The following is an AZPM original production.

Welcome to this latest edition of the Press Room from the radio studios of AZPM.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Coming up on the program, Senator Ruben Gallego unveils a comprehensive immigration and border security plan and Governor Katie Hobbs vetoes a bill that would have required hospitals to ask people about their immigration status.

With me to talk about these and other topics are Caitlin Schmidt of the Tucson Spotlight, Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel, Rafael Carranza of AZ Luminaria, and Christopher Conover of AZPM News.

Welcome to all of you.

Thanks for being here.

So, Caitlin, Senator Gallego made news earlier this week introducing this outline of a plan that some would describe as "comprehensive," a word we've heard in the past.

What do you make of the timing of it?

What do you make of what you've read about the package?

I mean, I certainly think it's a signpost of what we've been talking about for the past several months here is that these border issues continue to kind of define the political arena right now.

And I mean, if he wants to have a seat at the table, if he wants to be a part of the conversations, I think he's going to have to get on board.

So perhaps, you know, I mean, producing a bill like this that gives a little, that takes a little is maybe the best way to start a conversation, to make some concessions, to make some asks.

I mean, it includes a legal path to citizenship, but it also includes strength in border security, increased funding, which Republicans have been asking.

So I mean, it seems a little bit like an olive branch at this point.

I want to give some specifics, but Rafa, what was your initial reaction to the fact that, again, came out earlier this week on Monday and really sort of blew away all the cable networks he appeared on all of them?

Yeah, I think it just kind of signals the attention that, you know, he has been receiving particularly since, you know, he won in a year that, you know, Trump, I think, pretty much dominated, you know, in the election.

And so the fact that he won in a battleground state like Arizona, I think that probably has given him that boost, that attention boost, because it could potentially be a strategy that that Democrats could follow nationwide, especially in the outreach and talking to voters and how to win back some of the voters.

Perhaps that may have been alienated or that, you know, ended up voting for Trump anyway because of some of these issues like immigration.

Paul, initial thoughts.

Yes, so one thing you see with public polling is you see that people really, you know, while they want the border to be secure, they also want to see immigrants handled really well.

They want to see dreamers being given a pathway to citizenship.

They want to see lots of things that are more humanitarian.

So, you know, I think for Gallego to show that he's kind of in this line, that he's in this space is actually a really good sign for him.

It also shows that he's going to be able to maybe move the Democrats and actually get some policy done.

Yeah, Chris, you were on a conference call earlier Thursday.

What did you hear from Gallego?

He did a conference call with reporters and very much what everybody else has been talking about.

Well, I hate to steal a line from President Trump, but in many ways it's the concept of a plan.

We don't have a bill yet.

He has some outline to it.

And the big thing is that path to citizenship.

I think that's going to be the hang up.

And if it runs all as one bill, I think that could be the poison pill in it because as Paul said, a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans say, all right, border security, stoping fentanyl.

That's probably a really good idea.

Pathway to citizenship for Dreamers.

That's probably doable.

But some of the other things he wants are going to be difficult.

And of course, there were comparisons to the bill that was worked on by Senator Sinema who he replaced.

And he said on the call that, no, her bill didn't pass because of politics.

Well, I don't know quite what Senator Gallego is thinking because I'm pretty sure politics is going to be involved in the passage or non passage of his proposal when he finally files it.

Well, let me stay with you on that because this is he's following this long line of Arizona history from McCain to Kyle to Flake to Sinema.

Now Gallego, I don't know why Kelly's not on board yet to introduce his own plan.

But does that give it any more half the fact that it's a border state senator?

We've seen so many times in the past where there's the gang of eight, gang of four, whatever, and stopped by non border state members of Congress.

Same problem, I imagine.

Sure.

I remember I was in D.C. i when Kyl was the one who Senator Kyl was the one who was pushing the bill at that time.

I was there the day it blew up.

Senator Kyl was not a happy man because I was sitting with him in his office when the wheels came off of that.

