection to prevent border crimes such as drug and human trafficking.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order Tuesday directing state and local law enforcement agencies to partner with Customs and Border Protection to prevent border crimes such as drug and human trafficking, making Hobbs one of the first (if not the first) Democratic governors to partner with the Trump administration on immigration.
Immigration was top of mind for Arizona voters during the most recent presidential election, with about one-fifth of voters saying it was their top issue, according to the NBC News exit poll. Those voters broke near-unanimously for President Donald Trump.
Many Democratic governors, including JB Pritzker of Illinois and Kathy Hochul of New York, have bucked the Trump administration’s early efforts to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in American history — a top campaign promise of Trump’s.
But Hobbs is in a unique situation: While other border states lean either solidly Republican or Democratic, Arizona is the only border state considered to be a presidential battleground.
Trump won it by 187,382 votes (or 5.5 percentage points), flipping it after Joe Biden’s 2020 win. Arizona voters last year also approved Proposition 314, which made it a state crime for noncitizens to enter the state directly from the southern border at any points besides official ports of entry.
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