Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has thrust herself into the national spotlight for joining a clandestine coalition of 22 liberal attorneys general bent on resisting President Donald Trump’s agenda. Documents recently unearthed by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project reveal a secretive agreement, signed just days after Trump’s landslide reelection in November 2024, aimed at thwarting his efforts to end birthright citizenship, a policy many hail as a long-overdue correction to America’s broken immigration system.
The agreement, dated November 8, 2024, binds Mayes and her counterparts in a coordinated legal offensive against Trump’s immigration reforms. This isn’t just a policy disagreement, it’s a calculated rebellion against a duly elected president, cloaked in the guise of defending the Constitution. The compact pledges collaborative efforts to craft lawsuits, draft amicus briefs, and shield their strategies from public scrutiny, all while claiming to protect the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
The secrecy of the pact is particularly unsettling. The agreement forbids third-party access to shared information, including pre-suit strategies and communications, and even requires a five-day heads-up among the AGs before responding to public records requests.
Trump’s executive order, issued on his first day back in office, seeks to end automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants. For decades, conservatives have argued that the 14th Amendment was never intended to grant citizenship to those who break our laws to enter the country. Yet Mayes and her secret pact allies, have already joined lawsuits that have temporarily blocked the order, with federal judges in four states siding with their claims.
Mayes’ track record only fuels the outrage. She has already targeted Trump allies, indicting 18 individuals, including Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, in the so-called “fake electors” case tied to the 2020 election. Trump himself was named an unindicted co-conspirator, a move seen as political persecution.
Mayes joined a coalition of 23 state attorneys general in a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block a policy from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that ordered an indefinite freeze on trillions of dollars in federal funding. On January 28, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order, followed by a preliminary injunction on February 9, 2025, ordering the restoration of frozen funds.
Mayes was part of a coalition of 22 attorneys general that secured a nationwide preliminary injunction against a Trump administration plan to cap indirect payments from the National Institutes of Health to universities at 15%. A federal judge in Massachusetts halted the cuts.
Mayes was a lead plaintiff among 14 state attorneys general in a February 2025 lawsuit arguing that Elon Musk’s leadership of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) violated the Constitution.
Prior to that, she joined 19 attorneys general in a suit blocking DOGE’s access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment system. A federal judge ruled DOGE lacked legal authority, a decision upheld in early February as the coalition sought a preliminary injunction.
On January 27, 2025, Mayes joined a coalition suing multiple federal agencies for illegally terminating probationary federal employees en masse, a move tied to Trump’s personnel policies.
With this secret compact, she’s doubling down, positioning herself as the tip of the spear in a nationwide resistance against Trump’s America First agenda.
Mayes, a Democrat who won her seat in 2022 by a razor-thin 280 votes, was once a Republican, she switched parties in 2019, citing “Trumpism” as her excuse. Now, she’s proving her critics right by aligning with the radical left to defy the President whom Arizona voters chose by a clear margin. Her office’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, insists Arizonans didn’t vote for “chaos and shredding the Constitution,” but Arizonans didn’t vote for an AG who’d conspire behind closed doors to subvert their choice at the ballot box either. For a state like Arizona, grappling with the real-world consequences of illegal immigration, with overrun border towns, strained public resources, and a fentanyl crisis fueled by cartels, Mayes’ priorities seem dangerously misplaced.