In the battleground state of Arizona, Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who represents the Sixth Congressional District, hopes to retain his seat in 2024 after defeating Democratic opponent Kirsten Engel by an incredibly slim margin in 2022. But while Ciscomani represents an agricultural district that depends on the skilled labor of immigrant workers to harvest the region’s fruits, nuts, and wine grapes, he’s repeatedly voted with the most anti-immigrant members of his caucus and remained silent as they’ve spewed the same white nationalist rhetoric as the racist mass killer who targeted Latinos in El Paso. Now, his party’s signature campaign proposal, mass deportation, promises to send in military troops to rip apart American families, round up Dreamers, and wreck the economy for the working families in his district. Ciscomani hasn’t indicated that he wouldn’t continue to be the rubber stamp for these plans if given the opportunity.
Ciscomani is again facing Engel in a state that has become friendlier to Democrats in the polls following President Biden’s exit from the 2024 race. In 2020, President Biden flipped Arizona for the first time since 1996, winning the state by about 10,000 votes. While Arizona was trending towards convicted felon Donald Trump in the 2024 race, Vice President Kamala Harris’ entrance to the presidential election has put the state back in play, The New York Times/Siena poll finds. The U.S. House is also in play following Harris’ entrance to the race, leaving Ciscomani with all the more reason to try to make himself appear moderate to appeal to general election voters. His record and silence amid GOP extremism tell a different story.
HE’S FAILED TO PROTECT DREAMERS AND IMMIGRANTS HE’S CLAIMED TO SUPPORT
Ciscomani, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Mexico, has said he’s “a grateful beneficiary of the American Dream,” and is determined to preserve it for “future generations of Arizonans.” The Tucson Sentinel reported that during a recent Q&A with the Southern Arizona Leadership Council, Ciscomani continued to endorse the claim that immigration is “a key issue for him,” and that among the fixes he’d like to see is legal status for Dreamers. That’s a bold claim, because he failed to cosponsor House legislation doing just that.
In June 2023, Texas Rep. Sylvia Garcia reintroduced the American Dream and Promise Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, as well as Temporary Protected Status holders and Deferred Enforced Departure recipients. The bill had already passed the House prior to Ciscomani’s election on a bipartisan vote – twice – and its reintroduction in 2023 would have given him the chance to put his money where his mouth is. However, his name is missing from the list of nearly 210 lawmakers who have cosponsored legislation that would finally make these young immigrants full Americans on paper. Ciscomani would apparently prefer to keep having Dreamers live in limbo as Republicans led by corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton continue to threaten their DACA protections.
The Tucson Sentinel also reported that Ciscomani claimed that passing piecemeal immigration bills like the American Dream and Promise Act is “not the appetite of Congress right now,” but that’s a willful distortion of the facts and a dereliction of his office because House Republicans have shown that they can pass bills – and derail others – when it’s politically expedient for them.
For example, he provided a critical vote to help deliver the May 2023 passage of the draconian H.R. 2, a cynical GOP fundraising tool known as the Child Deportation Act. Ciscomani’s GOP colleagues promoted this despicable legislation – which would have gutted asylum, increased child and family detention, and created a show-me-your-papers scenario amid future natural disaster relief efforts – with white nationalist conspiracy theories about “replacement” and “invasion” that have inspired multiple domestic terrorist attacks. But when Trump derailed an enforcement-heavy Senate border bill that was a straight giveaway to Republicans’ stated policy priorities because he wanted to keep the issue alive and prevent Democrats from benefiting from any potential win in the eyes of voters, Ciscomani went along for the ride.
Ciscomani also voted to make Mike Johnson the Speaker of the House despite his demonstrated pattern of amplifying the white nationalist replacement theory. Then, as Speaker, Johnson has called for the mass deportation of the very Dreamers Ciscomani claims he supports. But there hasn’t been a word from Ciscomani about whether he would again vote for Johnson to run the House so that he can target the Dreamers that Ciscomani represents.
Engel called out Ciscomani’s lack of credibility and integrity on the immigration issue during a recent debate, where the Arizona Republic reports he was kept on the defensive by his Democratic challenger.
“We have a member of Congress who’s representing a border district, who has made the border security his top issue,” Engel told voters. “He gets handed, on a silver platter, a bipartisan deal to make immense progress on a top issue to all of this district. And he rejects it.” Ciscomani, she continued, “wants photo-ops on the border and not actually solving the problem.”
