Ruben Gallego Ad Features Sheriff Who Likened Border Agents to Nazi Secret Police

Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego’s (D.) latest effort to rebrand himself as a border hawk is a campaign ad that features an Arizona sheriff who supports “porous” borders and has compared federal immigration agents to Nazi secret police.

Gallego’s campaign is spending seven figures on the ad, which features Gallego riding shotgun with Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway on a patrol mission along the U.S.-Mexico border. “He’s fighting for solutions. Better technology, more manpower; so people like me can do our jobs,” says Hathaway.

The ad is part of a push by Gallego to cast off his progressive past, considered a liability in his race against Republican Kari Lake. Gallego, who once called himself a “true progressive voice in Congress,” quit the Congressional Progressive Caucus earlier this year and has toned down his criticism of police and federal immigration authorities.

But Hathaway is anything but a border hawk.

Elected sheriff in 2020, Hathaway is well known in libertarian circles as a staunch critic of government enforcement of border security. “Remember that state border enforcers have borne names such as Stasi, Gestapo, KGB, Border Patrol, and Homeland Security,” he wrote in his 2015 book, Immigration: Individual Versus National Borders.

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Hathaway’s views have not softened in the nine years since the book.

In a 2017 essay for the Libertarian Institute he wrote that “porous national borders are economic safety valves.” Hathaway said in a 2021 interview about his book that he was “baffled” by libertarians who argued in support of federal government involvement in border protection.

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