The following is an AZPM original production.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ Welcome to this latest edition of the "Press Room from the radio studios of AZPM.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Coming up on the program, we'll talk about advocates gathering outside of immigration courts.

Also, the city of Tucson is asking a judge to dismiss an $8 million lawsuit filed by a former state lawmaker.

With me discuss these and other topics are Danyelle Khmara of AZPM News, Dylan Smith of the Tucson Sentinel, Sarah Lapidus of Report for America and the Arizona Republic, and a very special guest today, University of Arizona political science professor, Samara Klar.

Hi.

Welcome everybody, thanks for being here.

Thanks.

Danyelle, let's start off with advocates gathering outside of immigration courts.

We've seen reports of agents waiting outside courts when cases have been dismissed and then ICE agents are in essence taking people into custody.

What are these advocates doing and how effective Has it been?

Yeah, so basically they are passing out literature that is mostly in Spanish, that's sort of explaining to people a little bit about what rights they have inside the courtroom.

So what the literature says is that they have the right to ask the judge not to dismiss their case if an attorney for the government asks for it to be dismissed.

They have a right to ask for appeal.

They have a right to ask for an appeal to an asylum case if they have a fear to return to their country.

And so the advocates are giving them this information they're offering to accompany them inside their courtroom if they want and they're offering to accompany them when they're leaving the courtroom and basically act as observers if an immigration authority were to approach these people.

So, and it does from, you know, they've only been doing this for like, I don't think even quite two weeks yet and it does seem to be having an effect.

I was down at the immigration court in Tucson the other day and I spoke to a couple that was coming out of their asylum hearing and I was just asking them if they had heard the news about ICE agents arresting people coming out of court hearings, how they were feeling about it.

They had been keeping up with the news.

They were nervous, but they also had heard that they need to tell the judge that they don't want their case dismissed if they want to continue with their case and avoid being vulnerable to being detained.

So it does seem like the advocates are getting the word out.

Okay, Dylan, what do you make of this, this development?

What we're seeing, especially in Tucson is the immigration judges are not just kind of, you know, immediately accepting the federal prosecutors request to dismiss a case.

They're asking for a reason, why do you want to do this?

Because while someone has an active case, an immigration case, they're protected from being immediately deported because they get to go through all of that process.

If there is no case, then ICE can nab them up immediately and try and, you know, deport them on a very rapid basis.

And just to add to that, I think it's important for everyone to understand that a lot of these people are people who have come into the country legally through humanitarian parole methods that were created under Biden, that Trump ended.

And so, you know, a lot of these people were essentially invited to come into the country on a temporary basis and have then begun asylum cases or immigration cases.

Did seem like that was the most disturbing part of it to a lot of people, except for the most hardcore when it comes to this, the idea that, wait a second, these are people who are trying to do it the right way.

Yeah, exactly, I mean, these are people that are showing up for their court hearings who, you know, not in all cases, but at least in some cases who have done it, quote unquote, the right way from the beginning.

Yeah, interesting.

So let's move on to something somewhat similar in the same vein, and Governor Hobbs reacted to it, Attorney General Mayes did as well, but the report that ICE agents were pretending to be TEP workers, at least in the case of one woman, they wanted to ask about her neighbor.

Yeah, so I first saw that story, I believe the Arizona Daily Star broke that story, and basically ICE agents had, like you said, they showed up in this neighborhood, they were talking to this woman, asking about, they said they wanted to offer, I believe, some sort of deal to the neighbor.

It's like a free estimate or something, is what they were saying.

Yeah, right, we're right, a free estimate, and the woman, I believe, saw their badges underneath their clothes, something to that effect, and yeah, I mean, basically, the reaction from Governor Hobbs has been that this seems questionable, this seems like, you know, not the best way to handle things, but that she is not sure if there's anything she can do, that this may be something, you know, federal law enforcement going undercover, something that is allowed.

Yeah, some of this is very complicated, because there are certain things where, apparently there's some line that indicates this isn't acceptable to be giving false pretenses, unless you're doing it in the cause, potentially, of public safety.

I'm not going verbatim on that, but-- Looking at who exactly is the target of ICE, in a particular instance, are they trying to arrest somebody who is allegedly a violent criminal?

I think most people would agree that there's a little bit more flexibility about what they should be doing in that instance, versus trying to deport somebody who just appears with their family, living their life, basically.

