Arizona has seen an immigration crackdown since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Immigration arrests in Arizona more than tripled in fiscal year 2025, with more than 6,000 arrests recorded by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Arizona. Longtime residents, business owners, and students have been impacted, and ICE’s actions have led to widespread protests across the state.
Despite calls for oversight and reform, Arizona’s Republican delegation have largely stood by the agency, consistently voting for billions to go to ICE with limited oversight.
Democrat Amish Shah, running to represent Arizona’s 1st Congressional District spanning Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Fountain Hills, Cave Creek, and parts of Phoenix, argues Trump can uphold immigration laws without the violence, including violence that left two US citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—dead in Minneapolis in January.
Shah said part of the issue is a lack of training for ICE agents.
“We are a nation of laws; those laws have to be followed. Voters have made that very clear to us.” Shah said. “What we wanted was to have the immigration laws of this country enforced following the Constitution. What we got instead was ICE being given six weeks of training and a gun, and put out into the country in a very irresponsible way.”
After the deaths of Pretti and Good, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) denied it reduced training levels for officers, but Democrats have argued that new immigration officials—-hired with massive new funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—went through a streamlined training program that filled the agency with inadequately trained officers.
“It’s really quite incompetent from the Trump administration, and then you saw the chaos that followed,” Shah said. “You saw two people lose their lives, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and then all kinds of violations of the rights of American citizens. All of that is abhorrent and needs to stop.”
The deaths sparked nationwide outrage and calls for agents to receive proper training and body cameras. In May, after backlash, the administration announced it would scrap the fast-track program.
The border
While Republicans have attempted to paint the Democrat as weak on immigration, Shah says it’s all wrong. He’s not in the group of defunding ICE: he wants to keep the agency funded, but said he’d support guardrails.
“We have to insist on ICE being trained to professionalism,” Shah said. “We do need to fund ICE. We’re not going to defund it, but we have to insist that the people doing these jobs are trained well enough so that they don’t hurt American citizens or cause collateral damage.”
Since Trump was elected, Congress has allocated more than $113 billion to ICE, through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 and through the Secure America Act in 2026, which passed through the budget reconciliation process, allowing Republicans to bypass the Senate filibuster and strip out proposed oversight amendments.
“I think the American people don’t want money wasted on things that don’t work,” Shah said. “They want you to run government effectively and run it in a professional way.”
Shah’s Republican opponent, Jay Feely, who is backed by Trump, has indicated support for ICE’s tactics. After Good’s death, Feely said it was “tragic and regrettable,” but that “she chose to put herself in harm’s way.”
“She should not have been impeding ICE,” Feely, a former NFL kicker and CBS analyst, wrote in a January post on X. “No one should. If you don’t like the law—get Congress to change it. But ICE is following the law and our citizens do not have a right to impede.”
Feely’s campaign website lists border security as a top issue, including support for mass deportations of violent offenders.
“In Congress, I’ll fight to finish the wall, dismantle the Biden/Harris open-borders agenda, and deliver results,” Feely wrote. “That includes supporting mass deportations of violent offenders, fully backing our police, Border Patrol and ICE agents, and working to eradicate fentanyl before it reaches our neighborhoods.”
While Feely’s website points to violent offenders, data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group, shows nearly 71% of the more than 65,000 people held in ICE custody had no criminal conviction.
During an Oct. 7 debate against Feely, Shah backed creating a pathway for immigrants brought to the US as children who are protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, along with creating a guest worker program that could boost the state’s economy.
Combating fentanyl
An emergency room doctor, Shah said he’s seen people die as a direct result of fentanyl. He said he supports resources at the border—including for the Border Patrol—in order to stop the flow of fentanyl from arriving in the US.
“A lot of that [fentanyl] is coming through the ports of entry,” Shah said. “You’ve got to put in the resources to stop that. You gotta go after the criminals and the cartels, and you gotta stop the fentanyl from flowing.”
Beyond the border, Shah said education could help mitigate the problem.
“You’ve got to make people aware that a small amount of fentanyl could kill you,” Shah said.
He pointed to past legislative wins on the topic: In the state House, Shah said he worked alongside Sen. Christine Marsh (D-Phoenix)—whose son died from a fentanyl overdose—to pass a bill legalizing fentanyl test strips. Shah said he went “from desk to desk” to get Republican colleagues on board to pass the legislation, SB 1486, which he said was “stuck.”
It worked, and in May 2021, then-Gov. Doug Ducey signed it into law.
A district up for grabs
Arizona’s 1st Congressional District is open after US Rep. David Schweikert (R-Scottsdale) left his seat to run for governor. He later lost the July 21 primary to US Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Gilbert.) The race could determine party control of the House this November and is home to more than 170,000 independent voters who could determine the race.
As polling shows Arizonans across party lines support both border security and fair treatment of immigrants, the race will test which approach wins over the district’s independents: Shah’s push to fund ICE with better guardrails and training, or Feely, who calls himself a “staunch supporter” of Trump’s policies.
Shah and Feely will face off in the Nov. 3 election. Early voting began Oct. 7 and election officials recommend mailing ballots back by Oct. 27 to ensure they’re counted.
