Alma Hernandez of LD20 Calls Out ESA Fraud While Bills Get Held Hostage

State Rep. Alma Hernandez (D-LD20) appeared at Democrats of Greater Tucson this week not as a newcomer, but as one of the longest‑serving Dems at the Capitol – a term‑limited House member now running for the LD20 Senate seat at age 32 after eight bruising years in the minority.

In the July 21 Democratic Primary, she is running against Roque Perez. Her pitch to primary voters is simple: in a Republican‑run Legislature, you need someone who already knows where the bodies are buried and isn’t afraid to blow the whistle when Democrats are being asked to swallow something toxic.

Criminalizing poor immigrants’ survival strategies

Hernandez made a controversial decision last year to do something almost no Democrat in her position ever does: vote against the state budget. The reason wasn’t a symbolic protest. It was a line‑item – roughly $24 million – for the State Gang and Immigration Intelligence Team Enforcement Mission, better known as GIITEM or, as Hernandez calls it, the “Get ’Em Fund.”

GIITEM has been around since the 1990s, but Hernandez says the context has changed drastically now that Donald Trump is ramping up anti‑immigrant enforcement. As a lawmaker who is also a lawyer, she points to the statutory language itself, which is written around hiring more officers to target people using false Social Security numbers – the kind of undocumented workers trying to support their families in taco shops and on construction sites.

“One thing I learned in law school is that if it’s not in the language, it doesn’t exist,” she told DGT. In her view, Democrats can’t pretend GIITEM is something benign when the words on the page are about criminalizing poor immigrants’ survival strategies. With Trump back in power and deportations ramping up, she concluded she could not “in good conscience” vote for a budget that pours tens of millions into that machine.

That vote put her on a collision course not just with Republicans but also with the usual “hold your nose and vote yes” logic within her own caucus. Budgets, she says, are “moral documents,” and this one crossed a line.

Now, as budget talks head toward a potential June 30 shutdown, GIITEM is back at the center of the fight. Republicans are dragging out the session and refusing to negotiate as long as Gov. Katie Hobbs insists on fully funding K‑12 under Prop 123 education funding. Hobbs, backed by legislative Democrats, has drawn a hard line that there will be no budget at all without that education money.

Hernandez says she and other Democrats are pressing the governor’s team on exactly how GIITEM dollars are being used and whether that 24‑million‑dollar slush fund will be cut, repurposed, or finally stripped out of the budget. But with Republicans openly flirting with forcing a shutdown, the risk is that GIITEM survives while schools and social services get starved.

School voucher fraud

Hernandez reminded DGT that Empowerment Scholarship Account vouchers were originally sold as a small program for kids on reservations and students with disabilities – and that Republicans have since blown them up into an uncapped entitlement for anyone who wants to subsidize private tuition with public dollars.

The result, she says, is not just a billion‑dollar siphon from public schools, but a playground for grifters. She described:

• Parents in Facebook groups are swapping tips on how to code purchases so the Department of Education will approve them – including three‑thousand‑dollar coffee machines.
• ESA money is being used for Disney trips and out‑of‑state junkets, then submitted as “educational expenses.”
• A report showing purchases like condoms and lingerie being flagged as improper but paid anyway with ESA funds.

Every one of those dollars, Hernandez argues, is a dollar that could be paying for a teacher who doesn’t qualify for AHCCCS Medicaid or needs food stamps. She notes that members of the Democrats’ informal “Teachers’ Caucus,” including Assistant Leader Nancy Gutierrez, have been fighting for years to put guardrails and caps on ESAs, only to be blocked by Republicans who refuse any limits.

The governor’s hard line on public education funding in this year’s budget is one of the last pressure points left. Hernandez hinted that ESA accountability, or at least a cap, may have to be on the table in the same negotiations over Prop 123 education funding and overall K‑12 funding.

But she was blunt: as long as Republicans hold the majority, fully rolling back universal ESAs will be “really tough.”

Moved 10 bills into law

Over eight years in the minority she has moved 10 bills into law, including rare union‑backed legislation, and secured millions in appropriations for LD20 priorities such as rental and utility assistance and long‑overdue funding for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.

She has also figured out how to operate when Republican leadership tries to sideline her. This year, she ran 18 bills and got 8 heard, sending 5 over to the Senate – where President Warren Petersen promptly froze every one after she publicly called out MAGA Rep. Andy Biggs and GOP colleagues for sharing sexist, mocking images of Governor Hobbs.

Rather than apologize, Hernandez took a Republican bill that was moving and “struck” it with her own language, reviving a carpenters’ union bill and sending it back toward a final vote even as her own bill numbers sit in a drawer.

For labor and working‑class voters in LD20, that combination – voting against GIITEM, calling out ESA abuse, passing union bills over leadership’s objections – is Hernandez’s core electability argument in a safe‑blue but ideologically divided district. She doesn’t offer soothing bipartisanship or left‑wing purity. She offers something rarer at the Arizona Legislature: a Democrat who is willing to blow up a bad budget, name the scam in ESAs, and still knows how to get a bill signed in a building run by extremists.

In a year when Arizona could see a state government shutdown engineered by Republicans, a billion‑dollar voucher drain, and a Trump‑era immigration crackdown turbo‑charged by state funds, LD20 voters now have to decide whether that’s the kind of Democrat they want in the Senate.