And, you know, most people are pretty accepting of utility workers.

If somebody shows up at your door and says, hey, I'm from, you know, the electric company, I'm from the gas company, I need to check on something, you're probably gonna be concerned and let them do what they say they're gonna do, right?

Yeah, except when they look at the bill, and they're like, please, please talk about it.

But one other thing, this wouldn't look good for TEP.

I can't imagine they'd be thrilled about this.

And it's still a little unclear exactly what happened in this case, and if there have been any others.

Did they actually pretend to be from TEP?

Were they, there are a lot of folks who are, you know, the door-to-door solar salespeople who go around and sort of imply that they're from TEP?

You know, maybe these ICE guys were like, pretending to be a solar salesman who was pretending to be from TEP.

Yeah.

Sarah, I know you did a piece on how tariffs are affecting Southern Arizona economy.

So I don't wanna go off track there, but it almost feels like things like this would be this sort of in doubt of folks.

Did you get a general feeling of even business owners you spoke to that they're, unless they're politically totally aligned with Trump administration, they're nervous about this too, because there's inconsistency or chaos out there.

They are, and they're also seeing less people cross over the border into their businesses, at least in Nogales.

They're seeing less foot traffic, less sales, and they've also had to increase their prices, which is hurting a lot of them.

Yeah, and so overall, what's the, you spoke to some people who are really on the ground there.

What's the impression you got from how people are actually feeling?

Because I think, and we're gonna talk about polling in a moment too, that data is very important, but data sort of measures how people are feeling in any one moment.

So how are people feeling right now?

At least the people you spoke to.

There's a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty going on right now.

As I said, they're raising their prices, there's less shoppers, and small businesses have been hit with a lot of things over the years, and this is just another additional thing they have to worry about.

One man I was talking to, he runs a clothing store on the weekends, and he was saying whether it's one 25% tariff or 30% tariff, all those numbers really do impact small businesses.

Yeah, Dylan, you've covered some stuff for quite a while.

What do you think?

You know, look back at what Republicans were saying when Obamacare was in the process of being instituted.

Their biggest complaint, the buzzword they used over and over again was uncertainty.

That's what they harped on for most of a year that this was creating uncertainty and it was bad.

Actually, there wasn't much uncertainty.

The bill was written and everybody knew exactly how it was going to work.

Here we are actually in a period of just absolute uncertainty.

Nobody knows what's gonna happen with tariffs from day to day.

Is Trump gonna jack something up to 400%, cut it down to 4%, which country, which product, which raw material, nobody knows.

Professor Samara Klar because you're a data person, but it is, and I don't know if you've measured this, but it must be interesting to think about how people do see these things depending on what party they may be in.

Of course, there's always the right track, wrong track.

Before we get into some specifics, what's your general overview of the folks you surveyed and how they feel about the country and is it really affected by ideology at this point, even more so than you might expect?

Yeah, we see really big differences between how Democrats and Republicans think of a lot of these issues.

I mean, when it comes to immigration specifically, when I was asking about immigration before the election, I saw people generally were opposed to the idea of deportations generally, especially for people who came to the United States as young children.

That was a really unpopular concept, especially in Arizona.

We saw concern across both Democrats and Republicans about the security of the US border.

And of course, in Arizona, we saw a lot of support, I think some surprising support for many among Democrats for that ballot initiative to allow state law enforcement the power to enforce immigration.

I don't know if you remember that.

Prop 314.

Exactly.

Now that the election has come and gone and we have Trump in office, when I'm asking about immigratio in the polls, I do see this very sharp partisan divide, which we often see with issues where the Republican, Republican respondents are heavily supportive of what Trump is doing.

He doesn't have overwhelming support.

We see that in the overall approval numbers.

His approval numbers are not great, but when you split them up bipartisanship, Republicans are generally saying that they are happy with how he's dealing with immigration and Democrats are deeply unhappy.

I mean, opposition among Democrats seems to be greater than the support among Republicans, but there is a big split there.

And national survey, how many folks did you survey?

This was about a thousand Americans in the most recent survey.

And we see pretty parallel trends to the same kinds of findings I was seeing in Arizona right around the election time.

Yeah, let me just take the pulse of everyone at the table.

So Danyelle, you cover a lot of immigration and border security, which can get very intense.

