For many Arizonans, Trump's claims ring hollow | Opinion

The president may be pleased with the work he's done for people at the top, however the people on the ground in Arizona see a far different view.

By Alejandra Gomez, For The Republic | March 3, 2026

President Trump has been spending a lot of time trying to convince Americans that everything is great. During his State of the Union address on Feb. 24, he bragged about the economy he’s built, saying prices are down and working folks have more cash in their pockets. He claimed that we’re safer as a country now than we were a year ago, and that he’s hard at work protecting democracy.

The view from on the ground in Arizona is far less rosy.

Over the past year, Arizonans have increasingly struggled to make ends meet as the cost of living rises. Instead of offering us relief, Trump and Republicans in Congress delivered additional tax cuts to billionaires and big corporations while advancing cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, freezing childcare funding, and blocking clean energy investments that would lower costs for working families. We are told the country cannot afford to care for its people, yet billionaires get their biggest-ever tax cuts and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gets more funding than the entire military budget of Denmark.

How do Trump's policies impact Arizonans?

At Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), we see the consequences of those policy choices in our communities every day. The parent who is losing SNAP support. The grandparent who is anxious about Medicaid cuts. The childcare worker who is confronting frozen funding. The family who is watching their utility prices rise as clean investments are blocked.

Arizonans like Dee McDonald are bearing the brunt of the Trump administration’s failures. McDonald is raising five grandchildren in Phoenix, and SNAP keeps food on their table. “Without it, we wouldn’t survive,” she told us. Cutting SNAP rips food from the mouths of her grandchildren and families like hers.

For millions of Arizonans, the impact is not theoretical, it’s immediate and personal. And the gap between what our president claims as reality and the lived experience of our community is growing even wider.

As Trump mulls how to seize more power over our elections in the name of “defending democracy,” we know from recent experience in Arizona that his agenda will do the exact opposite. When lawmakers prepared to hear SB1570, a proposal that would have stationed ICE officers at every polling location across our state, more than 150 leaders from LUCHA arrived ready to testify. We came to defend a simple principle: voting should be free from intimidation, equally accessible to all.

At the entrance, Latino residents were stopped and handed identical two-sentence trespass notices, unsigned and not even printed on official letterhead. They were not addressed by name; they were issued on the basis of race. Meanwhile, white community members passed through security without incident and took their seats inside the hearing room. Young Latinas were blocked at the threshold and warned they would be arrested if they stepped forward. Before a single word of testimony was spoken, the line dividing who belonged and who did not had already been drawn.

ICE at polling places bill tip of anti-immigrant iceberg

In a state where immigrant families already live with the daily reality of raids, detention and deportation, placing ICE officers at polling locations would have forced voters to weigh their constitutional right against the safety of their families. That is not election integrity. It is intimidation institutionalized. And it did not stand alone. SB1570 was one of more than two dozen anti-immigrant bills introduced this session, measures designed less to solve real problems than to construct an atmosphere of fear. Together, they form a strategy: raise the stakes of participation, heighten uncertainty and make civic engagement feel dangerous for the very communities whose voices are most needed.

Ultimately, the bill stalled and died in committee. We emerged victorious, but our fight at the Capitol is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of intimidation, fear and cruelty, and distracts from a massive upward transfer of wealth while immigrants and working families bear the deepest harm. The affordability crisis that GOP policy has aggravated is as real and urgent as their attempts to undermine a free and fair democratic process.

LUCHA will continue to show up and fight for the Arizona we deserve, focused on an affordability agenda rooted in dignity, not policies built on exclusion and fear. We will stand for all Arizonans and for a government that invests in health care, food, childcare, clean energy, and safe elections rather than funneling wealth upward through tax breaks and backroom deals.

They divide us so they can cash in. Only if we let them.

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