Arizona Republicans choose nominee to replace late rep in deep-blue border district
Because the district spans hundreds of miles along the U.S. border with Mexico, all three Republican candidates made border security a central issue in their campaigns and vowed to carry out President Donald Trump's robust crackdown on illegal immigration.
The Republican nominee will challenge the Democrat's Tuesday night winner, former Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva, in the race to replace her father, the late Democratic Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, this November.
Grijalva died of lung cancer-related complications in March. His more than two decades representing Arizona in the House of Representatives made him one of the state's longest-serving U.S. representatives.
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His vacancy queued up a competitive Democratic primary, including his daughter, who had endorsements from prominent Democrats, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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Also competing in the Democratic primary was social media influencer and progressive activist Deja Foxx, who picked up an endorsement from Leaders We Deserve, David Hogg's super PAC that stirred up intraparty fighting this year when the former DNC vice chair unveiled his plan to spend $20 million to primary older incumbent Democrats in safe blue districts.
Former Arizona representative Daniel Hernandez, progressive businessman Patrick Harris Sr. and environmental justice scholar José Malvido Jr., also vied for the Democratic endorsement.
In a reliably blue district along the U.S. border with Mexico, representing parts of Tuscon, Yuma and Nogales, Butierez is likely to face an uphill battle in the special election this September.
Grijalva won his re-election by 27 points in 2024, despite Trump defeating former Vice President Kamala Harris by more than five points statewide in Arizona last year.
Butierez, a contractor and small business owner, received about 37% of the vote as the Republican nominee against Grijalva in 2024. Running again in the special election this year, he has vowed to "fight to keep our border secure, slash taxes where appropriate, and crush the fentanyl crisis destroying Arizona families."
Also competing in the Republican primary was Jorge Rivas, a Salvadoran-born restaurant owner based in Tucson.
Rivas picked up national attention when Trump tweeted a photo of him wearing a "Latinos Love Trump" cowboy hat at a rally in Phoenix during the 2020 presidential election, according to KAWC. He briefly launched a gubernatorial bid in 2022.
Finally, general contractor and business owner Jimmy Rodriguez ran with a mission "to secure our borders, boost our economy, and empower families across CD7."Original article source: Arizona Republicans choose nominee to replace late rep in deep-blue border district
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U.S. troop deployments at the border have tripled to 7,600 and include every branch of the military — even as the number of attempted illegal crossings plummet and Trump has authorized funding for an additional 3,000 Border Patrol agents, offering $10,000 signing and retention bonuses. The military mission is guided from a new command center at a remote Army intelligence training base alongside southern Arizona's Huachuca Mountains. There, a community hall has been transformed into a bustling war room of battalion commanders and staff with digital maps pinpointing military camps and movements along the nearly 2,000-mile border. Advertisement Until now border enforcement had been the domain of civilian law enforcement, with the military only intermittently stepping in. But in April, large swaths of border were designated militarized zones, empowering U.S. troops to apprehend immigrants and others accused of trespassing on Army, Air Force or Navy bases, and authorizing additional criminal charges that can mean prison time. The two-star general leading the mission says troops are being untethered from maintenance and warehouse tasks to work closely with U.S. Border Patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings — and to deploy rapidly to remote, unguarded terrain. 'We don't have a (labor) union, there's no limit on how many hours we can work in a day, how many shifts we can man,' said Army Maj. Gen. Scott Naumann. 'I can put soldiers out whenever we need to in order to get after the problem and we can put them out for days at a time, we can fly people into incredibly remote areas now that we see the cartels shifting' course. Patrols aimed at stopping 'got-aways' At Nogales, Army scouts patrolled the border in full battle gear — helmet, M5 service rifle, bullet-resistant vest — with the right to use deadly force if attacked under standing military rules integrated into the border mission. Underfoot, smugglers for decades routinely attempted to tunnel into stormwater drains to ferry contraband into the U.S. S military personnel are reflected on a map as they listen to Jose Luis Maheda during a briefing at the US Border Patrol station in Nogales, Ariz., on Tuesday. Jae C. Hong/Associated Press Naumann's command post oversees an armada of 117 armored Stryker vehicles, more than 35 helicopters and a half-dozen long-distance drones that can survey the border day and night with sensors to pinpoint people wandering the desert. Marine Corps engineers are adding concertina wire to slow crossings, as the Trump administration reboots border wall construction. Advertisement Naumann said the focus is on stopping 'got-aways' who evade authorities to disappear into the U.S. in a race against the clock that can last seconds in urban areas as people vanish into smuggling vehicles, or several days in the dense wetland thickets of the Rio Grande or the vast desert and mountainous wilderness of Arizona. Meanwhile, the rate of apprehensions at the border has fallen to a 60-year low. Related : Naumann says the fall-off in illegal entries is the 'elephant in the room' as the military increases pressure and resources aimed at starving smuggling cartels — including Latin American gangs recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations. He says it would be wrong to let up, though, and that crossings may rebound with the end of scorching summer weather. 'We've got to keep going after it, we're having some successes, we are trending positively,' he said of the mission with no fixed end-date. Militarized zones are 'a gray area' The Trump administration is using the military broadly to boost its immigration operations, 'It's all part of the same strategy that is a very muscular, robust, intimidating, aggressive response to this — to show his base that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration,' said Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired U.S. Army judge advocate officer. Advertisement 'It's both norm-breaking and unusual. It puts the military in a very awkward position.' The militarized zones at the border sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the military from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil. 