So I'm not gonna ask you a political science question but what do you make of numbers like that that indicate that it really is divided by party because it didn't, especially in the dreamers, it didn't seem to be divided by party in the past.

It seemed to be, I'm gonna say two thirds to three quarters.

People thought, no, no, that's okay.

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me.

I will say that we saw overwhelming support for that bill that she was just talking about to allow local law enforcement to help with immigration authority.

And that was both Democrats and Republicans broadly supported that.

But when it comes to what is actually going on, what we keep coming back to is, okay, Trump said he was gonna get criminals out of the country.

And that is not what we're seeing.

I mean, we're seeing many cases of people being detained and arrested who seem to be just law abiding community members.

And so I think that, then we start to get more into, okay, the party that really just supports Trump and wanted to elect Trump and the party that maybe has more of a, I wanna say nuanced view on immigration, but maybe it's just more specific topics.

What is interesting to me though, about the fact, Dylan, this is a national survey, is that we talk about this a lot.

I mean, unfortunately, I'm sure viewers are gonna be upset when I remind them I live in Phoenix, but Phoenix is certainly a little bit more conservative than Tucson is.

So Tucson doesn't always reflect this because there is some tremendous positive activism for folks in Tucson and Southern Arizona saying, we don't like this, but how do you think that reflects against the rest of the country?

And we hear surveys like this.

I would think that Tucson's numbers would be a little bit more in the democratic aisle and so democratic column.

What are your thoughts on that?

That's probably likely.

We're seeing some rather concerted activism all over the country, really.

It's not something that is just in very blue spaces, so to speak.

There are people who are demonstrating and really just actually getting in the way when ICE shows up to arrest some people.

There have been a few instances where crowds have actually driven off ICE officers.

If they actually are ICE officers, people show up claiming to be without any name tags or uniforms or badges, just guys with blue jeans and masks and tactical gear, which is a whole nother kind of can of worms.

But what I'm actually interested in is, where do the people who are not aligned with either party break down?

Is it kind of a reflective split?

Independents kind of reflect similarly to the rest of it?

Yeah, well, in the vast majority of independents do typically vote for the same party every election.

Now, independents, and when I tell people that, they often will take it for a second.

Like, oh, I don't, I'm an independent and I vote for different parties.

And that's pretty rare.

Most independents do prefer a party.

And we do see in survey research that independents tend to look a lot like partisans in their responses.

Now, we find that independents can, as a group, are maybe more in the middle.

But if you really break it down and say, okay, which party are you usually voting for?

About half of independents say they vote for the Democrats and about half of independents say they vote for the Republicans.

I mean, the electorate right now is really, really polarized.

And that group of Americans who's really not sure who kind of switches, who's kind of in between, is really very small.

It's usually about 10% of all independents really don't have any party loyalty.

So, you know, Elon Musk today made a statement, well, maybe we need a third party that's in between the two parties.

And that kind of statement makes political scientists bring and explode because we just don't have that.

Didn't No Labels try that?

Yeah, we had a lot of solid attempts.

But there's not really a critical mass of Americans who kind of agree with both parties.

Typically, an independent, it leans more liberal or leans more conservative.

And a middle party that tries to bring those two together is gonna have a pretty tough time getting a strong voter base.

Well, briefly on that though, Arizona probably wouldn't have two Democratic US senators if it weren't for independents, right?

In the case of Ruben Gallego saying, Kari Lake, even I can't go that way.

And with Mark Kelly being someone who had a little bit more universal appeal to some extent.

Yeah, I think in Arizona specifically, the Democratic candidates have done a really, really great job of portraying themselves as moderate.

Democrats and Republicans nationally, not just in Arizona, overwhelmingly call themselves ideologically moderate.

So most Americans say they're moderate, they think they're moderate.

Now, that doesn't mean they're right in the middle of every issue.

And that doesn't mean that they kind of agree with both.

It can mean a lot of different things to people.

But most Democrats don't view themselves as very liberal and most Republicans don't view themselves as very conservative.

Kelly, Gallego, Hobbs, these are all candidates that really successfully pulled off that moderate image much more so than the Republican were able to do.

Yeah, and before we come back to more data, Sarah, I wanted to ask you, there were two quotes I pulled out from your tariffs article.

One is from Mayor Romero of Tucson.

"Our economy is very fragile because of the cast "that Trump is causing with his on again, off again tariffs.