But to your point, I remember and Paul, you may have been there when Martha McSally had House leadership down and they did a tour of the border.

Of course, we're at John Ladd's Ranch because that's where we do these things.

And Sinema was there.

And the idea was to show these non border members what's actually going on.

And you're right.

That's always Most of the border state members, they all know what's going on.

But it's invariably somebody from Iowa, which is far from the border or something like that that really gets it hung up.

Yeah.

I want to talk more about the path to citizenship.

But Rafael, the plan calls for increasing the annual allotment of some visas, green cards, removing or significantly increasing arbitrary per country caps.

We've heard in the past, again, I mentioned Senator Flake, he was very big on a guest worker plan.

Again, when we look at all the different elements in a patchwork one, that actually seems like one where you might get the business side of the Republican Party to go along with it.

How do you assess that particular part of this supposed plan?

Well, I think that that becomes when when it's made an economic argument, then I think that it does have a lot of support.

It tends to have a lot of support from a lot of business leaders, which includes a lot of Republicans.

But I think we've seen that at times that has not been enough.

And I think ultimately, if there's no political political will from Republicans who honestly, right now, kind of have the upper hand when it comes to immigration, they kind of dominate that conversation and set the agenda, set the tone for that particular topic.

And I think what we saw with cinema, for example, is that she at least had some of those relationships with Republicans and was able to kind of bring them to the table to at least talk about that, even though ultimately the last time with her bill, the larger Republican caucus kind of shied away from that.

But I think that that's going to become like a big challenge, but it is kind of at least a way in into some of these circles reaching out to some of the Republican business leaders.

Caitlyn, that's an interesting point about Senator Sinema in the sense that there were some Republicans who got along with her not to say Senator Gallego won't do that, but this is his first term in the Senate.

I don't know.

That's why I sort of come back to the timing of it.

What do you make of the timing this early?

What is it four months into his first term?

Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, things have been moving pretty fast for this term for everyone.

So it's time to get moving, right?

Start building those relationships.

I think that we have seen things honestly moving at a faster pace than I ever recall coming down from a federal level.

So really, probably there isn't time to waste in building bridges and getting out there and getting his name known and in forging some of those relationships that might help advance this bill or other policy that he wants to put forward.

I find that caps part in removing some of the caps really interesting because we've seen President Trump remove some of the special status for groups like Cubans and having lived and worked in Florida for so many years, old school Republicans, Reagan Republicans, Bush Republicans when I was there.

They were almost sacred.

I mean, that was a communist nation, you know, just off our border, anything we could do to protect them and help them.

And now it's like that.

Send them back.

It's in court, of course.

So it's going to be a really interesting but it's a change in the Republican Party.

Paul, what are your thoughts about the economic aspect first?

I mean, the economic aspect is actually really huge and I think it's sometimes undersold.

I mean, one of the things, too, is like there's also like port infrastructure rebuilds, which is a huge issue for us.

I mean, we have we have, you know, three major ports.

It's a vast amount of money that's flowing through there all the time.

And we haven't historically spent a lot of time putting money towards those things.

One of the other things, too, is, of course, with port infrastructure, comes, the ability to intercept drugs, there's more than non-intrusive inspections, machines.

That's something that Gallego last year came out and really talked about when he was at a press conference in Nogales.

These are all things that are going to be part of the bill.

I mean, one of the hardest part with this bill is that it includes all of these things all at once.

It's very much like the Gang of Eight bill that was done by McCain and Flake.

And that bill succeeded in the Senate and did really well, but it was never never got to a vote in the House.

I think this bill might have the same problem.

I wonder as well, Rafael, let me ask you about the idea that seems like Senator Gallego's speaking of himself almost as a whisperer in some way.

And I know we've we've heard this term.

We've used all of us have proven to use this term that the Latino vote is not a monolith.

And yet he's saying that because of the way he ran his campaign, he was getting messages from a lot of Latino voters.

