Arizona U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego takes on Trump policies in Iowa stop

DAVENPORT, IOWA — After touring the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, attending the Iowa State Fair and meeting with Johnson County Democrats, U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona made a stop here for a town hall meeting with local Democrats and their supporters on Saturday.

Sharing the stage with Gallego were state Sen. Mike Zimmer and Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart.

Hart said the party is running a Democrat in every state race so they can get the word out about the party and connect with voters.

Meeting with reporters before the event, and then with about 185 people at Golden Leaf Banquet Center, Gallego said his goal in coming to Iowa is to basically help Democrats connect with the people once again and start taking elections away from Republicans.

“We won in a very hard state in a very hard year,” Gallego said of his U.S. Senate race against Kari Lake, who is from the Quad Cities.

“We had some lessons learned that I think the Democrats need to take on,” he added. “We need to be winning in Iowa. We need to be winning in Nebraska. We need to be winning in Texas. Because every time we retreat and we just go to little safe spaces, sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.”

The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the working class and middle class, but that party got away from that vision, and people started not identifying with Democrats, Gallego said. But the months since President Donald Trump returned to office have been clarifying for Democrats.

Protecting the working class and the middle class is what Democrats have always been about, he said.

Iowa politicians like Sen. Joni Ernst and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Gallego said, have been making Iowa and Arizona “sicker and poorer.”

In response to Gallego’s visit to Iowa, Anthony Fakhoury, communications director for Miller-Meeks, said in a statement to the Quad-City Times that “Iowans won’t forget (Gallego’s) record: from cheering on the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the Iowa caucuses to openly calling for small farmers to be ‘taken over.’

“His newfound interest in the Midwest is nothing more than political theater from a radical progressive with values Iowa has rejected time and again,” Fakhoury said.

To turn things around, Gallego said, he needs to have partners not only in Arizona but in Iowa and other places around the country.

The focus right now is on the 2026 elections, he said. Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, represented by Miller-Meeks, which includes the Iowa Quad-Cities, is considered a toss-up district by election forecasters such as the Cook Political Report.

Gallego said Republicans are looking to gerrymander with mid-decade redistricting in states such as Texas to maintain their power base.

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“They know what they’re doing is harmful to the people of Iowa and Arizona, so instead of trying to change course they’re trying to change voters,” he said.

In the first half of the Biden administration, when Democrats held the presidency and both houses of Congress, Gallego said, they should have passed anti-gerrymandering legislation to “get big money out of politics and stop partisan gerrymandering.”

However, he added, a couple of Democrats refused to participate in that effort, “and we’re all paying for those results.”

In the meantime, to counter the moves by Republicans, Democrats should be doing their own redistricting.

“There should be no unilateral disarmament at all,” Gallego said.

In terms of immigration, Gallego said there is a way to completely shut down the border and help the people who are here without status.

Many migrants who have been in the U.S. for years aren’t just people living and working here.

“They’re not just part of our community, they’re part of the economy,” he said.

Instead of investing in more agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and separating families, it would be better to take these people, whose only crime is coming into the country illegally, get them work status, make them pay a fine and then put them in line for legal status behind people who did come into the U.S. legally.

Being “tough guys” and going after migrants who have no criminal record beyond the fact that they came into the country illegally “is not making us safer,” Gallego said.

Laurie Lusinski, chair of the Muscatine County Democrats, asked that Gallego take a message to the Democratic National Committee about taking away the Iowa first-in-the-nation caucuses.

“They screwed us,” Lusinski said. “Not just us, but they screwed Iowa. I can’t tell you the amount of revenue that was lost here. South Carolina doesn’t even want it. We want it.”

Visiting the meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, he said, was impactful and took him back 27 years to the time he was working to pay for his schooling and help support his family.

Going during the 6 a.m. shift, which Gallego said he had also worked, he wanted to learn what the people are going through now.

“It’s still hard work,” he said. “It’s still skilled work. It’s still dangerous work.”

But, Gallego added, what he heard from workers “wasn’t complaints, but more hopes.”