In Arizona, an old immigration debate returns

On a spring morning in 2010, thousands of pro-immigrant protesters flooded downtown Phoenix. They waved American flags and Mexican flags. Some, like a young girl in a stroller, held handwritten signs: MOMMY, WHY IS MY SKIN COLOR A CRIME? By some estimates, there were 20,000 people there; by others, over 100,000. Some had traveled from as far as Louisiana and Rhode Island to participate. As they marched through downtown and reached the Arizona State Capitol, the mayor of Phoenix, Phil Gordon, greeted them. “Welcome to the site of the next civil-rights movement,” he declared.
Weeks earlier, Arizona’s governor signed SB1070, dubbed the “show me your papers” law. At the time, it was deemed the country’s toughest bill on illegal immigration: it made it a misdemeanor for immigrants to be in Arizona without carrying proper documentation at all times, and it empowered local law enforcement to detain people they suspected to be in the country illegally. The bill’s critics, like those who protested in Phoenix that May day, said it would unfairly target Hispanics and encourage racial profiling. “I thought the government is more noble, more fair here,” one naturalized migrant from Mexico, midway through the march, told the Los Angeles Times.
As the bill wound its way through the Arizona legislature, it garnered national and international attention. Boycotts against Arizona companies were organized. Protests erupted in 70 cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Boston. Latino celebrities spoke up against the law, one after another: Shakira, Ricky Martin, Gloria Estefan. A U.S. congressman was arrested while leading a protest outside of the White House. The Phoenix Suns, in an act of solidarity with the Hispanic community, wore jerseys that read LOS SUNS.
The bill’s proponents deemed it a necessary measure to curb the flow of illegal immigration into the state: Phoenix had garnered the reputation of being the country’s “kidnapping capital,” linked to illegal narcotics and human smuggling across the border. Arizona’s undocumented population had grown fivefold in the two decades since 1990. The high-profile murder of an Arizona border rancher added fuel to the fire.
Eventually, after the protests subsided, much of the law’s teeth were knocked out. A district court blocked key provisions from going into effect; later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that several parts of the bill were preempted by federal law. A year later, Russell Pearce, the state senator who was the bill’s lead proponent, became the first legislator in Arizona history to be recalled. Arizona’s immigrant population, its growth stunted during the SB1070 era, began to increase again. A generation of Latino lawmakers took office across the state. Arizona shifted from being a deep-red state to purple. The age of anti-immigrant legislation, it seemed, was in the rearview.
This fall will determine whether that is true. In November, Arizonans will once again vote on a strict immigration ballot measure — one that opponents call “SB1070 2.0.” The measure, if passed, would make illegally crossing the border a state crime and toughen punishments for selling fentanyl. Like SB1070, it empowers local law enforcement to arrest and jail unauthorized migrants, renewing fears among its critics about how it could lead to racial profiling.
“We definitely feel like it’s a return to (SB1070), which is very problematic,” said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum.
SB1070 faced widespread opposition. This time, 14 years later, the ballot measure has widespread support. A recent poll from Noble Predictive Insights shows that nearly two-thirds of Arizona voters, including a majority of Democrats, plan to support the measure. A legal challenge to the measure’s constitutionality was tossed out. Few protests and no nationwide boycotts have accompanied the bill. The activist groups that would dedicate resources to opposing it are overextended between the presidential race, a U.S. Senate election and a high-profile abortion ballot measure. “I think it’s going to pass,” Yasser Sanchez, a Mesa immigration attorney, said. “Groups don’t have money to oppose it right now.”
What changed between 2010 and now? Why did a tough-on-immigration bill garner massive opposition then, but a bill with some similar elements enjoys majority support now? Perhaps the shift isn’t exclusive to Arizona: Americans, at large, are undergoing a major transformation on how they view immigrants and immigration.
Public opinion on immigration policy fluctuates, but for much of the 21st century, Americans have regarded immigration — and its benefits to society — either positively or with indifference. But in recent years, as illegal border crossings reached record levels, public perception has undergone a notable shift. Half of Americans, including 42% of Democrats, favor mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants, according to an Axios/Harris survey. (That was a fringe view in 2016 exit polls.) A majority of Americans now think immigrants today have “worse character” than immigrants 50 years ago did, per the same survey.
Gallup’s polling lays this out clearly: a larger share of Americans want to reduce immigration now than at any time since 2011, a month after the September 11 attacks. When asked if immigration should be kept at its present level, increased or decreased, a majority of Americans — 55% — say it should be decreased, up from 28% in May 2020. Only 16% say it should be increased.
This change has been felt acutely in Arizona. “You’re seeing the same type of mood in Arizona, because the border issue has been an issue for two decades, and whether it’s Republicans or whether it’s Democrats, no one’s solved it,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix-based pollster. In the August New York Times/Siena College poll, Arizona voters were more likely than voters in any other battleground state to say immigration is their top issue. (Arizona is the only battleground state on the southern border.) The same was true of its May poll.
But even Arizonans wouldn’t have bitten on a law that was too draconian. That’s the calculation state Sen. Ken Bennett made, at least: As recently as 2022, Arizona voters decided to extend in-state tuition to Dreamers — individuals who came to the U.S. illegally as children. When the Secure the Border Act made its way through the state senate this spring, it included a provision that would allow for the deportation of those same Dreamers, who were protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Republicans, who hold a one-seat majority in the state Senate, needed Bennett’s vote; he demanded that the DACA language be removed. “That this would somehow be retroactively applied against DACA individuals, to me, was blatantly unconstitutional, because both the U.S. and Arizona constitutions prohibit ex post facto law,” Bennett told me.
