The Arizona-Mexico border is as quiet as it’s ever been, as long as you don’t count all the political battles that are raging.
These days, very few people are trying to sneak across Arizona’s border with Mexico. In fact, it’s been historically slow for well over a year, leading to an odd situation where there are far more Border Patrol agents working in Southern Arizona than there are migrants caught crossing the border each month.
The red and blue lines show how few people were caught crossing the border during fiscal 2025 and 2026 in the Border Patrol’s Tucson and Yuma sectors.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration is barreling ahead with its plan to build more wall in Arizona, while local officials and activists raise a ruckus to stop any more wall from going up.
Down in Lochiel, a sleepy little town near Nogales that was spared from wall construction during the first Trump administration, protesters are sitting in cottonwoods to stop contractors from tearing down any more of the ancient trees.
If you’ve ever been to Lochiel, you may have spent time in the shade of those trees on a hot day. They certainly left an impression on retired Arizona State University plant ecologist Juliet Stromberg.
“There's so many sites I visited over the decades, and some just stand out as being kind of special ones, and that was one of them,” Stromberg told the Nogales International. “It still looms large in my memory, these massive trees, and it's just – wow – because there aren't that many pockets of old growth cottonwoods.”
For readers who are unfamiliar with Lochiel, it’s one of the quietest areas on Arizona's border with Mexico. The town and the surrounding San Rafael Valley are much more beautiful than they are dangerous. (Back when Curt covered the border, he’d go through thousands of federal court cases every year. Lochiel rarely came up.)
Meanwhile, environmental advocates are worried about what a border wall could do to animals like the jaguar known as “Cinco,” which moved from Mexico to Arizona and was spotted north of the San Rafael Valley in June and July.
Over on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, tribal officials recently posted “No trespassing” signs aimed at contractors putting up a double-layered 30-foot-tall border wall, as well as people hunting illegally or driving in restricted places.
It’s the latest move in a decades-long struggle between federal officials who want tighter border security and tribal officials who want to maintain sovereignty over the land and don’t want to block O’odham people who live south of the border.
It’s an uneasy relationship, as you can see by the Border Patrol checkpoints on virtually every major road into and out of the reservation.
This time around, tribal officials took the Trump administration to court to block the wall, but a federal judge ruled that construction can move forward. The judge cited a 1907 proclamation by President Theodore Roosevelt that put a 60-foot-wide strip of land along the border, commonly referred to as the Roosevelt Reservation, under federal control.
Unlike the San Rafael Valley, the Tohono O'odham reservation has long been a busy site for smuggling, particularly for migrants who are trying to get through the desert to Phoenix or the interstate as quickly as they can.
That trek can be deadly for migrants. At least 4,500 migrants have died in Southern Arizona since the 1990s, when federal officials started pushing migrants away from relatively safe routes through cities and into harsh deserts and mountains.
This summer has been particularly bad, even with so few people trying to cross the border.
The remains of 32 migrants were found in June and July in Southern Arizona, per Humane Borders. The 19 remains found in July was the highest monthly total in two years.
Policies and policing
While the wall controversies play out, a new state law could radically change how local police deal with immigration far away from the border. And it’s prompting an uproar that hasn’t been seen in Arizona since SB1070.
Two years ago, Arizona voters approved Proposition 314, a ballot measure that would give police the power to arrest migrants who don’t cross the border through a legal port of entry.
It’s a lot like what SB1070 would have done if a federal judge hadn't ruled most of that law was unconstitutional more than a decade ago.
This time, a federal appeals court gave the green light to the Texas law that Prop 314 was modeled after, which means police officers in Arizona now have a new set of duties that most of them weren’t trained to handle.
The ACLU challenged Prop 314, but a judge ruled against them, saying they couldn’t show anybody was harmed by it until after the first arrests were made. That ruling prompted the ACLU to drop the lawsuit for the time being. But they’re keeping an eye out for any arrests under Prop 314, so you can expect to see them refile their lawsuit as soon as that happens.
Meanwhile, ICE officials announced they would spend $20 million on electric-shock gloves that agents can wear when they arrest people. Needless to say, the announcement was met with some stiff resistance.
“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU, told the Associated Press. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”
While the electric-shock gloves are a new tactic for ICE, Sahuarita police have been using them for the past few years, per the Green Valley News.
A two-year-old video of a Sahuarita Town Council meeting where the technology was being (voluntarily) demonstrated, showed a man falling to the ground seconds after the gloves were used.
If all that weren’t enough, don’t forget about screwworm.
After closing the U.S.-Mexico border to cattle for more than a year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is going to reopen portions of the border and the port of entry in Douglas is first in line.
