Arizonans are carrying more documents to prove citizenship, avoid detention

Every morning, Raul Piña wakes up before dawn to take his Rottweiler, Beau, out for a walk near his home in Buckeye. He has a routine. He gets dressed and gathers Beau’s equipment. He kneels down to clip in Beau’s leash and puts on his shoes. Then he heads out. He opens the door and the cool 5 a.m. air enters his home.

But recently something has changed. Before he steps outside, Piña needs to remind himself to bring something extra that he never worried about before – his passport card and ID.

Piña’s one of many people in Arizona – many of them American citizens – who have added a new element to their daily routine: carrying additional forms of identification.

“It’s a new practice,” Piña, a U.S. citizen, said. “It's just as I'm walking out, and it's something to think about now, right? Do I have a flashlight, do I have my wallet, do I have my phone? It’s a mental checklist.”

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign has led many Arizonans to being more vigilant about the identification they carry everyday. Reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence increasing in Phoenix has done the same.

Piña, an Air Force veteran, said his new practice started when he noticed more workplace immigration raids and ICE detaining U.S. citizens.

“It’s an odd feeling to carry your passport,” Piña said. “And where does it stop? Do I need to carry my DD-214?”

Officially known as DD Form 214, a DD-214 is a formal document issued by the Department of Defense official when a service member retires, leaves, or is discharged from active duty.

The increased federal presence has brought troubling memories to the surface for Piña, particularly of life under former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio championed State Bill 1070, which authorized law enforcement to ask for identification from anyone they had reasonable suspicion of being in the country without legal status.

Much of it was blocked by the Supreme Court, but the justices in a 5-3 decision (Justice Elena Kagan was recused in the case) in Arizona v. United States declined to strike down 2(B) – known as the “show me your papers” provision, but with limitations.

But it did strike down parts of the law that made it illegal to not carry registration papers, allow warrantless arrests based on whether the officer thought someone was deportable, and to seek work without authorization.

In September 2025, in the case of Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo the Supreme Court issued a stay of a lower court order that allowed federal immigration agents to, in part, to racially and ethnically profile as grounds for immigration stops. It cleared the way for ICE agents to execute “Kavanaugh stops” to use factors such as race, Spanish and other language use and employment to detain individuals for questioning. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” but that it could be a “relevant factor.”

Advocates like Piña and other people around the Valley and the state are worried about what might happen if they fit the profile.

Piña is also a Community Advisory Board member in the Melendres v. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office case. The class action lawsuit was filed against Arpaio and the office in 2007 over racial profiling and unlawful traffic stops of Latinos. A judge found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt in 2017. The case has gone through a number of appeals and remains mired in contentious efforts to meet compliance with a federal court.

The Trump administration pardoned the ex-sheriff within two months.

“You would hope that the Melendres case would be one of the vehicles to remove those practices from law enforcement, definitely, to bring it to an end in Maricopa County, right,” Piña said. “I think that was the hope at the time, that we never see this thing again.”

Piña and other advocates said they made a bad miscalculation.

“It looks like the opposite has happened,” he said. “These strategies, these tactics have spread to other areas, all over the country now.”

Cronkite News reached out to city of Phoenix officials and ICE, but they did not respond to requests for comment.

Advocates said SB 1070-style tactics still in place in Arizona today. They point to a recent raid on 16 restaurants in the Valley, led by Homeland Security Investigations, which left residents on heightened alert.

Lifelong Arizona resident Jonah Phung said HSI’s targeted operations and ICE’s methods are more aggressive than what he saw under SB 1070. He also grew up under Arpaio’s jurisdiction.

“With SB 1070, it was very targeted and very specific to a group of people,” Phung said. “With this, it seems it does not matter what nationality you are, as long as you are a person of color, it feels like you are being targeted.”

He and his family started carrying extra forms of identification, including passports, at the beginning of 2026 – after he saw Asian community members pulled out of their homes in Minnesota.

Christy Stewart works with No More Deaths, an advocacy group dedicated to stopping the death of migrants in the desert. Recently, she’s joined local rapid response groups to increase awareness of potential ICE removal operations in Tucson.

Stewart leads Know Your Rights and rapid response training every two weeks, each class holding 100 participants.

Duties of the rapid response group include going door to door in the community, checking in on neighbors, escorting children to school, delivering food and watching for federal agents.

“‘How are you feeling? Do you need support with groceries? Escorting your children to school? How can we support you through this time?’” Stewart said. “That's part of our rapid response group training.”

She recently had to ferry young children, both of them American citizens, to and from school because one of their parents was undocumented, she said.

Local Indigenous nations are also being affected by DHS practices. ICE detained a Navajo Nation citizen in Peoria while he was heading to work.

The Navajo Nation, Salt River-Pima Maricopa Indian Community and Gila River Indian Community are encouraging their communities to know their rights and are providing resources to members, such as tribal IDs, to prove their affiliation.

Originally from Chinle, Arizona, Todd Middleton recently tried to get his tribal ID. The Navajo Nation census bureau had slowed production.

Along with his Real ID and passport card, Middleton now always carries his passport. He started carrying the extra identification after the report of a Navajo man being detained by ICE in January.

“I felt like it was time to start carrying it,” Middleton said. “Nowhere seems to be safe from DHS accosting people for their citizenship.”

Middleton thinks history is repeating itself.

“It’s frustrating and sad listening to stories of people detained by ICE,” Middleton said. “Knowing the history of the Navajo people and the Long Walk, there’s a lot of parallels that can be pointed out between now and then.”

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.