I would suspect more male Latino voters who are like, well, is there a balance we can find act humanely toward immigrants but still really cracked out of border security?

Do you think his insight as a Latino male is going to help something here?

Well, I think it definitely will be very essential to his messaging.

And I'm sure that, you know, that's something that, again, I think Democrats will be very eager to kind of lean into.

I think we've seen in the past election that, you know, there were some pretty noticeable swings when it comes to Latino voters, particularly among men.

Generally, that seems to be the case now where Latino men and younger men tend to be a lot more conservative.

And so, you know, I think that this could be ultimately like a strategy, you know, for Democrats and kind of like a test for, you know, how they can do that.

And, you know, that messaging, I think, will play a central role.

But of course, you know, drawing on his experience will be will be key to that message.

Paul, any thoughts on that?

I mean, that's a great point.

I think you're right.

I mean, you really go to the idea that like Latinos are not a monolith group.

There's very, very big differences.

And there's even differences even by state.

I mean, the Texas, you know, Texas Latinos, people who are on the border are going to be very different than, say, like Santa Cruz, you know, Latinos.

I mean, Santa Cruz is a very Democratic state or Democratic county.

But you see like counties that are in, you know, sort of especially down to the Rio Grande Valley have become increasingly conservative.

So, you know, it's I think very important to think about how these groups are going to be different, how people are going to vote differently, how the priorities are different.

And I think maybe Gallego kind of sort of is able to set the tone of saying we he said, I think, was interesting line.

We don't have to make a choice between handling people well and also having border security.

We can do both.

But we have to sort of thread that needle.

And maybe he might be the guy who can actually do this.

Yeah.

So even though we are recording this, we're not going to remember any predictions here, I promise.

But, Caitlin, you think there actually is some kind of groundwork to at some point there's something to watch in the next six to nine months that maybe we'll see conversations that maybe we didn't expect to see, especially with the way the Trump administration is pushing mostly one side of this argument, which is not the side.

Yeah, he goes on.

Yeah, I mean, certainly.

Yeah, I don't think this is going to be the bill.

I think, as we said, there's just too many things in here for for people to sign off on all of it.

But I do think it is the start of further conversations and maybe a sign that we're all going to be able to get on the same page somewhere down the road.

Yeah.

Rafael, any progress you think in the next little bit?

I think this is kind of like a long game.

And so I think as Caitlin said, I think it's just kind of the beginning of that.

And I think that the fact that he put himself out there, that Gallego put himself out there kind of makes him kind of like a magnet now for, you know, for these types of conversations.

And so I think that there will be, you know, maybe incremental steps along the way as he's reaching out and trying to build those relationships.

But ultimately, I think any any major action will probably be a couple couple of years away.

And I mean, he just started his six year term.

So he has plenty of time for that.

And that's exactly what I was going to bring up is he's at the month four of a six year term.

He can start setting the conversation, setting the narrative, coming into the midterms.

Then let's see what happens in midterms.

Then we have another presidential election before anything can get hung on him as you couldn't get it done.

And maybe he does it.

He severs the bill and does little pieces of it.

He realizes that you just can't do it as a giant, you know, whatever.

I don't remember what he was calling the act.

You know, it'll be some great name that somebody will come up with, you know, act.

So he's got time and it may be and that may be why we didn't see Kelly jump in.

And we haven't seen a lot of people jump in.

It's like, OK, let the new guy who really has time, let him go see what's going on, scout it out a little and we'll see where people start lining up and then we can come in.

Kelly has an election sooner and things like that.

And Kelly is certainly getting beaten up right now by the right anyway.

Yeah.

Paul, final thoughts on this?

Yeah, I think that's a great point.

I mean, Kelly Kelly has put some work when been involved in or put some forward some border legislation.

There's been other border lay solutions.

But this is sort of a kind of here's the grander plan.

And I think, yes, he has six years to implement or six years to try, which gives him at least, you know, some room and maybe actually get some forward movement.

