Bill making it easier to shoot and kill migrants vetoed for encouraging ‘armed vigilantism’

Gov. Katie Hobbs on Monday vetoed a GOP bill to expand when Arizona ranchers could legally kill migrants crossing their land.

Although the bill’s sponsor characterized the bill as closing a loophole that has led to “increasingly larger numbers of migrants or human traffickers moving across farm and ranch land,” the result of the changes Rep. Justin Heap, R-Mesa, wanted to make to Arizona’s “castle doctrine” law would have broadened the legal justification for people who shoot migrants crossing their land.

In vetoing House Bill 2843, Hobbs called the bill another example of extremists acting within Arizona’s legislature. 

“This legislation as written values property over human lives and incentivizes vigilantism,” she wrote in her veto letter. “This proposal would alter traditional laws on self-defense to allow the unnecessary use of deadly force and further embolden a culture of armed vigilantism and violence with impunity.”

Current law requires a property owner to feel threatened by an intruder that is inside their home to justify the use of deadly force. But Heap’s bill would have changed that to allow for deadly force if an intruder was merely on a person’s property and the owner felt threatened, broadening the circumstances in which deadly force can be used and justified. 

Heap, along with many of his Republican colleagues, have since denied that the bill was intended to impact migrants. But criminal defense attorney Jack Litwack told the Arizona Mirror in February that the change would give a much broader defense to people who use deadly force.

“The idea with the Castle Doctrine is that you are supposed to be able to defend house and home,” he said. “This seems to broaden it to say you can shoot someone that’s just on your actual property.”

Litwak said that he believes that Heap’s legislation would extend self-defense laws to justify the use of violent force similar to the events that led to the murder of a migrant near Nogales. The rancher in that case is awaiting trial for second-degree murder.