Tex, a dark brown Lab who works for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, circled a truck that deputies had pulled over on the side of Interstate 40 during a late-night patrol in Ash Fork, Arizona.
The tiny rural town north of Prescott sits along one of northern Arizona’s major east-west drug corridors, where Sgt. Cody Kruse’s Special Crimes Unit spends its shifts looking for narcotics moving through the state.
The unit has a unique mission: Instead of responding to 911 calls, it proactively seeks out drugs traveling throughout Yavapai County’s highways by watching traffic, pulling over drivers for traffic violations and looking for signs of drug trafficking.
Sheriff’s deputies with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office Special Crimes Unit during a traffic stop in Ash Fork, Arizona.
The team has made major busts before. So when Tex alerted deputies that he smelled drugs in the truck, they searched it extensively.
They didn’t find any.
That doesn’t mean Tex was wrong, Kruse said. Drugs like fentanyl are like microwaved popcorn: Even after they’re gone, the smell lingers.
The work of drug-interdiction units like Kruse’s is slow and often uneventful, but sheriffs say the major drug seizures they do make are making a difference — and that they can’t do it without the state’s help.
That help comes, in part, from Arizona’s Local Border Support funding — a state grant program that pays local law enforcement agencies to prevent “border-related crimes,” including drug trafficking, human smuggling and “illegal immigration.”
Sheriff’s departments that receive the money say they use it almost entirely for drug enforcement, not federal immigration work.
But as law enforcement agencies ask the Legislature for more Local Border Support (LBS) funding this year, Democratic lawmakers aren’t willing to take their word for it.
Now, the funding is poised to become part of another state budget fight, as a pending legal battle threatens to turn that long-dormant “illegal immigration” language into enforceable state policy.
The Border Strike Force rebrand
The LBS fund, as it exists today, is Gov. Katie Hobbs’ reinvention of part of former Gov. Doug Ducey’s Border Strike Force program.
Under Ducey, local law enforcement agencies could apply for Border Strike Force money, which was mostly used to help staff a multi-agency effort to deter border-related crimes. But a Republic investigation found most of the “strike force” work happened outside Arizona’s four border counties, and many drug seizures credited to the task force actually came from routine DPS activity.
Hobbs criticized Ducey’s Border Strike Force while campaigning for governor. Once in office, she killed the name, but not the funding stream.
Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes told us he helped lobby the Governor’s Office to preserve the money in 2023, when he was president of the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association.
“So we went to her and said, well, hang on a second — we understand you don't like the name, but this is where the funding goes, and we need the funding,” he said. “Otherwise, it's essentially eliminating law enforcement capability around the state, particularly around drug investigations.”
Under Hobbs, the newly named “Local Border Support” line item broadened how local agencies could use the money. Instead of mainly helping pay for officers assigned to the DPS-led border task force, agencies could apply for grants to cover a wider range of border-related needs, including equipment, salaries and overtime. And they no longer had to provide a 25% local match.
Of the nearly $65 million the state has disbursed through the border grant program since 2017, $46 million went out under the Hobbs administration.
In 2025, Hobbs’ third year in office, she announced $17 million in LBS funding – a more than 50% increase from the year before. It went to 27 different local police agencies, geographically ranging from the border-adjacent Yuma County Sheriff’s Office to the Page Police Department near Arizona’s border with Utah.
We reviewed dozens of LBS contracts approved by county boards of supervisors over the past two years, and most show the money going toward tools that can be used for drug interdiction, but also for routine policing: deputy salaries, outfitted patrol vehicles, K-9 units and surveillance equipment such as license plate readers.
“It's called border support money, but it's essentially related to interior investigations,” Rhodes said.
But that broad use is why Democrats are skeptical of claims that the money won’t touch immigration enforcement. The grants flow to sheriff’s offices and police departments that have wide discretion over how closely they work with federal immigration agencies.
And with President Donald Trump back in the White House and a looming U.S. Supreme Court battle that could unleash local police to act as immigration agents, Democrats aren't inclined to take any chances.