Yeah.

And Chris, feeding my political junky just for like 30 seconds, Arizona Republic had a column that speculated, oh, my gosh, does this mean Ruben Gallego is looking at the presidency?

And he actually had a there's a quote from NBC, four letter word where he said, of course, I would look at that.

But I mean, is this and that's again, that's a long game, as Rafa mentioned, when you started talking, that's what I was smiling about because that was his quote that popped into my head.

And I thought in some ways it was honest.

I think the full quote minus the words were not allowed to say were basically, I'm a politician.

Of course, I'm thinking about it, but it is not something I'm doing right now.

But he is coming out and we're seeing him more and more.

And his name does get tossed around as a rising star in the Democratic Party, which right now, I think is having a bit of an identity crisis.

So also something to watch.

This is a way for him to represent his home state, represent a lot of his constituency within that and get his name out nationally.

So, Caitlin, briefly, would Kelly and Gallego have like an arm wrestling contest, s Man, I'd love to see that.

Can we host that here?

We'll just clear these mics out.

Absolutely.

Amazing.

Paul, let's change over to a story you wrote for the Sentinel about Customs and Border Protection pulling back on several measures designed to protect some vulnerable folks.

I think we know why the Biden administration put those in before.

But so what's going on here as far as what the Trump administration is doing with CBP?

Yeah, so the acting commissioner actually somebody in currently t because that's not how we do things right now.

And so the acting acting gentleman, Pete Flores, he wrote a memo, just sort of published it very quietly, basically saying we're sending these four policies.

And these four policies were really put in place by the administration with the idea of protecting, especially pregnant women, children and people with serious medical conditions.

And what it really comes down to is Customs and Border Protection is fundamentally not built to hold people for long periods of time.

The agency has ended up in that position a lot.

And the agency has sometimes tried to put itself in that position by building the soft what they call soft sided facilities.

Basically, they're very, very large tents and setting those up.

But the agency still has really struggled in how to take care of people.

And it keeps running into problems.

And the thing is, is that this has been often fatal.

They've had multiple kids that have died in their custody.

They've had women who have died in their custody.

There's also recently there was a suicide at a Yuma station.

A woman killed herself because she it appears that the contractor just didn't check on her in time.

And so the agency has been hit with these problems.

The Trump administration, of course, saying, well, we don't need these policies anymore.

Now, on one side, you could say, well, they don't need these policies anymore because they just don't have that many people in their detention centers.

But the question I think that remains is, if they find themselves in a position where they do have a large number of people, they are holding people for more than 12 hours, 24 hours, 72 hours, how are they going to take care of people?

And you spoke to the ACLU about this.

Right.

What did they say?

They are not happy about it.

Unsurprisingly, they're not happy about it.

The real issue is because I mean, the ACLU has been involved in, I want to say more than a dozen lawsuits involving the health care.

And this is including not just the ACLU national, but also the different one in San Diego, the one in LA, the one in Arizona, and that have been involved in class action lawsuits.

You know, there was one here that went after the Tucson Sector Border Patrol, and it was going back to the problems that were endemic before the Trump administration, going back to the Obama administration, and the lawsuit really found.

And one thing that the judge came back and said is that these facilities are unconstitutional because of the way that people are held for long periods of time.

And these facilities are again, built to be temporary, but people are staying a long time.

So they're like jails.

And jails have a very different standard.

They have a very exacting standard compared to how border pursuits are.

So it really comes down to it that the ACLU thinks that they need to do a better job taking care of people.

Rafael.

Well, I would say I think this also kind of comes, it's kind of part of a broader kind of shift in change in tone in that they're also trying to find ways to discourage people from come.

I mean, we know that, you know, by reducing, for example, the humanitarian parole program, you know, they're they're trying to, you know, get that message out that even if you get here, it doesn't matter if you are a child, if you come with, you know, with as a family unit, that you're not going to be allowed into the country.

