Arizona lawmakers want to make crossing the Arizona-Mexico border a state crime, which would allow state and local law enforcement to arrest the stream of illegal immigrants crossing north and charge them with a misdemeanor offense.
The new law would also allow state judges to order people convicted of the offense to return to their home country.
Arizona’s legislators are working to get the measure on the ballot after the state’s Democrat governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed a similar proposal earlier this year.
Gov. Hobbs said she vetoed the bill, the Arizona Border Invasion Act, because it will be “harmful for communities and businesses in our state, and burdensome for law enforcement personnel and the state judicial system.”
Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, tells AFN the flow of illegals has shifted heavily from Texas to Arizona after Texas took steps to stop them at the Texas-Mexico border.
“The migrants, and the cartels that are running them into the country,” Mehlman advises, “have decided that they would take the path of least resistance and just move elsewhere along the border.”
In official statistics maintained by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, four sectors that cover the Texas-Mexico border show double-digit drops in encounters with illegal aliens since 2023.
Arizona is divided into sectors, the Tucson sector and the Yuma. In the current fiscal year, Border Patrol agents have encountered 39,336 illegals in the Yuma sector and 373,220 in the Tucson sector. The numbers from Yuma show a big drop – 69% from 2023 – but the Tucson number is a 107% jump from the previous year.
“What Texas has shown,” Mehlman says, “is that even if you have the federal government not doing what they're supposed to be doing, if states step up to the plate and take action on their own, it does have an effect.”
Looking south to Mexico, Mehlman says FAIR is taking a wait-and-see attitude with Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Her biggest challenge, he says, is the powerful and violent cartels that control the border area.
