Phoenix flooded with billboards depicting violent ICE arrests

Over the last year, Americans have become intimately familiar with the violent tactics of the Immigration and Enforcement agents who have sought to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. In Arizona, ICE has been caught on video ramming cars and drive-by pepper-spraying nonviolent protesters.

But if there’s anyone left who’s been able to avoid those images, a Phoenix-based nonprofit wants to change that. On Monday, the Mijente Support Committee launched a campaign to display more than 200 billboards across the country calling out ICE. Forty of those billboards are scattered across the Valley, reminding residents not only of ICE’s violence but also the cost of their tactics on taxpayers.

“For far too long, our government has prioritized setting up cages and pouring billions into an immigration enforcement apparatus that has left families shattered and communities terrorized,” Marisa Franco, the co-founder of Mijente Support Committee, said in a statement.

The billboards contain images of ICE agents violently arresting protesters, pinning immigrants to the ground, holding large rifles and even slipping on ice. (“Funding ICE is a slippery slope to fascism,” that last one says.) In bold letters, each billboard tells drivers that their tax dollars are being “WASTED” on funding ICE, “costing you $28 billion” while “17 million people lose healthcare.”

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained approximately $75 billion in federal funding for ICE through 2029, a massive increase from its previous level of around $10 billion. That same bill cut Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion over 10 years, potentially leaving millions uninsured. 

“Millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck,” Franco said in her statement. “Yet this violent agency continues to operate with a blank check.”

The majority of the billboards in the Valley can be found along several of Phoenix’s freeway systems, including Interstate 10, Interstate 17 and state routes 202, Loop 101 and 60. The largest concentration of billboards is along I-10 and I-17.

The billboards will be up for four weeks.

“It’s clear that these choices don’t make us safer and have no impact on improving our economic security,” Franco wrote. “Our billboards put a spotlight on these choices and demand a different path forward.” 

Here’s a map of the approximate locations of the 40 billboards in the Phoenix area. An interactive version can be found here.