A boisterous crowd of more than 1,000 people packed the plaza of the Arizona Capitol on a hot night in mid-September to celebrate the 216th anniversary of the Grito de Independencia de México, the cry for Mexico's independence.
Warren Petersen, the Senate president and Republican nominee for Arizona attorney general, was among the speakers.
During his nearly 5-minute speech, Petersen spoke entirely in fluent Spanish to a crowd that featured many waving Mexican flags and blowing plastic horns. When he mentioned that his wife, Denisse Benitez Petersen, was an immigrant from Mexico, the crowd erupted in cheers.
"Tonight, the cry will be heard here in the heart of Arizona," Petersen said. "Each year it has meant more to me, not only as president of the Senate
but also as a husband. I am married to a Mexican citizen born in Ciudad Obregón."
Although he wasn't officially campaigning that night, Petersen has been grabbing opportunities to appeal to politically important Latino voters using his Spanish skills and touting his marriage.
He's been giving interviews to Spanish-language media outlets. Petersen's campaign in October released a 30-second ad in Spanish that features Petersen and his wife. The ad also features an endorsement by state Rep. Lydia Hernandez, a Latina, Democrat and longtime activist.
But critics say Petersen has a track record of pushing for hardline immigration enforcement and deportation policies in line with President Donald Trump, making him an ally of policies they say could harm Latino communities. Arizona's next attorney general, whom voters will choose Nov. 3, will take the helm just months after a voter-approved measure went into effect, giving local agencies unprecedented power to police the border.
Petersen's Democratic opponent, incumbent Attorney General Kris Mayes, has also made overtures to the Latino community, though not in such personal terms. Her record tells a different story on the Trump administration and the state's role in assisting its immigration crackdown.
Petersen declined an interview request, and his campaign did not directly answer questions for this story.
“Unlike the current Attorney General, President Petersen will enforce all of the laws — and led the charge to help secure our border," Petersen's campaign manager Chad LeBeau said in a statement. "When Mayes failed to defend the Secure the Border Act, President Petersen successfully shepherded the defense of the law to the Supreme Court."
Petersen's advertisements are an attempt to deceive voters and distract from his hardline record and support of Trump's immigration crackdown, said state Sen. Analise Ortiz. She's a Democrat whose district on the west side of Phoenix and Glendale is heavily Latino.
"Warren Petersen knows that that's not popular," Ortiz said. "And so he's trying to run in the opposite direction and pull the wool over our Latino community's eyes. But he is only doing this to pander to the Latino community. As soon as he is in power, the real Warren Petersen will come out."
In 2025, Petersen requested a federal investigation of Ortiz after she posted on social media that immigration agents conducting raids were near a school in her district. Petersen said she was trying to undermine federal agents.
'Ads are never enough'
Latinos make up about 33% of the state's population and about 25% of its voters. That makes them an important constituency for any candidate running for statewide office, said Stella Rouse, director of Arizona State University's Hispanic Research Center.
Using his Spanish skills and touting his marriage to a Mexican immigrant may help Petersen win over some Latino voters, particularly low-propensity voters, Rouse said.
But that likely won't be enough to close the gap among all voters, Rouse said. She highlighted a poll conducted the last two weeks of August and the first week of September by ASU's Center for Latinas/os and American Politics Research that showed Petersen trailing Mayes 22% to her 52% among Latinos.
Speaking Spanish and Petersen's marriage to a Mexican immigrant "could be sort of an information shortcut that some voters might use to say, 'OK well, he might be one of us,'" Rouse said.
But Latino voters are "pretty engaged" this election because of the impact of the Trump administration's immigration policies and Petersen's support for those policies, she said. The impact of Mayes' ads targeting Latinos is similarly uncertain.
"Ads are never enough," said Gary Segura, founding partner and president of California-based polling firm BSP Research. "Ads on television are when you get up to go get a drink from the refrigerator. People are not really that tuned in."
BSP polled 2,700 working-class Latinos from late August to mid-September for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy group. The national poll included 500 Arizona Latinos. The poll found Latinos' top economic worry is the high cost of living, a complaint shared across the voting spectrum. But the poll also found discontent about how Republican leaders have handled the economy has not necessarily translated into enthusiasm to vote for Democrats.
That's in part because of lax outreach to a community that feels it works hard but it still falling behind, said Clarissa Martinez, vice president of UnidosUS' campaign to grow Latino participation.
"This is the perennial issue that comes up every election cycle, is that the outreach is anemic and it tends to come very late," Martinez said.