Last year, 14 House and Senate Democrats voted against the state budget largely over the “illegal immigration” language tied to the border funding, which has been in the state’s budget for more than a decade.
Before Ducey created the local-support funding now known as LBS, similar immigration enforcement language was attached to other border-security funds DPS distributes through its Gang and Immigration Intelligence Team Enforcement Mission, or GIITEM, program.
But the prospect of renewing language in state law that directs local law enforcement to use the money on “illegal immigration” enforcement — whether or not agencies planned to use it that way — felt newly charged last year under Trump’s second term, as widespread deportations renewed fear in immigrant communities.
Plus, in 2024, Arizona voters passed Prop. 314, which could make illegal border crossing a state crime if courts allow a similar Texas law to take effect. If that happens, the budget’s state-level immigration enforcement language would have a state law under which to operate.
This year, before it could get sucked into another state budget fight, Republican Rep. Quang Nguyen tried to secure LBS funding early by running a bill to boost the fund to $20 million, up from last year’s $18.2 million.
The Arizona Sheriff’s Association, now led by Navajo County Sheriff David Clouse, assured lawmakers at the bill’s committee hearings that the funding is almost entirely used to intercept drugs, not undocumented people. And for cash-strapped counties like Navajo, he said, it has become a crucial resource.
“(LBS) monies are keeping Arizona safe,” Clouse told lawmakers in February. “They’re changing the dynamics and the flow of narcotics across the interstate system and throughout Arizona.”
The bill cleared two House committees, a full House vote and two Senate committees, but hasn’t received a full Senate vote. At this point, the funding is more likely to be folded into the broader state budget than passed as a standalone bill.
While a handful of Democrats objected to the budget’s border funding last year, nearly every Democrat who voted on this year’s LBS bill opposed it.
They argued Arizona has little room for a $20 million expense in a tight budget year — and even less reason to fund a program whose allowable uses still include immigration enforcement, regardless of whether local agencies are currently using it that way.
Rep. Kevin Volk was the only Democrat to vote for the funding so far this year, saying it's a much-needed response to Arizona’s fentanyl crisis.
While it’s “technically possible,” police could use the money to target “people like DACA recipients who came over to this country when they were one year old,” Volk told us, that’s not law enforcement’s priority.
Other Democrats, like Sen. Catherine Miranda, are more skeptical.
“It's extremely concerning that there is an attempt to expand the Local Border Support program to $20 million at a time when we are seeing an abuse of power from immigration enforcement entities nationwide,” she said. “We should first think and consider what exactly these funds are being used for.”
What LBS funds are buying
The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department has received about $3.7 million in LBS funding since 2024, when Hobbs expanded the funds.
The vast majority of that has gone to the salaries of Kruse and the four deputies on his Special Crimes Unit.
We joined Kruse’s unit on a 10-hour ride-along in late April, following Kruse and his deputies through about five traffic stops. None yielded a drug bust.
That’s how a lot of the work goes, he said: long stretches of waiting, watching traffic and pulling over cars that show suspicious behavior. Most stops don’t end with deputies arranging pounds of bundled drugs together for a photo op.
But sometimes they do.
Last year, deputies pulled over a truck near Ash Fork and found 40 pounds of meth in a suitcase, for example. In November, a K-9 unit named Radar found 70,000 fentanyl pills hidden in a car that deputies stopped on the I-17.
Radar and the drugs he sniffed out in November 2025. (Yavapai County Sheriff's Office).
During all that roadside work, Kruse and his deputies don’t check immigration status when they pull people over, he said. That happens later, inside the county jail, if they make an arrest.
Yavapai County participates in ICE’s 287(g) program, which allows state and local law enforcement agencies to perform limited federal immigration functions depending on the type of agreement they sign. The Sheriff’s Office uses the Jail Enforcement Model, meaning its immigration screening happens only after someone enters county custody.
