Mary Ann Mendoza wears oversized sunglasses and a bulletproof vest, her blond bangs hanging like a helmet above her tactical gear. Behind her, washed out by the sun, lies the harsh Arizona desert, scrub and mesquite, rifle-toting Border Patrol agents milling about. Alongside a stretch of steel fencing, the 67-year-old Mendoza poses for photos for a dark-money-backed right-wing media project called the American Border Story, which has in recent months been releasing high-production videos featuring bereaved and anxious mothers, gravestones, and barbed wire.
These women are called the “angel moms,” and they claim that their children were killed by undocumented immigrants. They emerged as a symbolic force under the first Trump administration, Mendoza among them, and they remain some of the most visible advocates for the government’s ongoing immigration crackdown. Right-wing media regularly broadcasts images of the mourning mothers, who are mostly, though not exclusively, white. In those scenes, they gather, solemn and demure, on the White House lawn; they take photos with officials; they lobby Congress to pass ever-more hardline immigration policies and offer tearful praise when lawmakers comply. In many ways, they are typical of the new conservative womanhood, which demands adherents play both housewife and gun-toting firebrand, the sanctified mother and the frontline agitator. Under either guise, the angel moms are heeding the call to take up arms.
Donald Trump coined the term at an August 2016 rally in Arizona, days after clinching the GOP presidential nomination, inviting a dozen mothers — many affiliated with a shadowy Texas nonprofit — onstage to showcase to the crowd. The angel moms’ current standard-bearer, though, is Mendoza: A Phoenix real estate agent turned nativist provocateur, Mendoza has organized the angel moms and helped transform them into a lasting political force.
Mendoza emerged from the nativist milieu that has festered over the last several decades in and around Phoenix and which spawned Joe Arpaio, who led a two-decade reign of terror as the sheriff of Maricopa County (and who was pardoned by Trump after flouting a court order to end his department’s racial profiling practices). Over the years, the angel moms have made appearances with “Sheriff Joe” and his various heirs. Arpaio’s ski mask-clad deputies, his rogue immigration enforcement, his cruel tent jails — Arizona’s anti-immigrant politics can be understood as a proving ground for what we are seeing at the federal level today. And Mendoza and her league of mothers are helping sell those politics to the nation.
Phoenix’s freeways are sites of incredible violence; more people are killed in traffic accidents on these roads than in almost any other major city in the U.S. It is here that Mendoza’s son, Brandon Mendoza, a 32-year-old beat cop, was killed in a wrong-way collision on May 12, 2014. The oncoming driver was drunk. He had driven for more than 30 miles in the wrong direction on multiple highways when he careened, in the early hours of the morning, into Brandon Mendoza’s car at full speed on a freeway overpass. He was an undocumented immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, a landscaper. He, too, was killed in the crash that night, leaving behind a wife and children.
One expert that Mendoza called to testify in a lawsuit over her son’s death opined that the state of Arizona had been “negligent for decades” in responding to wrong-way drivers and that such fatal accidents were increasing at a rapid clip. But it is the job of the angel moms to fashion stories of tragedy to which we have all been collectively numbed — fatal car crashes, fentanyl overdoses, even cancer deaths — into racialized tropes of migrant crime.
Mendoza’s advocacy falls into a particular heritage. The “mother of tomorrow,” as historian Wendy Kline writes, was a rallying cry for eugenicists in the twentieth century. Obviously, they believed she must be white, and they promoted horrific forced sterilizations and race-based immigration quotas in her defense (the latter were enshrined into law with the Immigration Act of 1924, the blueprint for the modern U.S. immigration system).
White mothers were also part of a revival of the nativist right, which helped advance a wave of anti-immigrant laws in the 2000s. Among them was Michelle Dallacroce, a mother in Phoenix who founded the group Mothers Against Illegal Aliens in 2006. The organization was small and decidedly fringe, not to mention crudely and openly racist, but through it, Dallacroce muscled herself into primetime TV segments to deliver anti-immigrant screeds, helping to popularize the pejorative “anchor baby.” She also helped make the end of birthright citizenship a right-wing priority (an aim nearly achieved with Trump’s executive order this spring). Mothers Against Illegal Aliens collaborated with anti-immigrant vigilantes, laundering their politics for a mass audience. As the sociologist Mary Romero has argued, women like Dallacroce have successfully framed their militant anti-immigrant stance — which might otherwise be discomfiting to those inclined to sympathize with immigrant mothers — as a kind of motherhood in itself. Dallacroce appeared on national television, fretting about “our children,” as a right-wing vigilante in disguise. It was a model that, a decade later, the angel moms would follow.