And even though, as you know, as Paul mentioned, the numbers are kind of low right now, you know, we that that still has kind of played out.

We've seen, for example, that I think when they released the latest numbers for April, I think it showed that they had only allowed about like four people in on humanitarian reasons throughout the entire border.

And so I think that that that kind of just speaks to kind of like the larger kind of shift that they're really trying to to try to, you know, signal a message out there that, you know, even if you come here, there's there's no guarantee that you're going to get into the country.

Yeah, Caitlin, brief thoughts on this.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of par for the course with what we've been told is going to happen and with what we're seeing happening.

Yeah, Chris, I think the part that for me struck me as ironic is as I was reading Paul's article, and doing some research on all of this, it mentioned that, over time, a number of women had babies in Border Patrol facilities, which therefore makes those children US citizens.

And as I was reading it, I was listening to the US Supreme Court arguments on whether or not birthright citizenship is going to remain in the way it is written now.

So it all plays in together.

All these things that seem like they aren't related are all of a sudden, especially when you get a group of us sitting around the table.

All right, let's move on to earlier this week, Governor Hobbs vetoed a long list of bills, including one that would have required hospitals that accept Medicaid funding to ask about a patient's immigration status.

Sponsor Senator Wendy Rogers basically said it's a data collection in essence.

I don't know that Governor Hobbs believed that because she vetoed it.

Chris, what do you make of the premise of the bill?

And then Governor Hobbs, I don't think a big surprise she vetoed this.

No surprise at all.

And I think everybody who is opposed to that bill, obviously, Senator Rogers was not opposed to it, nor was the majority of the legislature.

What do you do with that data?

Data just doesn't sit out there.

Something gets done with it.

And there are concerns and there are examples that back up the concerns that if you begin asking that question, will it have a chilling effect for people who need health care, possibly in an emergency situation, not wanting to go and get the care they need, because they're going to have to ask questions, even if it is just put off in some database in the cloud forever.

So and not surprising that Governor Hobbs vetoed that.

Caitlin, even if we believe that it was just a data collection, obviously, as Chris mentions, the chilling effect aspect of it.

I mean, the idea of hospitals are supposed to be safe havens, I suspect, right?

Right.

That's the idea, right?

I mean, data collection in general is just a, I mean, it's a basket of chaos, right?

We have, I mean, in the police system, you have victims of sexual assault submitting evidence and rape kits.

There have been instances when that has been later used to identify them as suspects.

So once your DNA, once your information is in a system, there's no pulling it back.

So I think we really should be careful with allowing that access to information, even if it's just the premise of data collection, you never know what's going to be done with it after it's already there and the person can't get it back.

I was gonna say, just to Caitlin I think that the reason I think why there's a desire to kind of collect that data, I think, is because there's kind of a larger thinking behind there that there might be, whatever the data comes, whatever findings they can come across, you know, through that data will likely be used for to create some sort of action.

And so if the idea, for example, here is, this is how much money it's costing hospitals to take care of people who don't have legal documents, in the country, then you know, the next step up there could likely be, let's do something to address that so that they don't have to spend that money.

Several years ago, I did a story actually looking at how much Arizona hospitals, you know, spent on people who are undocumented and who are coming, especially people who are injured across the border, and talking to somebody who was with University Medical Center.

And at the time, you know, she said, yes, I mean, it's, it's, there is a significant cost.

She goes, the bigger issue for me is that Arizona isn't paying its access bills on time, because that's the thing that means I worry, you know, hospitals have had this problem for a long time.

But this is a tiny light item to their total expenditures.

And so asking for this data now, though, does have a chilling effect.

And the other thing is, like, if they collect the data, the data is going to be clearly used, because I mean, right now, you know, the Trump administration has asked for the IRS data to be used for immigration enforcement.

They've asked for health and human services data to be used for immigration enforcement.

There's no reason to suspect that this data, which is gathered by hospitals, isn't going to be used by immigration authorities.