The bad news is that the flesh-eating parasite is a real problem. The good news is Sonoran officials have done “excellent work” protecting the state’s cattle from screwworm, Paul Brierley, director of the Arizona Department of Agriculture, told KJZZ.
120 days of no: A majority of the Pima County Board of Supervisors signaled last week that it supports a 120-day moratorium for data centers, Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock writes. The ban on processing applications for data centers could come back to the board in a few weeks, possibly with a permanent ordinance governing data centers. The Tucson City Council worked on just such an ordinance for months and recently signed off on a series of new rules governing large data centers inside city limits, the Arizona Luminaria's Stephanie Casanova reports. More than a few city residents called for a permanent moratorium, but council members were concerned a moratorium could trigger Proposition 207 complaints. The 2006 voter-approved measure makes it difficult for cities, towns and counties to regulate the use of privately owned property and allows people and companies to sue if they feel new local laws hurt the value of their property.
One house, two house: Congressional District 6 Democratic nominee JoAnna Mendoza claimed two separate houses as her primary residence in the last two years and received an annual $400 tax credit that she didn’t qualify for, the Republic’s Laura Gersony reports. That amounts to about $800 in property taxes that Mendoza didn’t pay when she converted her home in Pima County into a rental and moved into her current home in Red Rock. Meanwhile, Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani has to deal with the fallout of the Trump administration’s economic policies in Casa Grande in the northwestern corner of CD6, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. Those policies include cutting a federal grant for Kohler, a bathroom fixtures manufacturer, and eliminating tax credits for Lucid Motors, which led to more than 1,000 workers getting laid off at its electric-car factory in Casa Grande.
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Elections have consequences: The Rio Nuevo board isn’t looking to take on any big projects until they see who wins races for governor and state legislative seats, per the Arizona Daily Star’s Gabriela Rico. Republican lawmakers tried to gut the district during state budget negotiations this year, but a deal with Gov. Katie Hobbs kept the funding intact. The board also is down two members, and those positions are appointed by the state speaker of the House and Senate president. Plus, sales tax revenue has declined lately, which means the district’s coffers aren’t refilling quickly.
Please comply: The Trump administration is renewing its pressure campaign on universities, although with a softer tone this time. Last year, the White House tried unsuccessfully to get schools like the University of Arizona to sign a compact and commit to serving the Trump administration’s goals, which include giving conservative voices a boost on campus. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to universities calling for them to publicly post information about admissions, free speech and “intellectual pluralism.” Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who’s shown willingness to work with the Trump administration in the past, said the letter was an opportunity to make universities more responsive to the country’s educational needs, the Republic’s Helen Rummel reports. UA President Suresh Garimella said he’d consult with local stakeholders before responding to the White House, per the Star’s Prerana Sannappanavar.
Beating up city hall: The NIMBY crowd had a great week in Cochise County, per the Herald/Review’s Matt Hickman and Terri Jo Neff. Opponents of a proposed 160-megawatt energy storage system in Huachuca City packed the county planning and zoning commission meeting and pushed the commission to squelch the proposal, along with nixing an impound yard near Palominas and a communications tower in Stump Canyon. Hickman and Neff point out that without more economic development, county residents are probably going to start paying more in property taxes.
“Cochise County is not exactly in danger of becoming Maricopa County,” Hickman writes. “Nobody is proposing a 40-story condominium tower overlooking Stump Canyon. If anything, the concern is the opposite: The county could become so skilled at stopping projects that it forgets how to approve one.”
The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s 2026 general election debates kick off tonight.
If you’re tracking 2026 races in Southern Arizona — and you should be — the debates are your best source of information about the folks who want your votes.
This year, we’re not just covering the debates — the entire Agenda newsroom is moderating the legislative debates.
And we want you to have a role in this whole experience, too.
So please take a quick minute to jot down some questions for your future elected representatives. We’ll try to shake some answers out of these candidates for you.
Head to the Clean Elections website to bookmark the full schedule of debates.
We’ll be covering the highlights as they happen.
Republican activists want you to think U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly was booed by the crowd at the recent Iowa State Fair, where high-profile pols test the waters when they’re thinking about running for president.
“Mark Kelly has a better chance of being a garden gnome than he does of ever being President,” one of Kelly’s critics wrote on Twitter.
But a closer examination found at least some of the boos were coming from local Turning Point USA employees, including 19-year-old Ella Mullenbach, who followed Kelly around holding an “Out of Orbit, Out of Touch” sign.
So yes, Kelly was booed in Iowa. By people who appear to have shown up specifically to boo the former astronaut in Iowa.