HE’S REMAINED SILENT AS HIS FRIENDS HAVE EMBRACED DEADLY RHETORIC. BUT HE ALSO HAS SOME EXTREME TIES OF HIS OWN
Rather than taking advantage of his position as a southern border legislator to help ground his party in fact-based debate and policy when it comes to solving fixable issues around immigration, Ciscomani has remained silent as his colleagues and party leaders have endorsed deadly violence against immigrants, echoed the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, and embraced deadly white nationalist conspiracy theories.
This past January, Gov. Greg Abbott publicly lamented that Texas couldn’t shoot and kill migrants on sight at the southern border, complaining to right-wing activist and former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch that the “only thing” Texas isn’t doing is “shooting people who come across the border because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” Ciscomani has also been silent following Trump’s repeated, despicable claims that immigrants are “not people” and are “poisoning the blood” – let’s be clear, this is Nazi rhetoric – and as his House colleagues have fully adopted the deadly “invasion” and great replacement conspiracy theories cited as an inspiration in multiple mass casualty terrorist attacks, including the deadliest attack on U.S. Latinos in the modern era.
This past spring, even an anti-immigrant hate group seemed wary about being publicly associated with a dangerous conspiracy theory that resulted in the tragic deaths of 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019. Jessica Vaughan, a staffer with the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies, “vehemently denied” during an April hearing that she’d used this sort of rhetoric. That was a lie, and we had the receipts to prove it.
When anti-immigrant groups founded by a eugenicist like John Tanton are lying about their record left and right, it’s a pretty big indication that the rhetoric adopted by Republicans is reprehensible. So, what’s Ciscomani’s excuse for failing to push back on his friends? But as Engel noted in their debate, Ciscomani has some disturbing ties of his own that aren’t so easy to ignore or downplay, despite his best efforts. The ties are also being exposed on local radio, The Copper Courier reported.
“He has spent most of his adult life on the board of directors of a Christian Nationalist group called the Patriot Academy that believes we should rewrite the constitution to establish a Christian Nation and considers the separation of church and state a ‘myth,’” said Engel for Arizona. “The Patriot Academy trains children as young as eleven years old to use lethal force, believes we should abolish gay marriage and is against abortion with no exceptions.”
Ciscomani’s deep connections to Christian nationalism must not be casually dismissed. It’s an indication that Ciscomani isn’t just going along to get along but is entertaining ideas that up until recently were contained to radical fringes of American politics. His decade-plus association with a Christian nationalist group is part of a deeply disturbing pattern that at best demonstrates Ciscomani’s willingness to look the other way as his friends loudly challenge who gets to be an American based on who they love, the religion they practice, or the accent they speak with.
During the debate, Ciscomani claimed Engel was “grasping at straws” for trying to tie him to the group. But Ciscomani previously admitted that he could “wholeheartedly say that nothing in my life has given me a clearer direction for my life than Patriot Academy.” As the late poet Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
DOES CISCOMANI SUPPORT SEPARATING AMERICAN FAMILIES IN HIS DISTRICT?
Ciscomani not only endorsed Trump for reelection, he has discussed his possible return to the White House in excited tones. “President Trump is going to come in with a different energy than the first time,” Ciscomani claimed to Telemundo in March. He is not wrong, but that energy is because it will be worse than last time. Trump and his allies have had several years since he tried to overturn the rightful results of the 2020 election to plan an even more cruel and destructive agenda. The plans for Ciscomani’s district are right there, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Stephen Miller’s own words. Miller, a key Project 2025 ally, has called for a red state army of National Guard troops and local police to go from door to door, home to home, and community to community in blue states to round up families.
Ciscomani shouldn’t be under the illusion that his district – an agricultural region that highly depends on immigrant workers – will somehow be off-limits because of his endorsement. Instead, it will be an invitation for Miller to send in the show-me-your-papers force into Ciscomani’s district. Does Ciscomani approve of Miller deploying his thugs to his district to separate families and deport workers from their homes, schools, and workplaces?
And, as a Mexican immigrant, he should be aware that Trump’s deportation force has every intention of being ruthless, so no person of color is safe – except maybe a member of Congress. In fact, the racist plan Ciscomani’s friend brags about seeking to out do rounded up and deported many Mexican-American citizens just like him.
Yet, so far, all we hear is silence. Silence as his friends push extreme Christian nationalist ideas. Silence as his friends echo Hitler and deadly domestic terrorists. Silence as his friends scheme on how they can deport his neighbors and constituents. But, the silence speaks volumes.