'It's in that gray area, it may be a violation — it may not be. The military's always had the authority to arrest people and detain them on military bases," said Joshua Kastenberg, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a former Air Force judge. 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President Donald Trump has promised to unleash an economic boom that will turbocharge growth, fatten paychecks and chip away at America's mountain of debt. However, a new analysis from Trump's alma mater suggests that his immigration crackdown – a centerpiece of his second term – could do the exact opposite. Trump's policy of mass deportations would shrink most worker paychecks, erode gross domestic product (GDP) and spike the already-massive federal government budget deficit, according to a Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis shared exclusively with CNN. 'There is no question the US economy will get smaller as you deport a lot of the workforce,' Kent Smetters, professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said in an interview. 'You simply have fewer bodies to produce. Fewer people means a smaller economy.' During the 2024 campaign, Trump vowed to wage the biggest domestic deportation program in American history and eventually expel millions of people. The Penn Wharton analysis found that a four-year policy in which 10% of the nation's unauthorized immigrants are removed per year would increase federal deficits by $350 billion, reduce GDP by 1% and dent the average worker's wages. The higher deficits are driven by a combination of lost revenue and new spending required to make mass deportations possible – on top of the funding for border security, interior enforcement and deportations provided by the tax and spending cuts package Trump signed into law this month. If the immigration crackdown spanned 10 years, the cost to the federal government would rise to $987 billion, GDP would shrink by 3.3% and wages would tumble by 1.7%, researchers found. Why many workers could get hurt by deportations That's not to say all workers would be harmed by the mass deportations. Penn Wharton concluded that authorized, lower-skilled workers – including US-born ones – would get a pay bump due to less competition. Wages for those authorized, lower-skilled workers would jump by 5% by 2034, the analysis said. However, if deportations are reversed after four years, wages for authorized low-skilled workers would eventually drop. 'Part of the promise of deportation is that those left behind are supposed to be better off. In reality, it's a much more mixed result,' Smetters told CNN. Penn Wharton found that the outcome for high-skilled workers is clearer: They'd be worse off. That's because unauthorized, low-skilled workers complement higher-skilled workers, defined in the analysis as native-born citizens, permanent residents and visa-holding immigrants with at least some college education. Higher-skilled workers 'are generally harmed by deportation more than authorized lower-skilled workers are helped,' the Penn Wharton analysis found, adding that higher-skilled workers have a bigger impact on paychecks and GDP and contribute more to taxes. High-skilled workers would suffer a $2,764 loss in annual wages on average if the immigration crackdown spanned 10 years, Smetters said. 'If you're middle class to higher income, you're going to be hurt by deportation because you rely on lower-skilled workers to make your job easier and to make your life more comfortable,' Smetters said. Many farmworkers are unauthorized For instance, he pointed to office workers who are helped by lower-skilled employees who clean buildings, do security and help transport people. Lower-skilled workers, at times unauthorized, play central roles in various industries, including construction, restaurants and manufacturing. This is especially true in agriculture. Between 2020 and 2022, about 39% of crop farmworkers were US citizens, while 19% were authorized immigrants. That means the rest – 42% – held no work authorization, according to the US Department of Agriculture. 'There are a lot of jobs in the US that native-born people don't want – and foreign-born people are happy to have,' said Stephanie Roth, chief economist at Wolfe Research. The White House pushed back against the Penn Wharton findings. 'These sort of pedantic analyses miss the forest for the trees by not accounting for the immense costs that everyday Americans are forced to bear due to illegal immigration: violent crime, rising housing costs, eroding social trust and even the overbearing of emergency rooms,' White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to CNN. Desai pointed to research that finds more than one in ten young adults in the United States are neither employed, pursuing higher education nor in vocational training. 'There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force,' Desai said, 'and President Trump's agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this administration's commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential to build America's next Golden Age while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws.' It's true that some young people are having trouble finding jobs. The unemployment rate for those aged 20 to 24 stands at 8.2% as of June – more than twice as high as the national rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 'We need immigration' However, it's also true that America's aging population creates real challenges for the economy and businesses. Economists fear that as Baby Boomers continue to retire, businesses will struggle to find workers, a problem that would be compounded by a loss of foreign-born workers. Roth, the Wolfe Research economist, worries that mass deportations, along with the Trump administration's decision to terminate the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants, will cause some worker shortages and lift prices for consumers. 'We need immigration. Foreign-born workers are critical to the labor force – especially in this environment where the population is aging,' Roth said. Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, said the Penn Wharton study 'illuminates just how critical rational immigration policy is to the wellbeing of the American economy.' He said the United States needs comprehensive immigration reform that features cross-border migration to support the labor needs of manufacturing, construction, agriculture and household maintenance as well as leisure and hospitality. The study 'strongly implies that the current path of immigration policy is not economically sustainable nor supportive of growth or narrowing budget deficits,' Brusuelas said. 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