Looking back at our top Arizona Watchdog Project stories from 2025

In 2025, Phoenix New Times landed a big investigative reporting grant. The Trace Foundation gave us $123,000 to perform watchdog and anti-corruption reporting in Arizona, allowing us to hire two reporters for a year to focus on that work.

In May, we unveiled the Arizona Watchdog Project, a year-long reporting effort to hold the powerful accountable in the Grand Canyon State. Our two reporters, Stephen Lemons and Beau Hodai, have spent the time since digging and producing important reads about the state of this state and the state of the country.

We’re really proud of the work they’ve done, so as we shut the door on 2025, we wanted to look back at our favorite Arizona Watchdog Project stories of the year. Keep an eye out after the new year, too — there’s more to come in 2026.

The Big Takeover: The secret plans to give Trump command of America’s police

In May, Hodai was the first to report a cache of documents that revealed a shady network of Trump allies — former administration officials, local law enforcement figures, ex-military brass and right-wing thinktankers — who had quietly mapped out plans for a second Trump administration throughout 2024. Since Trump regained the White House, those plans have been playing out in national headlines all year.

The plans Hodai uncovered show that what has seemed chaotic on your television screens is really anything but. They amount to one alarming, overarching aim — to drastically reshape American law enforcement and place it under the thumb of Trump himself. This means the increased militarization and federalization of local cops. It means going after opposition groups. The plans even included proposed propaganda to sell the changes to everyday Americans.

There’ll be more stories to come from these documents in 2026.

How Clinton and Obama helped build Trump’s mass deportation machine

While the ferocity of Trump’s onslaught against immigrants certainly caught many off guard, Trump has mostly been pulling levers that his predecessors installed for him. In this June piece, Lemons laid out just how far back America’s demonization of immigrants really goes.

There were, of course, anti-immigrant waves throughout the 20th century, but the presidents who came directly before Trump — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — all deserve their share of the blame for how Trump has unleashed hell on immigrant communities.

Miscarriage of justice: Donald Trump’s war on pregnant migrants

As immigration detention centers fill up and Immigration and Customs Enforcement looks for more beds, Lemons examined a problem that predates Trump 2.0 but is poised to get worse during this administration — the treatment of pregnant women by immigration officials.

Simply put, ICE has a horrible track record for dealing with pregnant women. Many have been shackled, despite evidence suggesting that doing so is detrimental to the health of both the mother and her fetus. Some have been forced to give birth while chained to a hospital bed. Miscarriages in immigration detention centers — which have been repeatedly criticized for providing substandard care — are depressingly common. Pro-life doesn’t apply to everyone, it would seem.

Tom Homan once spared Phoenix migrants. Now he’s Trump’s Darth Vader

Once upon a time — before he became Trump’s swaggering deportation wrestling heel, and before there was (as much) cable TV fame and fortune to be made railing against brown people — Tom Homan was a relatively normal, sane immigration official. As Lemons showed in this July piece, the proximity to power and Trump seems to have warped a person who used to be respected in Phoenix immigration circles.

As several sources told Lemons, Homan once showed some compassion for migrants in Phoenix when he was serving as an ICE official under Obama, declining to press for the removal of hundreds arrested in racial profiling stops by the goons of notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. When Trump was first elected in 2016, several former colleagues told New Times, Homan expressed dismay.

Not long after, though, Homan joined the Trump administration. He’s been an immigration hardliner ever since, milking extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric for status and power. This story showed how malleable one’s principles can be. Notably, not long after this story came out, national outlets revealed that during the Biden administration, the FBI recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash in exchange for arranging immigration-related contracts when he joined Trump’s second administration.

The Arpaio All-Stars: Meet the county sheriff’s sketchy retreads

No one knows the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office quite like Lemons, who has been keeping an eye on how things are going under former Arpaio acolyte and new Sheriff Jerry Sheridan. And, as one might expect, things are a bit sketchy over there.

