Feeding the deportation machine

In the last year, President Donald Trump has more than tripled ICE’s annual budget to about $37 billion while radically transforming the agency’s mission from targeting criminals and companies hiring undocumented immigrants to roving the streets and attempting to pump deportation numbers up.

Now, Arizona Republicans are working to force state and local law enforcement to collaborate more heavily with federal immigration officials — a plan many police departments have opposed.

A suite of bills moving through the Arizona Legislature would dramatically alter how Arizonans interact with federal immigration authorities — from requiring cops to spend their time studying and enforcing immigration policy to making doctors ask patients about their immigration status.

It’s all part of the right-wing plan (Project 2025, that is) to create a massive deportation and carceral machine — and it requires state and local officials to serve as henchmen for the feds.

The vision is an all-powerful, tentacular police state controlled by the federal government.

Of course, that isn’t how Arizona Republicans are framing their efforts.

The Freedom Caucus, the far-right faction of Arizona’s GOP legislators, held a press conference Monday at the Capitol in the style of Donald Trump circa 2015, decrying “illegal aliens” and painting undocumented immigrants as “dangerous criminals.”

It was little more than a bonanza of horror stories, each one evoking murder, rape, pedophilia and fentanyl.

That criminals get deported is hardly the issue: A large majority of voters agree that immigration officials should be focused on capturing dangerous undocumented immigrants.

However, when enforcement is focused on getting numbers up and not on catching criminals, as is the case now, experts point out that it takes the focus away from fighting the kind of violent crime that nearly everyone believes should be prosecuted.

Hoffman would prefer not to think about that — he called the idea that the administration’s policies have taken officials’ attention away from child predators and thieves one of many “red herrings” or “straw man arguments” that “the media loves to focus on.”

The criticism was particularly ironic given Republicans’ messaging around immigration enforcement is focused entirely on the most appalling acts perpetrated by immigrants — and ignores the fact that data suggests immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens.

One reporter asked Hoffman about a Department of Homeland Security internal memo that showed about 14% of people arrested by ICE had violent criminal records.

Hoffman sidestepped the question, asking in return, “You think those 14% are insignificant?”

The deflection was a clear reminder that Republicans — in their messaging campaign to associate immigrants with rape and murder and social plague — will have to ignore any opposition to the high percentage of nonviolent immigrants being rounded up.

That’s because it’s not about the violent criminals.

The Trump and Stephen Miller mass deportation plan is aimed primarily at reducing the entire immigrant population. There aren’t enough violent immigrants to hit the deportation quotas, so pillars of communities, business owners, parents and even children will also have to be rounded up like cattle, put into crowded prisons and sent somewhere else.

But that’s not a package you can sell very well to most of the American public.

Considering ICE now has an enormous amount of money at its disposal and is supposedly doing such a great job under Trump, one might wonder why Arizona Republicans feel the need to enlist cops to also do ICE’s work.

Their agenda is focused on “supporting ICE,” Hoffman told us. Primarily, that means forcing state and local officials to work with and for ICE, regardless of whether the police officers — and the voters in their communities — want that.

The bills that make up the core of the GOP’s immigration agenda are sponsored largely by Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers.

Her Senate Bill 1474 would require state and local law enforcement agencies to hold immigration enforcement training for all employees, which would help turn all police departments into the eyes, ears and arms of ICE. It would also prohibit city-level policies that restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities and require the Attorney General to investigate alleged noncooperation policies at the request of lawmakers.

Another Rogers initiative, SB1520, would demand all state agencies share any data requested about undocumented immigrants with the federal government. It passed the Senate Military and Border Security Committee.

Rogers also teamed up with GOP Rep. Ralph Heap to sponsor mirror bills in both chambers (SB1051 and House Bill 2689) that would require hospitals receiving funds from the state to ask patients for information about their immigration status. It wouldn’t, however, require hospitals to hand over a list of undocumented people they have served — just a summary of the costs of care for undocumented immigrants and number of undocumented patients.

The American Medical Association advises doctors not to collect information about immigration status because it “erodes trust,” Gilbert nurse Barbara Esquivel-Garcia told the committee.

Republicans are unlikely to pass their anti-immigrant agenda this year.

As long as Gov. Katie Hobbs is in office, any legislation that transforms local law enforcement agencies into immigration enforcers and ICE collaborators is dead on arrival.

Still, Hobbs is up for reelection in November and Republicans have a shot at taking back the 9th floor of the Executive Tower.

That makes these bills a small window into the brave new world Arizona could become next year — if Hobbs loses and Republicans hold their legislative majorities.