The masked federal agents in tactical gear haven’t arrived in Tucson yet, but the local response is already getting messy, as a dust-up between a liberal newspaper columnist and a liberal county attorney showed this week.
While officials in Tucson brace for the arrival of the ICE and Border Patrol squads that terrorized cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, local immigration activists and reporters are hustling to document any incident that resembles an immigration sweep.
If the past is any guide, agents will round up day laborers in Home Depot parking lots, hurl tear gas and point guns at protesters and basically throw violent tantrums anytime somebody doesn’t respect their authority.
So far, Trump officials say they’re aiming at Phoenix, rather than Tucson. Last week, agents rounded up day laborers in a Home Depot parking lot in Phoenix, the first such incident in Trump’s second term, the Republic reported.
But there have been a few false alarms in Tucson lately.
Instead of indiscriminate sweeps, activists and reporters are finding agents making arrests after long investigations, and with warrants issued by judges.
The rising tension on Tucson’s streets and the false alarms about immigration raids present a challenge for officials like Pima County Attorney Laura Conover, a progressive who won reelection in 2024 and is an outspoken critic of Trump’s policies.
Shortly after Trump took office again in January, for example, Conover told county employees to ask ICE agents for their IDs and warrants before allowing agents onto county property to make arrests.
The tension between local law enforcement writ large and federal immigration agents has only ratcheted up since then.
All of which leads us to a difference of opinion between Conover and the Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller.
Steller is a longtime columnist (meaning an opinion writer). But he’s also a former border beat reporter who knows the lay of the land as well as anyone.
And his columns often mix his own opinions with reporting and quotes from elected officials, including a video Conover posted in December, where she said that comparing ICE sweeps to careful investigations that lead to warrants from federal judges is like comparing “apples and oranges.”
In Sunday’s Daily Star, Conover’s comment was wrapped up into Steller’s argument that he understood why people were upset at ICE.
Steller called ICE agents “the real paid agitators” and he said he was “starting to agree with the activists I’ve interviewed who argue that blanket resistance is the only viable answer to federal immigration actions, not some effort to weed out the legitimate ones.”
On Sunday night, Conover tried to distance herself from Steller’s argument.
In an email to her supporters, Conover said “my hard work on messaging on this exact topic came out completely muddled in today’s paper.”
“In today's Star, the long-time opinion writer echoes everyone's righteous frustration with what we have seen across the country as ill-planned, reckless, and deadly immigration tactics,” she wrote. “But his implication that we should meet recklessness with more recklessness causes me to shout back from the rooftops.”
She pointed to the “vast difference” between long-term criminal investigations and the “warrantless immigration sweeps we have seen in other cities.”
“Let me be blunt,” she wrote. “I want, nay, I NEED us to be as smart and calm as the 100 protesters and journalists who showed up Thursday in a parking lot only to realize that they were accidentally interrupting a criminal operation by the Department of Public Safety, rather than an ICE sweep. Everyone went home alive.”
The next day, Monday, Conover issued a statement on her official social media accounts:
“Here in Pima County, we expect our community members and our local police to be safe from recklessness. And to that end, I am urging our community not to meet recklessness with more recklessness. We must be smart and fight fire, not with more fire but with water.”
Steller jumped in with his own social media response, sticking to his guns and reiterating his argument that while some immigration agents are carrying out legitimate law enforcement operations that he may even support, the Trump administration is specifically targeting Democratic-controlled cities in a campaign of retaliation — and as such, ICE operations can no longer be considered legitimate by default.
And it’s not on the people of Tucson to distinguish which immigration raids are legit, and which are part of Trump’s campaign of terror on blue cities, he argued.
“The only sensible response for residents of blue cities and states is to mount blanket resistance against immigration operations, because these deployments are part of a broad campaign of repressing us and exacting retribution against us for our beliefs.”
We’d argue that both Steller and Conover are correct — from their respective positions.
Steller is rightly outraged at ICE being used as a force of terror, rather than a legitimate law enforcement agency. As a columnist and representative of the public, his position is that the agency has been compromised and it’s not on the people of Tucson to figure out which ICE operations are legitimate and which aren’t.
But Conover isn’t a newspaper columnist — she’s a law enforcement officer.
Her office works with ICE on legitimate operations to catch smugglers, drug traffickers and murderers. And for her to say that all ICE operations are illegitimate would be wildly irresponsible.
If anything, the dust-up between the two shows healthy growth for both Steller and Conover, and it’s a good example of the questions a lot of Tucsonans are wrestling with.
Steller is being brave enough to write boldly about the outrage that he and other Tucsonans are legitimately feeling over the prospect of masked goons descending on their town.
And Conover is being nuanced enough to try to distinguish between the goons rounding up immigrants on the streets, and the law enforcement officers who are taking on real criminals and trying to keep Tucson safe.
But if and when the goons start to descend on Tucson, that fine line is going to get harder and harder to draw.
IN OTHER NEWS
Taking the show on the road: Gov. Katie Hobbs delivered her State of the State address in Phoenix on Monday, and she’ll be doing it all over again at the Tucson Convention Center on Wednesday, January 21. The Southern Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is hosting and you can register to attend here.
Any terrorists in the pool?: Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is getting about $250,000 of federal money to travel to conferences at resorts and casinos, Beau Hodai reports for the Phoenix New Times. The money comes from a $1 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security’s program to prevent violence and terrorism.
Options on the table: As negotiations stall among Arizona and the six other states that use the Colorado River, federal officials published a list of options if the states miss the deadline to come up with a deal by February 14, per KUNC, a public radio station in Colorado. Those options include leaving the status quo intact, partnering with conservation groups to use less water and making cuts to Arizona’s water supplies, among others.
Not a lot of daylight between them: The Republican majority in the U.S. House is still razor-thin, which makes the race in Congressional District 6, where Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani is trying to hold onto his seat, important to the entire country, not just Southern Arizona. The separation between Democrats and Republicans is so tight that if more than one Republican breaks ranks or isn’t available to vote, then legislation dies, the New York Times notes.
Claim to fame: The City of Tucson is getting more complaints than any other city under a new state law that allows residents to ask for a rebate on their property taxes if officials don’t deal with public nuisances, mostly related to homelessness, writes Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller. So far, Tucsonans have sent in 15 of the 24 complaints filed statewide, and city officials are rejecting all the claims because they say the law is unconstitutional.
TODAY’S LAUGH
Portland had its inflatable frogs. Arizona has a bunch of people playing tubas and trombones.
When Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller tried to drum up support for a bill that would make it a state crime to interfere with ICE, he and his crew planned to make the announcement on the lawn in front of the Capitol building.
But protesters showed up playing tubas. After about 10 minutes of being drowned out, Miller had to move his press conference indoors.