Earlier this month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem made a sudden visit to Arizona to discuss “election security,” which she and other Trump administration officials have routinely claimed is being undermined by non-citizen immigrants. When asked by reporters to name a single example of alleged voter fraud, however, she only said: “Oh, I’m sure there’s many of them.” Nevertheless, officials like Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes are not only dealing with confusion and fear stoked by the Trump administration’s declarations, but also directly hostile attempts to take over the state’s elections, including an ultimatum to hand over voter rolls and plans to deploy ICE agents at voting sites.

As both a border state and a battleground between the Democratic and Republican parties, Arizona has been a lightning rod for immigration and election integrity battles long before Donald Trump began his second term. Fontes, who first served as Maricopa County Recorder from 2017 to 2021 and then as the state’s chief election officer since 2023, has become a visible face of opposition against attempts to intimidate and suppress voters by Republicans, which included a much-criticized audit by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on voting machines in the Phoenix metro area.

Now, in the midst of Trump’s second term and a nationwide purge of immigrant workers and families, Fontes told Salon how he is fighting a federal government and political party that is increasingly weaponizing the crackdown to further undermine elections — and shield themselves from angry voters:

"Trump’s promise was that he was going to crack down on “violent criminal aliens” and non-citizens, and he’s obviously taking it far beyond that. With the blackmail letter they sent to my friends over in the Midwest, we realized that what they were actually doing was intimidating Americans for the purpose of getting the voter rolls. The Trump administration realizes that the power in America is our democracy through our elections, and that’s their number one goal, is to mess with the systems that can take them out of power. Their desperate tactics reveal their weakness: the fact that when they’re not politically popular, they have to subvert elections in order to stay in power, because the elections are where the people exert their power."