Incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani is facing Democratic opponent Kirsten Engel for the second time in the Nov. 5 race in Arizona’s 6th District, as both candidates claim they’re more solutions-oriented than their opponent on immigration and border-security issues.
“My personal experience with the immigration system directly influences my views and policy positions,” Ciscomani said in a Sept. 30 emailed statement to the Arizona Daily Star. “Finding solutions to this issue, which has been ignored by both sides of the aisle, is personal to me and one of the main reasons I ran for Congress.”
Born in Hermosillo, Sonora, Ciscomani is the first naturalized citizen from Mexico to represent Arizona in the U.S. Congress. His family immigrated from Hermosillo, Sonora, to Tucson when he was 11, and he became a U.S. citizen 13 years later.
Ciscomani says he supports streamlining the “outdated, slow, bureaucratic, and expensive” U.S. immigration system.
“I am pro-immigration, pro-trade and pro-security,” he said. “The main difference is that those who try to ignore the current state of affairs, including my opponent Kirsten Engel, condone the lawless nature of our current system. Meanwhile, I am focused on working on a safe, efficient, and clear pathway to immigrate into our country that curtails the terrible practice of human trafficking.”
Engel, a University of Arizona law professor and former state legislator, counters that Ciscomani’s party is the one preventing progress on immigration. In a Sept. 16 interview with the Star, Engel pointed to the bipartisan border-security bill that died in the Senate this year after Donald Trump urged Republican legislators to vote against it.
“That bill fell apart because Republicans wanted to support Trump in keeping the border a crisis,” said Engel, who said she moved to Arizona 20 years ago for a job at the UA. “This issue deserves our attention and figuring out how we do provide real solutions, and stop it from being just this political football that is only serving to divide people, rather than coming together to solve it.”
The bipartisan border-security bill would have added 100 more immigration judges and 4,300 more asylum officers, providing quicker adjudication of asylum claims, Engel said. It also funded more border agents and officers, as well as high-tech scanning equipment at ports of entry to intercept fentanyl and other smuggling activity that overwhelmingly occurs at official pots.
Kirsten Engel, (D), and Rep. Juan Ciscomani, (R-incumbent), are candidates for the U.S. representative in Arizona’s Congressional District 6.
“It certainly wasn’t a perfect deal by any means, but I think it was a step forward,” she said. Ciscomani “rejected it for political reasons, to please his party bosses.”
Ciscomani told the Star in June he would have been open to amending the bill, had it made it to the U.S. House. He objected to what he said was a too-high threshold of Border Patrol migrant encounters before restrictions on asylum access took effect. Those restrictions would kick in when daily migrant apprehensions hit an average of 5,000 over five days.
Supporters of the bill have clarified that doesn’t mean 5,000 people would have been released from federal custody; it’s the number of migrants apprehended by border agents before restrictions would go into effect.
Ciscomani has called Engel “out of touch” on issues that matter to Arizona, including border issues, which he said require a multi-pronged approach.
“Mexico is our top trading partner. We must enhance trade and commerce by investing in our ports of entry,” he said. “There is a national security and humanitarian crisis at the border. We must enforce current immigration laws and protect the vulnerable women and children being exploited by the Mexican drug cartels. I firmly believe that a three-bucket approach — security, trade and immigration — is the best way to achieve progress on this issue.”
Both candidates say they support finding a path to permanency for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
In the presidential election, Ciscomani has endorsed Republican candidate Trump, who has called immigrants from Mexico rapists and criminals and promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Ciscomani did not respond to the Star’s Sept. 24 inquiry about whether he supported Trump’s promised mass deportations, which would potentially separate more than 4 million U.S.-born children from their undocumented parents. The hit to the U.S. workforce would also upend the economy, experts say.
The cost to arrest, detain and deport 1 million undocumented people per year would be $88 billion annually, for a total of $968 billion over 11 years, according to an analysis from immigrant-rights group American Immigration Council.
Engel said she’s been “disgusted” by Trump’s recent comments demonizing Haitian migrants in Ohio. She said the proposed mass deportations would “tear communities apart.”
“People here deserve something better than this drastic plan of yanking people out of their homes and deporting them,” she said.
After three terms as a state legislator, in 2022 Engel lost her bid for the 6th Congressional District seat to Ciscomani. About 5,000 votes separated the candidates.
“It was an extremely close race last time and I was very much outspent by outside Republican Super PAC money that flooded this district against me,” Engel said. “This time around, I think we’ve got a lot of support both at the grassroots level and we also have support at the national level for my campaign.”
The Tucson Sentinel reported Engel set a new state record in fundraising between April 1 and June 30, raising more than $1.7 million. Ciscomani raised about $1 million in that timeframe, Federal Election Commission records show.
