The presumptive Democratic nominee in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, JoAnna Mendoza, is attempting to distance herself from her past comments calling to defund police. At the same time, she's holding fundraisers with far-left groups that have called to defund police, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
On Friday, for example, Mendoza headlined a big-ticket fundraiser in Los Angeles's affluent Brentwood neighborhood, cohosted by the Heart of LA Democratic Club. The club, which describes its mission as "championing feminist leadership and women's full representation in politics and policy," repeatedly backed the Defund the Police movement. In a since-deleted June 2020 tweet, it praised the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter chapter's "compelling presentation to LA City Council on defunding the police" as "a big step towards progress." The club backed a bill to defund police around the same time, and one of its officers, Sarah Kate Levy, said she "see[s] clearly the need to defund."
Months earlier, in January, Mendoza held another Brentwood fundraiser with the Los Angeles-based Stonewall Democratic Club, which signed a 2020 letter calling for the "divestment of public funding from police" and a resolution calling for "budget reallocation" from police departments "to programs that end systemic, abusive, and unlawful use of lethal force on Black and Brown People." The move, the group said, was about joining "the struggle to end white supremacy, institutional racism, individual bigotry, and mass denial."
The fundraisers come as Mendoza attempts to distance herself from her prior support for anti-police policies in her campaign against incumbent Republican congressman Juan Ciscomani in a district President Donald Trump carried narrowly in 2024.
In 2020, when Mendoza ran unsuccessfully for Arizona's State Senate, an audience member at a virtual town hall asked her whether she would "defund the police," to which she replied that she supports "the reallocation of funding" away from law enforcement.
"Police reform is just one aspect of addressing systemic racism in our nation, and specifically here in Arizona," Mendoza said. "I support the reallocation of funding to programs that would allow people to live their best lives, such as the social service programs, such as housing, public education, health care, ensuring that we're addressing economic stability and environmental safety."
In that same virtual town hall, Mendoza accused police officers of violating their "oath to protect and serve their communities" and appeared to justify the anti-police riots that swept the United States following George Floyd's death.
"There are hundreds, hundreds of deaths at the hands—murders—at the hands of police brutality," she said. "And so what we're seeing right now from folks is we're seeing the demand for change through the protests, through the civil unrest. We are seeing that folks no longer trust law enforcement agencies who, by the way, have taken an oath to protect and serve their communities and have clearly violated that oath time and time again."
When Fox News reported on Mendoza's comments in March, her campaign stated that she "has been on the record for years that police need MORE resources to do their jobs—not less—including body cameras and training," adding that "she has repeatedly stated that she does not support defunding the police." Mendoza also attempted to walk back her comments about the "reallocation of funding" several months following her initial remarks, saying during a different town hall that she did "not support defunding the police." The Arizona Police Association endorsed Ciscomani in May, not long after the "reallocation" video came to light.
Mendoza's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Policing is not the only area of inconsistency for Mendoza. Shortly after the Free Beacon reported that she had a net worth of up to $4.7 million, according to her 2025 financial disclosure, Mendoza issued a new financial disclosure claiming she is worth no more than $336,000. The new filing also revealed that she had concealed ownership of a rental property in Tucson worth between $250,000 and $500,000.