"But then," and this sort of speaks somewhat to different politics, the president and CEO of the Nogales, Santa Cruz County Chamber of Commerce said the city's economy Has yet to feel the impact of the tariffs as you wrote.

So this year, sales have been steady compared with last year.

So I guess that shows again, it really sort of depends on what side of the road you're feeling like.

Did that ring true in terms of your reporting?

Just the idea that, okay, the economic perspectives may be different depending on what side or what part of the city you're from or what part of the state you're from?

I think it's a little bit, but I think the majority of people were feeling very negative.

I mean, the manufacturers were saying that their clients, well, the manufacturing groups that helped manufacturers set up in Mexico were saying their clients were paying, were paying millions of dollars over several days in duties, and that was being passed to the customer.

Small businesses are raising prices.

And so it is interesting, it hasn't been felt in a big scale in Nogales, and they have the mine and new construction with that.

So it's interesting that it's not all negative.

Some people say they haven't felt the economic impact yet.

Yeah, perspectives are interesting.

I'm gonna go back, Professor Klar, because this is one of the most fascinating things to me when it comes to how people feel about the educational institutions and Trump administration wanted to pull back from funding for research.

So tell us about how different it was, again, with Republicans and Democrats, even those who had similar educational backgrounds.

Yeah, what I found in this most recent survey, again, this is about 1,000 Americans across the country, Democrats and Republicans have really similar relationships to higher education and experiences with higher education.

So I find, for example, Republic are equally likely to have gone to college.

They're equally likely to hang out with people who went to college.

I asked in the survey, which I found pretty interesting, do you know anyone, or how many people do you know that went to an Ivy League school?

And I listed the Ivy League schools, because a lot of people don't know what they are.

And about half a percent of Americans attended an Ivy League school.

It's easy to forget that, because we see it in the news, Trump talks about them so much, and we see them in the newspapers, like 0.5% of Americans went to an Ivy League school, despite the fact that we talk about this so much.

So in the survey, I said, do you know anyone in your life?

And half of Republicans and half of Democrats say, no, I don't know one person who attended an Ivy League school.

So their backgrounds are very similar when it comes to their experiences with higher ed.

But again, dramatically different viewpoints on Trump's attacks on higher ed, if you wanna put it that way, or Trump's very antagonistic relationship with higher ed right now.

I asked about support or opposition to the Trump administration withdrawing research funding from universities.

And again, very strong support among Republicans, much to a much higher degree opposition among Democrats.

Now this isn't based on their own experiences, because again, it's not as though Democrats went to these schools and Republicans didn't.

They're equally unlikely to have gone to any of these schools, frankly.

But again, it's partisanship that really draws that line.

You can take that apart a little bit more, is it just because of how divided the country is?

Because that does seem to be one where, the joke for many years is that almost, how many Supreme Court justices did we have who didn't go to an Ivy League school?

How many presidents did not go to an Ivy League school?

And that is sort of, one would think that would affect people's perspectives generally, maybe from a socioeconomic standpoint, as opposed to party divide.

Well, I think there's really two things going on.

One, I mean, it all comes back to uncertainty in a way, as everyone was saying.

When policies are so uncertain, it allows people to interpret them however they want to.

So I mean, what is the tariff policy right now?

Does anyone really exactly know?

What is the immigration strategy?

The less that we know about what's going on, the more voters are able to interpret it however they'd like to.

So you can cast a pretty clear story in any direction at this point, because we don't really have a lot of transparent information about what these policies are.

So I think that's one part of it, just sort of the partisan interpretation.

And second, we do know that people who are choosing to identify as Republicans versus Democrats, have very different levels of trust in institutions generally.

And for Republicans right now, there's very low trust in media, in higher ed, in universities, in any sort of traditional institution, and any sort of attacks on universities.

Does, you know, it satisfies that desire to weaken these elite institutions.

Well, speaking of elite institutions, that is my segue dealing to you.

But I want to have the group weigh in on this Justine Wadsack suit.

Former state senator was in the news again, she'd filed this eight million dollar lawsuit, and now the city of Tucson is saying not so fast.

So without giving us a ton of background, the Senate and you were right on top of this when it began last summer, or at least when we really started talking about it last summer.

So what stands out about this particular step right now?