But the link between LBS money and immigration enforcement isn’t direct. Once they use LBS funding to buy deputies, surveillance tools and drug-sniffing dogs, how close local law enforcement gets to immigration enforcement depends largely on the sheriff’s office using it.
The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, for example, takes an aggressive stance toward border-related policing, despite operating in a county that doesn’t touch the border. Its YouTube page has a playlist titled “Border,” featuring deputies calling Border Patrol after finding people hidden in trunks or packed into cars.
And several Department of Justice press releases cite “immigration-related criminal charges” against people who were pulled over by a deputy with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office.
In a letter asking DPS for $1.7 million in LBS funding last year, the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office said most of the funding would go toward its anti-smuggling unit, “which is responsible for preventing and investigating narcotic and human smuggling.”
The unit “regularly stops vehicles smuggling drugs and trafficking humans going north,” Pinal County Sheriff’s Public Information Officer Sam Salzwedel told us.
“Our Narcotics Task Force focuses on drug dealers who are poisoning Pinal County citizens,” he wrote in an email. “They do not perform interdiction operations, but their job is to stop drug dealers in our community. Those drugs are almost all smuggled across the Mexico border.”
Last year, Yavapai County deputies helped federal immigration agencies carry out raids at four Colt Grill locations in the county, part of a multi-state investigation into allegations that the barbecue chain’s owners ran a scheme to smuggle undocumented workers from Mexico.
The raids led to the arrests of 22 undocumented workers on immigration violations, and according to media reports, sheriff’s deputies helped transport some of them to detention.
Sheriff Rhodes said the deputies who participated were not part of the special task force that Yavapai County funds with LBS dollars.
Still, at the time, Rhodes tied the raids to the money.
“I want to thank the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors, the Arizona Legislature, and Governors Ducey and Hobbs for their continued support of the Local Border Security Fund, which makes operations like this possible,” Rhodes said in a statement after the raids.
If Texas wins
For now, Arizona deputies can help federal immigration agencies, but they cannot arrest someone solely for being undocumented.
In 2024, Republican lawmakers set up the road map to change that through Prop 314.
The 2024 ballot measure made illegal border crossing a state crime, but only if a similar Texas law survives in court.
That Texas law survived an appeals-court challenge last month. It still has more legal fights to clear before it can take effect, but the law could eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court, and this time, a much more conservative slate of justices than the one that rejected state-level immigration enforcement under Arizona’s SB1070.
“The possibility that state law enforcement would be conscripted to support federal immigration enforcement certainly adds that level of urgency to our desire to not have there be additional border activities,” Senate Democratic Leader Sen. Priya Sundareshan said.
Nguyen, who sponsored this year’s $20 million appropriation for the LBS Fund, said even if Prop 314 takes effect, the money wouldn’t be used for widespread, state-level immigration enforcement. Only counties along the border would see “some border enforcement, if you cross outside of the port of entry,” he said.
But Nguyen doesn’t control how sheriffs use the money, and sheriffs have not always treated Prop 314 as a border-only issue.
After Prop 314 passed, Rhodes asked lawmakers for more border-enforcement funding and warned that sheriffs were being handed an “unfunded mandate” without the money to enforce it.
Now, he says sheriffs don’t need state money to enforce the illegal-entry law, should it ever take effect, because in the same election cycle that Arizona voters passed Prop 314, the country’s voters reelected Trump.
“At the time (Prop 314) was written, we were faced with the prospects of a second Biden administration, in which there was no border enforcement…,” Rhodes said. “But once President Trump took over and essentially shut down the border, the need to do that doesn't exist anymore. There's lots of Border Patrol on the border, and very few illegal border crossers.”
Sundareshan voted against the budget last year in opposition to the border funding and language allowing local police to use it for “illegal immigration” enforcement. She said she’ll do the same thing this year.
“$20 million of additional funding is a nonstarter,” she said. “We are fighting to reduce that, and we would love to see there be no additional border funding.”