Bennett also pushed to soften the penalties in the bill, and to ensure local law enforcement was only detaining migrants at the border, not conducting raids throughout the state. The DACA language was struck, and other parts were massaged; the bill’s final language met Bennett’s approval, and the resolution passed the Senate with all 16 Republicans in favor, and all 14 Democrats opposed.
By Bennett’s interpretation, the law, as currently written, can only be enforced by police who literally witness an illegal border crossing, either in person or by recording, “as opposed to the SB1070 thing from a decade ago, where it was kind of a, ‘stop anybody that looks illegal and ask them if they have papers,’” Bennett said. “That’s not what this is about.”
The bill’s opponents do not think that is good enough. During a heated discussion in May, state Sen. Anna Hernandez, a Democrat representing Phoenix, asked Bennett whether law enforcement officials could send video surveillance footage to police officers in other parts of the state, empowering them to find undocumented immigrants in their communities. Bennett, in response, said he didn’t think that is how “law enforcement works,” the Arizona Mirror reported, though he admitted no geographical limit was added to the bill.
That makes some lawmakers nervous. One state senator, a Latina Democrat (and a citizen), said she was pulled over 18 times by police officers the year SB1070 passed. The new law could lead to the same crackdown on brown people, they warn: while police must have “probable cause” of illegal entry to make an arrest, the language is vague, and allows for “any other constitutionally sufficient indication” of probable cause. Bennett assures that the law cannot be applied retroactively, as the text indicates.
This nuance is lost in the ballot language: a “yes” vote, the ballot will read, will criminalize submitting false information to access public benefits or employment; entering Arizona outside of a port of entry; refusing to comply with a deportation order; and selling fentanyl that causes another person’s death. Among those who support the bill, according to the Noble Predictive Insights polling, the penalty for drug dealers is the most popular portion. At present, only 16% of Arizonans are undecided on how they’ll vote. “From my experience polling a lot of ballot measures in Arizona over the last decade, that’s a pretty low number,” Noble said. “That surprised me.” A vast majority of Republicans — 77% — say they’ll vote in favor of the measure.
But some Republicans are still skeptical. John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa (Arizona’s third-largest city), claimed that the law was created “because the Speaker of the House wanted to win a Republican primary for Congress, plain and simple. It’s not because it’s a good idea.” The lawmaker in question, Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, introduced the bill shortly after launching a bid for a vacated seat in the U.S. House; he ended up finishing in third place in the primary. But his resolution passed the state legislature and made its way onto the ballot, up for a vote in November.
Giles said the effects of the law could be catastrophic. One study estimated that Arizona lost $141 million from canceled conventions in the state in the wake of SB1070; some fear that this new law could have a similar result. “It creates a real threat to the economy in Arizona,” Giles said. “The economic impact of SB1070 was catastrophic to our workforce and to the image of our state. And so this is digging up a bad idea, and just so that some politicians at the legislature can say that they are the most conservative in the room.”
Some in Arizona, Giles included, are nervous about “ballot fatigue” for Arizona voters. All the attention is funneled toward the presidential and Senate races, and perhaps the abortion amendment. But dozens more ballot lines await voters: in Maricopa County, the ballot is four pages long.
That risks issues like the immigration ballot measure being swept up by the top-ticket presidential race. To some, that seems like a natural result: Yasser Sanchez, the immigration attorney, sees the forces motivating the immigration measure being the same ones behind Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. “Trump took all the bad ideas of (SB1070) and combined them, and put them on steroids, and made them nationwide,” Sanchez said. If Trump wins, he’s promised mass deportations, and he’s vowed to engage local law enforcement in the effort.
To some of Sanchez’s clients, that is a chilling thought. Armando Coronel is one of them. As a child, his parents brought him from Mexico to Mesa. They were on a visa but eventually overstayed. Coronel went to the local elementary, junior high and high schools, and his parents worked local jobs — his dad laying carpet, and his mom in daycare. Coronel learned plumbing, and after graduating from high school, he started his own pool company. He still lives in Mesa, now with his wife and three children. They are expecting a daughter. He is working closely with Sanchez to get legal residency.
Coronel remembers the SB1070 era well. “There was a lot of uncertainty,” he said. People were scared to drive and to leave their homes. At the time, Coronel thought he had an active visa, but when traveling back from Mexico after a wedding, he was stopped. His visa had lapsed, the customs agents told him, and he would not be able to enter the U.S. He eventually made his way back to Mesa — to his citizen wife and his three citizen children — but brought with him an acute realization that he could be sent back to Mexico at any point. “You kind of have that PTSD, you know? You’re just scared,” he said. “Anytime a cop pulls you over, you’re like, ‘Oh gosh, what’s gonna happen?’”
The current landscape includes echoes of that era. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have taken a markedly anti-immigrant turn in recent weeks, propping up false claims against immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, as justification for mass deportations. Vance has called for the termination of longstanding immigration programs, like Temporary Protected Status, and labeled the legal beneficiaries of these programs “illegal.”
Coronel recognizes that the Arizona ballot measure, as currently worded, is intended to only affect the border area. But there is enough gray area to cause concern. “We won’t know how the law will be applied until the law is applied,” Sanchez, his lawyer, said. And the threat of mass deportations if Trump is elected could affect the family directly.
“What happens to my family, my home?” Coronel asked me, holding his one-year-old son on his lap. “What happens to my business? It’s a big deal.”