Well, in one sense, this is kind of just another little turn of the wheel in the continuing saga of Justine Wadsackk and her speeding ticket.

You know, the city of Tucson followed a motion, asking the judge in the case to just toss it out, calling it a political charade.

Back in, I believe it was March, the city attorney called it ridiculous.

This is a suit that makes an entire laundry list of claims, but basically comes down to saying that the Tucson Police Department and city officials conspired against Justine Wadsack to make her lose her primary election.

And she hasn't really brought any proof of this yet.

She hasn't pointed to any specific evidence for the long list of claims that she's making that she was targeted because of her sex, that basically that they were out to get her in ever so many ways when she was, as police say, pulled over for going more than 70 miles an hour down Speedway in a 35 zone.

More than a year ago.

Yeah, and at the time, I mean, didn't she sort of mix up prosecution and persecution to some extent?

Well, that's kind of open to question exactly what she said.

The police report that was filed before the ticket was actually served on her, one, a TPD lieutenant had a phone call with her, called her up and said, "Hey, we are actually gonna give you a ticket, "even though you say you had legislative immunity, "we're gonna give you a ticket."

And the officer said that Wadsack claimed that it was political persecution.

Now that's kind of been transformed in the lawsuit to political prosecution, whether it's political at all, or as city officials say, it's a cop who pulled over somebody who was going too fast.

Danyelle, what are your thoughts on this?

This has been going on for a while.

Well, something when I was going over this new story that the Sentinel published this week, I was thinking about just the part where she was upset in the lawsuit about, she said that TBD told reporters about what had happened.

And I was wondering, does that even matter?

What does that really have to do with it?

And then I saw that the city attorney had basically said she doesn't prove that there was any unlawful telling of, that the police didn't tell press in any way that was unlawful.

And I had to read it a few times to kind of wrap my head around the mess of what was being said, but I'd love to hear your perspective on that, Dylan.

Well, we at the Sentinel very much protect our sources.

I can tell you folks that, sure, we knew that this had happened.

And if she had just dealt with her ticket, it probably would never have been a news story.

I mean, who's never been pulled over for speeding?

I think everybody at this table has probably got a speeding ticket.

I was pulled over on my bike once for going through a stop sign.

That's not such a big deal.

It was the Justine Wadsack herself making it into a political case, claiming that TPD was conspiring against her to make her lose her primary, and then continuing to kind of press the case and claiming in court that legislative immunity is basically a get out of jail free card and that a state lawmaker can never be prosecuted for anything that they do while they're in session.

Just kept kind of spiraling along.

It's very much a case of the Streisand Effect where you keep making news about yourself.

And Sarah, briefly, you made the point before we started taping about the difference between Mark Finchem and what are some thoughts that come to mind for you as we wrap up here?

I mean, Mark Finchem also got a speeding ticket while the legislative session was going on, and it was dismissed because of that.

So they didn't wait till after to give it to him.

And he said at the end of my colleague's article, he said they should never have written it.

Should never have written that ticket.

So I don't know.

It's a different case.

It's kind of interesting.

That's what Watsack's attorney has claimed.

Watsack should never have been pulled over.

The cop should have seen her little sticker on her car that says she was alone.

She was still going 71 and a 35.

And the attorney said that she should never have been pulled over.

Wow, okay.

We've only got about 30 seconds left.

So let me go back to you.

This is not about, I don't wanna cast aspersions, Justine Wadsack I don't know her personally.

But why would she continue to want, you mentioned the Streisand Effect, why does she wanna continue to be out there?

Because one would think this is not gonna work out well for her.

Isn't this somewhat embarrassing?

I can't speak to her personal interpretation of things.

And she never wants to respond to our emails and phone calls about this.

But they do negative headlines, right?

I mean, if some people go through the world thinking that if they're being paid attention to, that's a good thing.

And when you wanna put taxpayers on the hook for eight million or nine million or whatever number that you are putting in your lawsuit, that's a significant sum of money.

And yeah, for a politician to do that, people in the press are going to pay attention to that.

Whether it's gonna continue or not, or the federal judge just tosses this out.

We'll have to see.

I will say real quick, our columnist at the Sentinel, Blake Morlock, is making the case that actually the city should not try and get this tossed out.

He would like to see this go to court and evidence offered.

Sorry, I don't need to cut you off.

It's all for this edition of the Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Enjoy the rest of your day.