I think that's just unrealistic.

And I think people are kidding themselves at this point, that the data is just going to sit on use.

It's certainly going to be used.

And I think when it comes to data and so many of these bills in the long term, it could have turned around and bit Wendy Rogers, because now we have that data and maybe an administration, I won't even say the Trump administration, but an administration, as Paul said, is not paying its bills.

And now it's the basis of a lawsuit, Arizona suing, you know, somebody who Wendy Rogers might support.

It's like, thank you, Senator Rogers, for giving us the basis for the lawsuit to sue the people you like.

So, again, you don't know what that data is going to be used for.

Well, Caitlin, we've been struck by the idea that we've talked about Juan Ciscomani and whether he's going to oppose certain level of Medicaid cuts.

And yet Paul makes a good point.

If the Medicaid expenses aren't being paid as it is and Arizona can't pay, then what does that do to hospitals generally to have to have even more information?

Again, it just seems chaotic like most things do.

Right.

I mean, and let's talk about medical debt, really.

I imagine that medical debt from U.S. citizens far exceeds the amount of money that hospitals are spending on non-U.S. citizens.

I mean, there are plenty of people out there who are just not paying their medical bills.

So to categorize it as this is a massive expense, I mean, I'm sure this isn't the biggest expense.

And we have language issues, which we've seen recently with some of the detentions that Border Patrol has made, you know, picking up people in Tucson who may or may not have been here undocumented.

And now you're in a crisis emergency situation, language issues and all kinds of things.

It's ripe for problems.

And it's really also ripe for problems because you have people who will have like you're looking for people who have like flu or endemic care who just aren't going to come to the hospital.

It's not going to be the emergen per-se.

It's going to be people who have long term health problems.

So those health problems get worse.

You know, one of the things like during the covid pandemic, I mean, there was lots of people who didn't go to the hospital and then they had more significant health consequences a year, two years later.

You're going to see a large population that's going to be in the sort of same state, which means ultimately you're going to be spending more on their medical care because of that.

We're down to just a minute or so left.

Rafael, I want to say the governor also said the legislation was opposed by business leaders, hospitals and others who, quote, understand that immigration enforcement is best left to federal law enforcement and not health care professionals, end quote.

That seems like a pretty pretty straightforward message on that.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very clear that there's a very there's kind of a battle going on between the Trump aligned GOP in Arizona and then Hobbs kind of being like the the last kind of stopgap in, you know, in trying to get a lot of those Trump priorities in place here in Arizona.

It's interesting point that she mentions the business community on this one, too, because that's sort of has to be Governor Hobbs play on this, right?

Right.

Yeah, she's hoping.

Yeah.

OK, so I'm going to ask one more political question.

We have seen the legislature do a quote unquote end around on certain issues before.

Chris, let me start with you.

Any reason to think the Republican lawmakers might say, you know, let's put this on the ballot.

It wouldn't surprise me at all.

They they've done that a couple of times.

Interestingly, it generally fails.

So it depends on the ballot.

It depends on the year.

But I think this one, especially because the business community is behind it and they will dump a lot of money into a no campaign, would not do well on the ballot.

Paul, just a few seconds.

I think that's a great point.

It's like the four fourteen campaign of the business community against it.

It's probably going to be hard to pass it.

Yeah.

Yeah, agreed.

OK, they'll have to be very strategic on what they want to get on the ballot.

Well, that's interesting.

I was thinking about three fourteen, which was padded with some other things.

It was not quite an emphasis on local law enforcement mentioning fentanyl, mentioning some other things might be a way around.

I don't think it would surprise any of us if that happened.

Everybody, thanks for the great conversation.

Caitlin Schmidt of the Tucson Spotlight.

Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel.

Rafael Carranza of AZ Luminaria.

Christopher Conover of AZPM News.

Again, thank you all for being here and thank you for joining us for this edition of the press.

We'll be back next week.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Enjoy the rest of your day.