Ruben Gallego ad features sheriff who compared border agents to Nazi secret police

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway has repeatedly insulted border agents as “morons” and advocated for “porous” borders.

Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego's (D.) latest effort to portray himself as a border hawk is a campaign ad featuring 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,” Hathaway says.

The ad is part of a push by Gallego to shed his progressive past, which was seen as a liability in his campaign against Republican Kari Lake. Gallego, who once called himself “a true progressive voice in Congress,” left 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 strong critic of the government's enforcement of border security. “Remember, state border control agents have names like Stasi, Gestapo, KGB, Border Patrol, and Homeland Security,” he wrote in his 2015 book: Immigration: individuals versus national borders.

Hathaway, who calls the state a “false god,” argued that supporters of federal involvement in border protection “endorse the random patrols of a criminal gang that will just as easily knock out, pillage and shooting innocent “legal” residents while promoting the image of a false invasion crisis.”

“Legal residents are a trapped, registered, and herded mob that unwittingly funds these predators,” wrote Hathaway, who also refers to border agents as “morons” three times in his book.

“Do not porous borders actually enhance freedom by diminishing the power of oppressors and their accomplices who seek to prevent their populations enclosed within barriers from improving their own well-being?” he asked.

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

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 supported federal involvement in border protection.

As sheriff, Hathaway took conciliatory stances on border enforcement and opposed technologies to monitor illegal border crossings. He gained national attention for his opposition to Customs and Border Protection's use of balloon aerostats to monitor the border. He called former Gov. Doug Ducey's (R) plan to build a border wall “ridiculous” and threatened to arrest any contractors who helped build it. He has disputed that there is an “invasion” of the southern border and opposes a ballot initiative that would allow sheriffs to arrest people who cross the border illegally.

Earlier this year, Hathaway smeared an Arizona rancher who was charged with murder after he fired warning shots at a group of illegal aliens on his property, killing one man.

Hathaway claimed that the rancher, George Alan Kelly, 75, harbored the idea that he wanted to “hunt Mexicans.” An expert witness said Hathaway’s remarks, made in a YouTube video before Kelly’s trial, were “completely inappropriate, prejudicial and extremely biased,” according to Fox News. The judge in the case declared a mistrial after the jury voted 7-1 in favor of acquittal. Prosecutors later dropped the case.

Gallego and Hathaway's campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.

According to NBC News, Gallego's ad will air in Phoenix and Tucson.