Turning inward

Quiet at the border, chaos everywhere else …. Carry on, officers … And a tattletale gets tattled on.

Federal agents wearing face coverings arrested immigrants outside of courtrooms in Phoenix yesterday for the second day in a row.

ICE is reportedly conducting similar operations across the country.

As Border Patrol agents encounter vanishingly few migrants at the border, President Donald Trump’s gaze is turning inland — not on hardened criminals and “illegal” immigrants, but on people who did everything right.

People who are easy targets.

The dozen people who were arrested yesterday appeared to have used the CBP One app to enter the country legally, the Republic’s Raphael Romero Ruiz and David Ulloa, Jr. reported.

The migrants followed the rules and showed up for their immigration hearings, only to have prosecutors drop their cases and rearrest them, reportedly for immediate deportation under a Trump executive order.

"The majority of them are going to be waking up tomorrow in their own countries," as immigration attorney Nera Shefer told the Republic. "It used to be getting your case dismissed was a celebration. Not anymore. The government is given the opportunity to reprocess you under the new rules. That's what it means."

Immigration lawyers, advocates, human rights groups and local and national Democrats are calling the courthouse setups an unprecedented and horrifying violation of due process rights.

Democratic state Rep. Analise Ortiz was at the courthouse yesterday, using her journalist background and sizable online following to document ICE’s actions and help drum up support for the migrants. She and Democratic state Sen. Catherine Miranda sat in on some of the hearings, confirming that some of those detained were asylum seekers.

“I can tell you that when we sat down in the courthouse as state legislators, the judge’s demeanor switched up real quick,” she told her followers. “So please come and support the movement because we keep us safe.”

Protesters will return to the Phoenix Immigration Court on 7th Avenue and Van Buren starting at 7:30 a.m. today.

@senanaliseortizPlease come if it’s safe for you

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Meanwhile, Gov. Katie Hobbs’ spokesperson says she’s still seeking info, noting that Hobbs “supports securing the border and a focus on deporting criminals, but is firmly opposed to indiscriminate roundups and inhumane immigration enforcement practices.”

We’ve clearly gone far beyond deporting criminals and securing the border.

The border is as secure as it has ever been. Agents near Douglas say they’ve “never seen it this slow.”

So few people are crossing the border to ask for asylum that Pima County shuttered its years-long program to support asylum seekers in January. Migrant shelters in northern Mexico are basically empty.

Instead of photos of caravans or migrants clamoring to cross the border, we’re seeing videos of federal immigration agents busting down doors, breaking car windows and lurking outside immigration courtrooms in cities far from the border.

Masked federal agents are ambushing people whose only “crime,” as far as we know, was claiming asylum, as promised to them under federal law and international treaties.

Migrants are following the law and showing up to court hearings, while the government pulls a switcheroo, dropping their asylum cases, arresting them at the courthouse and deporting them to countries where they may face threats against their lives.

And it’s not just migrants getting arrested in courtrooms.

Protests erupted in Milwaukee in recent weeks after federal agents arrested a judge, accusing her of helping an immigrant evade arrest by letting him exit her courtroom through a private door while agents waited outside.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, ICE agents ransacked a house after suddenly surrounding it and knocking down the door. They dragged away an 18-year-old friend of the family who hadn’t shown up for an immigration court hearing. News coverage showed an olive-green, armored vehicle parked in front of the house during the raid.

Federal immigration agents busted down the door of a family home in Oklahoma, ordering a woman and her three daughters out in the rain in their underwear, while the mother kept telling them “we’re citizens!” The agents were looking for a tenant who lived in the house before the family moved in.

“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” the woman said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments — her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”

ICE agents smashed a car window in Massachusetts to arrest a man who was in the process of claiming asylum. His wife filmed the encounter, which came as they were on their way to a dentist appointment. His lawyer said ICE was actually looking for a different person.

The crackdown is getting so egregious that even Kid Rock is in uncomfortable situations.

The musician, who likes to pop in on Trump in the Oval Office, said he doesn’t have anything to do with the daily operations of a restaurant he owns in Nashville, which shut down its kitchen to avoid an ICE raid this week.

But Trump hasn’t lost the Kid just yet.

“That being said, I 100 percent support getting illegal criminals out of our country no matter where they are,” Kid Rock posted on social media.

Even posh restaurants in Washington, D.C., aren’t immune.

ICE agents made a surprise visit to a pizzeria in the affluent Dupont neighborhood, asking for paperwork showing employees could legally work in the country. They ended up arresting 189 immigrants in raids throughout the city over a three-day period.

Beyond the individual incidents, the Trump administration is pushing the limits of the rule of law wherever it can, including trying to do away with birthright citizenship and habeas corpus.

Although it’s not clear whether DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — who oversees all the raids we just mentioned and likes to cosplay as federal law enforcement — actually knows what habeas corpus is.

The next front in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown could be the federal budget.

Despite illegal border crossings being at record lows, the budget bill currently working its way through Congress includes $46 billion to build more border wall, along with $4 billion to hire 3,000 more Border Patrol agents and 5,000 customs officers.

As for the ICE raids throughout the country, the bill includes funding to hire 10,000 more ICE agents, and billions for immigration detention.

In a first for the U.S. government, the bill also would impose a $1,000 fee on asylum seekers — people who have fled their home countries, often with little more than the clothes on their backs.

But one measure in particular that’s tucked into the budget is raising alarm for pretty much everybody who doesn’t live in the United States.