While Sheridan has tried to distance himself from Arpaio, he’s promoted or rehired several Arpaio-era personnel with troublesome histories within the sheriff’s office. That includes Deputy Chief Paul Chagolla, who once threatened a reporter with arrest and sending her kid to Child Protective Services. It also includes Chad Willems, formerly Arpaio’s campaign money man who is now making $185,000 a year as Sheridan’s chief of administration — despite no law enforcement experience.

How kissing Trump’s ass won a Border Patrol leader a cushy job abroad

Brandon Judd comes from a long line of public servants in Cochise County, so it’s no surprise that he became a Border Patrol agent. He soon got involved with the Border Patrol union, first at the local level before rising to become president of the union itself. Along the way — as Trump was coming onto the political scene — he became an ideologue.

A union that used to hand out endorsements rarely and bipartisanly became tantamount to a Trump surrogate under Judd. During his reign, the union attempted to brush off racist behavior by Border Patrol personnel and increasingly spouted the Trump line on immigration issues. Judd was also granted special access to Trump, and he regularly found himself next to Trump at campaign events.

This year came the payoff for all that ass-kissing. Trump nominated Judd to be ambassador to Chile. The Senate confirmed Judd’s ambassadorship in October.

Police identified, never charged suspect in 2022 teacher killing

Three years ago, David Denogean was senselessly murdered while walking his dog in a Phoenix neighborhood. His killer ran up from behind and shot him several times outside of Feeney’s Restaurant & Bar near 12th Street and Maryland Avenue. The killing of the 30-year-old remains officially unsolved.

However, within a year, Phoenix police had identified a suspect: Eduardo Quintero, who had committed a remarkably similar killing just a day after Denogean’s death. Lemons and New Times were the first to report the existence of a police report showing that Phoenix detectives worked a connection between the two murders, even questioning Quintero directly in 2023.

Then the investigation died — Quintero accepted a plea deal on the other murder and never copped to shooting Denogean. One source told New Times that police asked Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell to press Quintero to confess to the Denogean killing as part of the plea agreement, but Mitchell’s office brushed it off.

All of this was news to Denogean’s family members — New Times was the first to tell them the cops had a suspect in mind. Suffice it to say, they were less than happy with how Phoenix police had left them in the dark.

He’s Tucson’s ‘mushroom man.’ The feds may deport him over paperwork

In October, Lemons reported on the plight of Hernan Castro, a local mycology celebrity in Tucson who has been in ICE lockup since May. Castro has made a name for himself as a mushroom expert and advocate — think health tonics, not hallucinations — but now it seems the 38-year-old has been targeted by ICE.

Castro came to the U.S. as an adolescent and is a green card holder who has applied for naturalized citizenship. But on May 31, federal agents snapped him up, claiming he’d lied on his citizenship application about selling drugs. Castro’s criminal history shows no such convictions as an adult, leading friends to speculate that it may result from a juvenile issue that is under seal.

“Anybody in his position is at risk at this time,” one friend told New Times.

Kyrsten Sinema is getting paid to push for a Chandler data center

In October, former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema made the wrong kind of headlines for seeming to threaten the city of Chandler. Speaking to the city’s planning commission — and, a day later, to the city council — Sinema pushed Chandler to approve a huge AI datacenter on Price Road. If the city didn’t push it through, she warned, the Trump administration would do it for them.

In December, as the vote on the data center loomed, Lemons and New Times reported on emails between Sinema and city officials showing how she was doing the bidding of Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Hogan Lovells, which the ex-senator had joined after leaving office. Sinema had somehow forgotten to mention that connection during her public remarks in front of the city council.

Sinema’s appearance created a wave of opposition against the data center, which had previously generated little interest among residents. Emails poured in to city councilmembers, many explicitly mentioning Sinema’s involvement in the project. Others cited issues with power and water usage — notably, the company behind the project, Active Infrastructure, made big water savings promises that carried a lot of question marks.

Later that month, when the issue finally came up for a vote, the city council unanimously shot down the data center. Some councilmembers seemingly had flipped. While the council chambers were packed with residents against the data center, Sinema was nowhere to be found.