Public records reveal Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes's office worked behind the scenes with an activist group that has called to abolish ICE and defund police, even as more than 60 percent of Arizona voters backed the very border security measure she fought.
A lobbyist for Living United for Change in Arizona, known as LUCHA, emailed Mayes's office on May 6, 2024, asking the attorney general to publicly oppose the Secure the Border Act, a Republican-backed bill that would require immigration status verification for certain public benefits and let state and local law enforcement arrest immigrants suspected of entering Arizona illegally. Three days later, Mayes released a statement doing exactly that, calling the bill "a political distraction that will sow seeds of bias and fear without fixing the issues it claims to address."
The emails, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a public records request, show the coordination did not stop there. LUCHA's then-political director, Chris Gilfillan, followed up with Mayes's communications director Richie Taylor in June 2024, and again in September 2024, each time seeking to shape the attorney general's public posture on immigration enforcement.
Neither Mayes's office nor LUCHA responded to requests for comment.
The May 6 email from a LUCHA lobbyist laid out the ask plainly:
"Lucha is asking if AG Mayes would oppose [the bill] and come out with a statement against these efforts, as this policy and policies like them are not a sincere effort to address the humanitarian crisis at the border."
The lobbyist acknowledged the political difficulty, writing that "it is going to be tough to defeat this, but public pressure like this helps make it possible." Arizona Republicans had voted to advance the bill, sending it to the ballot as a legislatively referred measure, bypassing the governor entirely and putting it directly before voters as Proposition 314.
Mayes's public statement, issued three days after the LUCHA email, echoed the group's framing. She claimed she had "been extremely vocal about our federal government's blatant failure to secure Arizona's border" but raised concerns about the bill's "unintended consequences." The timing alone raises questions about whose priorities the attorney general's office was serving, LUCHA's or Arizona's.
By June 2024, LUCHA's political director was reaching deeper into Mayes's operation. Gilfillan emailed Taylor requesting a call about "how AG Mayes is thinking about" the Secure the Border Act "especially from a prosecutorial perspective." He dangled political opportunity:
"I think there's a really strong narrative that she could seize, but also understand it could/would be inherently political."
Taylor responded that he was "happy to chat" and provided his phone number. Whatever was discussed on that call is not captured in the public records.
The relationship continued into September 2024, when Gilfillan asked Taylor whether Mayes would sign a letter from Democratic attorneys general criticizing Texas's immigration policies, the same policies that had inspired the Secure the Border Act. Taylor said his team would be "on the lookout" and confirmed shortly after that Mayes "signed onto this letter."
So across at least three documented exchanges spanning five months, LUCHA asked and Mayes's office obliged, on the public statement, on the phone call, and on the multistate letter.
The group Mayes's office was coordinating with is not a mainstream policy shop. LUCHA posted on X as early as 2018 that "We must Abolish ICE & Abolish CBP." In June 2020, as cities across the country debated police funding, LUCHA held a rally outside Phoenix City Council Chambers and posted on Facebook that "the police do not protect or serve us" and demanded the council "defund police."
That same Facebook post called Phoenix's police force "one of the deadliest police forces in the country" and said "their violence has been on full display during the past week of protesting." LUCHA argued the police budget "should be going to programs and services that will create healthy communities."
After Proposition 314 passed with roughly 62 percent of the vote in November 2024, LUCHA led unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the law's constitutionality. An appeals court upheld the measure.
In other words, the activist group Mayes chose as a partner on border policy lost at the ballot box, lost in court, and holds positions, abolishing federal immigration enforcement, stripping police budgets, that most Arizona voters have flatly rejected.
The LUCHA coordination is not the only time Mayes's stance on immigration enforcement has put her at odds with law enforcement. In January, during an interview with 12News, she suggested Arizona's Stand Your Ground law could apply to encounters with ICE agents conducting operations:
"It's kind of a recipe for disaster because you have these masked federal officers with very little identification, sometimes no identification, wearing plain clothes and masks. And we have a Stand Your Ground law that says that if you reasonably believe that your life is in danger and you're in your house or your car or on your property, that you can defend yourself with lethal force."
When the interviewer pressed whether she was "telling folks, 'You have license, if you are threatened, to shoot a peace officer,'" Mayes answered: "Well, no, but, again, if you're being attacked by someone who is not identified as a peace officer, how do you know?"
The Arizona Police Association condemned the remarks. Its statement did not hold back:
"Words from elected officials matter. It only takes one unstable individual to interpret such commentary as permission or encouragement to use deadly force against police officers. As Arizona's chief law enforcement officer, the Attorney General has a responsibility to de-escalate, not inflame. We find these remarks reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous to the safety of all law enforcement professionals in the state."
Two days later, Mayes released a videotaped statement blaming "right-wing media" for the controversy and expressing her "support and appreciation" for Arizona law enforcement. The walkback did not address the substance of her original remarks.
Mayes won her 2022 attorney general race by just 280 votes. She now faces Republican Warren Petersen, president of the Arizona Senate, in what her own campaign calls "one of the closest races in the country." A recent Noble Predictive Insights poll showed Mayes holding a 6-point lead, but more than 30 percent of voters remain undecided.
Her campaign pitches her as "a partner to law enforcement" who "has locked up drug cartel members" and "seized more than 27 million deadly fentanyl pills off our streets." Those claims sit uneasily next to a record that includes coordinating with an abolish-ICE group, opposing a border security measure that won supermajority support from Arizona voters, and drawing a public rebuke from the state's police association.
Voters in Arizona have made their position on border security clear, by a 62-to-38 margin. The question now is whether an attorney general who privately took her cues from activists on the opposite side of that divide can convince those same voters she represents them.