Last month, Trump posted on social media that he wanted to “shut down remittances.”

GOP lawmakers heard that loud and clear — the budget bill includes a 5% tax on the remittances that immigrants, even those with legal status, send to their families in Mexico, Guatemala, India and countries around the world. And it would require financial institutions verify whether the sender was a U.S. citizen.

Arizona lawmakers tried something similar in February. Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman’s SB1111 would have taxed foreign wire transfers that immigrants often use to send money home.

That money would have gone toward bounties paid to local law enforcement who arrest a person who doesn’t have legal status, as long as they eventually get deported.

The new tax set off alarm bells in Mexico, where President Claudia Sheinbaum pushed back hard at a press briefing.

“Remittances are the fruit of the efforts of those who, through their honest work, strengthen not only the Mexican economy but also the United States’, which is why we consider this measure to be arbitrary and unjust,” Sheinbaum said.

Mexico’s Ambassador Esteban Moctezuma Barragán sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers urging them to reconsider, saying it would be double taxation on income that immigrants already paid taxes on.

And it could lead to money laundering, Barragán said.

"Many migrants might seek informal or unregulated means to do so, complicating oversight and control of these financial flows. This would not only reduce the expected revenue but also increase risks related to financial security, tax evasion and money laundering," he wrote.

Immigrants from Mexico sent a record $63 billion in remittances to Mexico last year, while Guatemalans sent $21 billion. If you include all of Latin America, the total came to $160 billion last year.

Police get a pass: The Justice Department is shutting down its investigation into the Phoenix Police Department after it found, through a three-year civil rights investigation, that the department engages in brutality, discrimination and violates protestors’ and homeless people’s rights, the Republic’s Michelle Cruz reports. Most of Phoenix’s elected leaders pushed back against a consent decree that would subject police to an outside monitor, and now, the DOJ is retracting the entire Biden administration-era report. Phoenix Police said they found out about the reversal like everyone else did yesterday: through a public DOJ announcement. Senate President Warren Petersen thanked U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon for the move in a press release, noting the DOJ dropped the investigation after Petersen asked her to in March. In an oped to the Wall Street Journal about how she’s ending the nationwide “injustice against police,” Dhillon cited Democratic U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego’s opposition to the consent decree in Phoenix as proof she’s on the right track. Meanwhile, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego says police transparency is on her to-do list at her annual State of the City address, per the Republic’s Shawn Raymundo.

The enemy of my enemy: Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer offered a backhanded defense of the guy who beat him in his reelection bid last year in an op-ed for the Republic. Current recorder Justin Heap is in the hot seat for suggesting the county send out ballots to people who didn’t request them, which is illegal. But Richer says the bigger issue is that the recorder has to share election responsibilities with the board of supervisors, which “creates an unwieldy operation that wastes resources, confuses voters and frustrates administrators.” He argued lawmakers should vest all election responsibilities under the board of supervisors, rather than Heap.

2026 is a long way off: Republican state lawmakers have officially dropped the idea of passing a Prop 123 renewal this year — and accompanying constitutional protections for school choice vouchers, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. They’re still eyeing the 2026 ballot for a combo package, but say the dragging budget negotiations are now taking top priority. Democrats have been sounding the alarm about the attempt to mash the two ideas into one constitutional amendment since our sister publication, the Education Agenda, first revealed the Republican plan last month.

Still waiting: April tax revenue came in better than expected, but that’s not speeding up negotiations over the budget, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports.

We would be super stoked if you could help us reach better-than-expected revenue this month.

Faith and fraud: A Phoenix pastor is one of 22 defendants that the Arizona Attorney General’s Office charged with billing the state for care it wasn’t providing in the widespread sober living homes Medicaid fraud scheme, per 12News’ Brahm Resnik. Pastor Theodore Mucuranyana and Hope Of Life International Church, which caters to East African migrants, were hit with 10 felony counts of money laundering. An attorney for two of the service providers also charged in the case said, “a lot of them didn't even realize that what they were doing was a crime.”

Nail-biter in Glendale: Glendale voters are split on Prop 401 and 402 after yesterday’s election. The propositions are voter referendums attempting to shut down the city’s plans to redevelop a 10-acre plot of land into parking and office space for the VAI Resort that’s already being constructed around it as part of a billion-dollar entertainment complex near State Farm Stadium. Prop 401, which will determine if the city can rezone a plot of land land from "parks and open space" to "corporate commerce center,” is narrowly trailing, while Prop 402, which would allow the city to conditionally rezone the land so it doesn’t have to adhere to stipulations on roadway designs, sewer access and dark sky lighting, is narrowly leading. The margin on each is fewer than 500 votes.

Mesa Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Andi Fourlis emailed a parent’s employer in an apparent attempt to silence a local mom — but it blew up in her face.

The East Valley Tribune’s Cecilia Chan tells the story of local parent Heather Austin, who had emailed the school superintendent about concerns she had with the district curriculum.

But Austin had emailed from her work address, so Fourlis tried to get her in trouble at her job.

“I’ve received lengthily inaccurate and inflammatory emails from one of your staff members … I am wondering if the email messages are representative of your public relations firm as they are coming from your firm’s email address.”

Austin is pissed, and she’s telling the school board all about it.

“My firm supports parents advocating for their children,” she told the board last week. “Emailing well-researched questions about proposed programming to the MPS School Board and District shouldn’t be controversial.”

Now, school board member Rachel Walden wants to investigate Fourlis and address the issue “so that something like this never happens again.”

Nobody likes a tattletale!