Phoenix, AZ – Tomorrow, Arizona AG Kris Mayes, Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, and Oregon AG Dan Rayfield will host the first in a series of Community Impact Hearings to speak with individuals impacted by the Trump administration’s federal firings and DOGE funding cuts and freezes.

The Community Impact Hearing will be Wednesday, March 5, in Phoenix, AZ, at 6 p.m. MST at Central High School Auditorium. Reporters wishing to attend must request a media credential here. Space is limited.

In an interview with MSNBC’s The Weekend, AG Torrez discussed the upcoming town hall and how the mass firings of federal employees by DOGE and Elon Musk will devastate the livelihoods of Americans everywhere. AG Torrez also reemphasized the efforts he and his fellow Democratic state attorneys general have taken to fight the unconstitutional actions undertaken by the Trump administration thus far. 

Key highlights from AG Torrez’s interview: 

• “Rather than an administrative argument, we’re making a constitutional argument about the power that the president is trying to wield in eliminating federal agencies, in eliminating critical funding, and fundamentally destabilizing the American system.
  
• “And one of the things that I think has come through in all this is the way in which we’ve dehumanized the people who are public servants.”

• “It doesn’t really matter to me if Elon Musk buys up a company and…decides to just randomly fire people there and see if it works. I don’t care if he does that with his own company, but he’s trying to do this with our government, and he’s doing it in a way that endangers people’s lives and then, frankly, undermines the service that they’ve engaged in for years.”

• “This is somebody who has never engaged in public service and has spent most of his life accumulating money, accumulating power. And then he gets in and he decides to use his access and influence to fire park rangers and engineers and nuclear safety specialists. I mean this is not just unconstitutional, it’s downright stupid.”

• “So there’s an opportunity for folks who are interested in government efficiency to engage in a process that brings people together, that leverages their knowledge. But this is like deciding that you need to redesign your kitchen, and let’s just set the house on fire and see what burns, and then if we need to replace the stove, we’ll do that.”

• “That’s a dumb way to go about much necessary reform in this country, and I don’t think most Americans, including a lot of Republicans, are really responding to the chaos that we’ve seen from these cuts.”

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