By 2015, Mendoza had garnered some local notoriety penning anti-immigrant letters to the Obama administration. She was “one of the first people I met when I announced I was going to run,” Trump has said of Mendoza — “a friend of mine,” he called her. At the July 2015 Phoenix rally that rocketed his first presidential campaign into the public consciousness, Mendoza introduced him to a crowd of thousands. “The very core of my being has been shattered by an illegal criminal,” she told them.
She appeared on national television, fretting about “our children,” as a right-wing vigilante in disguise.
Mendoza was then working with an organization called the Remembrance Project, founded in Texas by anti-immigrant agitator Maria Espinoza, who at the time was touring the country, supposedly advocating on behalf of crime victims. The Remembrance Project collaborated closely with the Trump campaign early on, introducing him to mothers like Mendoza, but by 2017, relations between the group and the families Trump was parading about had soured, as they feuded over tens of thousands of dollars in donations that Espinoza and her group were accused of pocketing.
Mendoza took up the mantle, founding her organization, Angel Families, and beginning to appear as a self-anointed spokesperson for the angel moms. She has been involved in a litany of other groups since: advising Steve Bannon’s short-lived We Build the Wall before it flamed out in scandal; co-founding the organization Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, which has intervened over the years in various high-stakes immigration legal battles; serving as an advisor to the right-wing group Moms for America; and working with the American Border Story.
When Mendoza filmed a video with the latter group in May, she stood beside Tim Foley, the founder of paramilitary group Arizona Border Recon, which conducts armed patrols along the border. (In the video, the grizzled Foley carries a pistol, dressed in camo.) Freddy Cruz, a researcher with Western States Center who has spent many years tracking Arizona’s border extremists, describes Foley as “the longest-running militia person I can think of down in Arizona.” Groups like his, Cruz told me, “will typically elevate angel moms as their justification for engaging in border operations.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar” (who it was recently disclosed was caught up in a bribery sting), is friendly with vigilantes like Foley. He is another figure to whom the angel moms appear to have a direct line; between Trump administrations, when Homan was engaged in dubious and highly paid “consulting” gigs, Mendoza spoke at events hosted by one of his projects, an organization called Border911, and Homan personally endorsed Mendoza in her failed bid for Arizona state office in 2024.
In June, Homan appeared beside the president to rail at Congress to pass the GOP megabill, which ultimately handed ICE an unimaginable windfall, more than $25 billion. “I get pissed off,” Homan told the crowd, “because I’m tired of meeting angel moms and dads.” On their behalf, he demanded more money for ICE.
The Laken Riley Act was the first move in the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on immigrant communities, empowering ICE to tear apart more families, separate more children from their mothers. Enacted in early 2025, it instated sweeping new mandates for immigration detention and further eroded the scant due process protections for those caught in ICE’s dragnet. The legislation was named for a young woman murdered in Georgia, whose mother stood beside the president as he signed it into law.
A year before the bill became law, a crowd at a campaign rally for Trump held aloft signs adorned with photos of Riley. “Say Her Name,” they read, a twisted invocation of the cry that rang in the streets for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and other Black women murdered by the police. The angel moms have, at different times, consciously co-opted language from the movement for Black lives, turning “Say Her Name” into a cry to send armed state agents into more homes.
In her study of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, an organization founded by Black mothers in Los Angeles fighting for their incarcerated children, the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote of motherhood as “a political foundation from which to confront an increasingly hostile state.” The mothers that Gilmore describes, who are “deliberately invoking” the struggles of Palestinian and South American women, form part of another legacy of activist motherhood in the U.S., a struggle waged by Black mothers and immigrant mothers, among others — a struggle that the angel moms have attempted to both counter and co-opt. Vigilantes at the U.S. border are not confronting the state but abetting it, and in the same way, the angel moms are not unwitting symbols for the state’s immigration enforcers but their accomplices.
Katya Schwenk is a journalist based in Brooklyn. She is currently a staff reporter at The Lever, an investigative news outlet; previously, she was an alt-weekly writer in Phoenix, Arizona.
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