In Arizona, 59% of people surveyed said they had not been contacted by a campaign or other organization asking for their vote.
Petersen says immigrants should 'follow the law'
Recent interviews and Petersen's 14-year career at the state Legislature illuminate his views.
In a La Onda radio interview with independent journalist Elvia Diaz, Petersen said immigrants must come to the U.S. legally. Diaz previously worked at The Arizona Republic, as did Mayes.
"I love immigrants and immigrants are welcome here. My wife is an immigrant. She was born in Mexico," Petersen said in Spanish during the radio interview. "This should not be controversial. All I think is that they should follow the law. That's why they come here. It's a big reason why people come here to the United States, because we're a nation of laws and that's why we have order, that's why we have security, that's why we're successful."
Petersen learned Spanish in school and when he went on a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to serve in Latino neighborhoods in Rhode Island and Connecticut, Petersen told The Arizona Republic in 2023.
But his Spanish improved greatly after he married his wife, Denisse, Petersen said in the La Onda interview. They married in 2022 after he divorced his first wife in 2021. She is from Bácum, a small city near Ciudad Obregón, the second-largest city in Sonora, the Mexican state that borders Arizona.
"More than anything, I learned from my wife," Petersen said in the La Onda interview. "In just three months with her, I learned more than I had learned from everything else combined."
Petersen voted for and later went to court to defend the Secure the Border Act, a 2024 voter-approved measure that creates state crimes for crossing the border outside a port of entry and gives police in Arizona greater latitude to enforce immigration law.
He has said anyone who does not come to the country legally and does not abide by the law should "be ready to be deported or prosecuted."
In 2025, he sponsored the Arizona ICE Act, which would have prevented state and local government bans on working with the Trump administration's immigration agents, under threat of losing state funding if they did not do so. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the measure.
Art Del Cueto, a former Border Patrol agent from Tucson who has appeared on stage during Trump rallies, is supporting Petersen because of his track record pushing for "common sense" laws that allow local police to work with federal immigration enforcement officers.
"I can tell you, when a different president comes into office, it's like the light switch of what comes across the border," Del Cueto said. "But if you have common sense in your local governments, or in your state governments, it goes a long way and it makes a huge difference."
Del Cueto criticized Mayes for comments she made in January warning that the state's "stand your ground" law could create dangerous confrontations if masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents interacted with armed residents.
"To have an attorney general say ... I want all the law enforcement in the state to be able to work with our federal partners and the federal government, that's a very big difference from having an attorney general that is telling instead the public we have a 'stand your ground' law and we don't know who these people are that are masked if they're really law enforcement," Del Cueto said. "That's a very, very big difference."
Mayes: Trump 'completely distracted' at the border
This year's World Cup in North America jumpstarted Mayes' outreach to Latino voters as she seeks a second term.
Mayes hosted five public watch parties, teaming up with advocacy groups like Mi Familia en Acción. Her campaign launched a six-figure television and online advertising campaign during soccer's premier championship. A bilingual ad led that campaign and another followed that is entirely in Spanish.
Her campaign spent about $1.5 million to reach bilingual Arizonans with Spanish ads on television and radio, including radio stations in Mexico that draw listeners in border towns, according to Mayes' campaign manager, Delaney Corcoran. Mayes launched a coalition of Latino supporters and has visited Latino-owned small businesses across the state.
In office, Mayes has opposed Trump's mass deportation campaign through numerouslawsuits. She joined a lawsuit challenging Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship, and her office sued the Department of Homeland Security to block a huge immigration detention center planned in Surprise, among other lawsuits.
Mayes often touts her office's work on major drug cases, claiming it has seized more fentanyl in her tenure than any previous attorney general, and she's advocated for allowing border law enforcement to shoot down cartel drones.
She said she has prohibited her office's investigators, who work on task forces alongside federal agents, from turning their attention from drug traffickers to immigration cases. She has also frequently used her bully pulpit to criticize the Trump administration for shifting agents away from the border and for going after workers, not violent criminals Trump pledged to target.
"They're focused on immigration enforcement in places like Minnesota," Mayes said. "If you're taking an honest look at it, you have to admit that the Trump administration has gotten completely distracted when it comes to the border."
Arizona Republic reporter David Ulloa Jr. contributed to this story.
Daniel Gonzalez covers immigration. Reach him at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @azdangonzalez. Stacey Barchenger covers state politics. Reach her at stacey.barchenger@arizonarepublic.com or 480-416-5669.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Warren Petersen, Kris Mayes are competing for Arizona's Latino vote
