Yassamin Ansari

Watching the watchers: The planned immigration detention center in Marana is raising big questions as deaths in immigration detention reach record levels. It’s not clear who would be able to rein in any abuse inside the Marana facility, considering federal civil rights offices are shells of their former selves and local officials don’t have much say, Yana Kunichoff reports for the Arizona Luminaria. At a facility in Florence, inmates disputed ICE’s account of the days leading up to the death of Emmanuel Damas, a Haitian asylum seeker who died from an infected tooth, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari visited the detention center and said inmates told her they had to stand in front of Damas’ cell and demand he be treated before medical staff took his complaints seriously. (March 23, 2026)

Trying to set a limit: After months of horrific reports from ICE detention centers, Democratic U.S. Reps. Adelita Grijalva, Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton are trying to set a 12-hour limit on how long people can be held at holding facilities like the one near the Mesa Gateway Airport. The trio visited the holding facility recently and called it a “failure of basic humanity” in a news release. “No one should be forced to sleep on concrete floors or share a toilet in full view of dozens of others, in confined spaces never meant for prolonged detention,” Grijalva said. “This bill restores commonsense limits, strengthens oversight, and makes clear that humane treatment is not optional — it’s the law.” (April 30, 2026)

Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari visited the Eloy Detention Center for the third time last week to call for better health care for an immigrant detainee who is suffering from leukemia (Noah Cullen / PinalCentral) (November 11, 2025)

Extremism: Republican U.S. Rep. Eli Crane of Northern Arizona’s Congressional District 2 introduced legislation to defund the National Endowment for Democracy, which supports pro-democracy groups around the world, and which Crane says is “a key contributor to global censorship campaigns, domestic propaganda, and regime change politics,” the Verde Independent’s Tony Capobianco writes. Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari announced her extreme heat legislative agenda, which includes a trio of bills dealing with urban heat mitigation, emergency preparedness and studying the economic impact of extreme heat. Finally Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton launched a new “extreme heat” caucus in Congress, per KJZZ’s Katherine Davis-Young. (June 5, 2025)

Laura Looner: Nutty online conspiracist Laura Loomer launched an anti-Islamic attack on Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari after Ansari called her out for tweeting that Christians and Jews need to arm themselves against Muslims, per the Republic’s Laura Gersony. "There’s no such thing as Hate Speech, Muslima. You are a Muslim who came from Iran," Loomer replied to the religiously agnostic, Seattle-born Ansari. (June 25, 2025)

Welcome to dystopia: After President Donald Trump bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday and forced the United States into war in the Middle East without congressional approval, Arizona’s Republican political players say to “trust” the president, while Democrats like U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego want evidence on why the bombings were necessary, the Republic reports. Our sister ‘sletter, the Tucson Agenda, dives into the candidate reactions in the Congressional District 7 race. Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari, whose family fled Iran during the 1979 revolution, wants her congressional colleagues to vote on the War Powers Resolution to rein in Trump’s military powers. And on Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened threat environment” in the U.S. (June 23, 2025)

The court stakeouts continue: Federal immigration officials returned to Phoenix’s immigration court last week to detain migrants whose cases were dismissed as part of Trump’s continued bid to arrest people showing up for scheduled immigration hearings, the Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Gomez reports. ICE agents were staring through binoculars on top of a parking structure to track down people leaving court in cars, then relaying that information to other federal officials who followed them in white vans. That same day, Arizona U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari toured an immigration detention center in Eloy, where two detainees have died this year, and said a group of women told her horror stories. Female detainees said a guard forced them to walk around the facility’s yard in the heat without water as they yelled degrading comments, per the Phoenix News Times’ Morgan Fischer. (June 2, 2025)

Voting wrongs: Besides the threat of a lawsuit against Arizona’s political maps from Senate President Warren Petersen, last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will have longterm implications for Arizona’s map-making entity, the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, Sasha Hupka writes for Votebeat. The decision makes it much harder to challenge maps as racially discriminatory, meaning Arizona’s “majority-minority” districts, like Southern Arizona’s CD7 and Phoenix’s CD3, represented by Democrats Adelita Grijalva and Yassamin Ansari, respectively, may not exist after the next round of redistricting in 2030. Same goes for legislative districts that give minority groups the opportunity to elect “representatives of their own choice.” “At the end of the day, this is going to be a really big story for Arizona in 2031,” Democratic consultant and redistricting nerd DJ Quinlan explained. (May 4, 2026)

Unseen tragedy: While Democratic U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego was accusing the Trump administration of making Americans “sicker, poorer and less secure” outside the Capitol during the State of the Union speech, Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari’s guest was sharing the heart-rending story of her partner, Arbella “Yari” Marquez, who suffers from leukemia and has been in immigration detention in Eloy for months. Marquez has lost 70 pounds while in detention and now vomits blood regularly, John Washington reports for LOOKOUT. (February 26, 2026)

No chance to hide: When three Democratic members of Congress showed up unannounced at an ICE holding facility in Mesa, they came away saying the overcrowded conditions in the facility were “shocking,” “shameful” and people were packed in “like sardines,” Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports for the Arizona Mirror. Democratic U.S. Reps. Greg Stanton, Yassamin Ansari and Adelita Grijalva decided to show up without warning after the Mirror reported last week that the number of detainees dropped right after two of the Democratic lawmakers gave the required seven-days notice for a planned visit. Then the number of detainees shot back up right after that first visit. At a different ICE facility in central Phoenix, the wife of a detainee says 33 men are crammed into a single cell and the food is so bad it’s making some detainees vomit, the Republic’s David Ulloa Jr and Daniel Gonzalez report. (April 13, 2026)

U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari is calling for an end to for-profit detention centers as the Trump administration’s mass deportation program ramps up (Morgan Fischer / New Times) (January 15, 2026)

Calling bullshit: Despite publicly available data showing overcrowding at an immigration holding facility in Mesa, a Department of Homeland Security official claimed two Democratic members of Congress were wrong when they highlighted the overcrowding, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. As MacDonald-Evoy previously reported, one of the few times the facility wasn’t overcrowded was when U.S. Reps. Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton visited the facility in February, after giving ICE a week-long heads-up about the visit. (May 26, 2026)

That’s suspicious: An immigration holding facility in Mesa is routinely overcrowded and keeps detainees longer than intended, but just happened to drop near capacity ahead of a congressional visit in February, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. The site is meant to hold 157 people, yet regularly housed more than 500 before Democratic U.S. Reps. Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton announced their visit. After the notice, numbers dipped, then climbed right back up once they left. (April 10, 2026)

The ICE ROI: Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari wants a meeting with federal immigration officials to get details on reported plans to build a massive ICE detention center in Glendale, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. Meanwhile, Avelo Airlines is ending its deportation flights out of the Mesa Gateway airport because it wasn’t making enough money. (January 12, 2026)