Sheriff Hollywood: The Far Right’s New Darling Kicks Off His Campaign at the Border

Mark Lamb’s campaign for U.S. Senate is light on substance but heavy on gun fetishization and border fearmongering.

On April 11, Arizona sheriff Mark Lamb, of Pinal County, declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Lamb, a Republican, kicked off his campaign with a Glock on his hip and an American flag draped over his shoulder. In 2016, Sheriff Lamb sported polo shirts and didn’t wear a cowboy hat. Now he’s “America’s sheriff,” buff and often toting his trusty assault rifle. The 50-year-old’s trajectory embodies the GOP’s transformation from trickle-down economics to blood splatter.

Lamb is aiming for the seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat turned independent, when she’s not selling her designer threads on Facebook. Sinema has yet to announce her reelection bid, and Kari Lake, the former Republican candidate for Arizona governor, and perennial sore loser, is also reportedly considering throwing her MAGA hat into the ring for the congressional District 9 race. U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, has also announced he’ll run.

Lamb’s campaign is light on substance but heavy on gun fetishization and border fearmongering. His website’s “legislative priorities” page features Lamb emptying an assault rifle into the desert. In a video he pledges to “stand up to the woke Left” and “finish the wall.” He says the U.S. should designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and send the military into Mexico—even after decades of U.S. military involvement in Mexico’s drug war and the country’s own disastrous military deployment, which has led to unfathomable death and destruction.

Following Trump’s playbook, Lamb has become a celebrity thanks to reality TV and social media. He’s part of the new Republican generation: a slick, multifaceted marketer who sells not only “America’s sheriff” T-shirts but also aspirational books about “Christian” morals and protecting the Second Amendment. On his Facebook page, he labels himself a “rising creator.” “There’s the person selling T-shirts and doing Instagram reels, and then the person who has a job to do as sheriff,” says Jessica Pishko, a Texas-based journalist, who is writing a book about sheriffs like Lamb who have embraced the Far Right. “What is real, and what is for show? It’s not clear to me that [Lamb] sees a difference.”

Pishko, who writes Posse Comitatus, a Substack newsletter about sheriffs and the Far Right, has followed Lamb’s career since 2020. Pishko said the Arizona sheriff is updating the “stodgy Constitutional sheriff’s movement,” long affiliated with anti-immigrant hate groups like FAIR and bringing it into the post-Trump era. “Constitutional sheriffs” believe they are the ultimate authority, above state and federal law. Which is convenient for authoritarians like Trump when sheriffs like Lamb, who support him, insert themselves in electoral politics and promote the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In the past, Lamb has worked with True the Vote, a nonprofit that pushes election fraud conspiracies nationwide.

“Arizona has a long history of anti-immigrant activity,” Pishko said. “And after the 2020 election, Republican operatives helped Lamb put together a group of far-right sheriffs called “Protect America Now”, who decided that their focus would be the border.”

For Republicans—especially the Far Right—the border is a lucrative backdrop for the fear industry they’ve built. The only problem is that Pinal County is not a border county. What’s a borderless sheriff to do?

On April 24, Lamb jumped the border of his own jurisdiction, drawing the ire of neighboring Sheriff David Hathaway, of Santa Cruz County, which is on the border, and landing his helicopter near the border wall along with a deputy recording his every move on camera.

The resulting video features Sheriff Hollywood, kitted out in his signature black tactical vest, looking out the window of his helicopter onto the desert landscape below. He mentions “drugs,” “scouts,” and “meth,” adding, “I’m not sure if there’s more bodies in there.” After landing, Border Patrol agents look on as Lamb dons his cowboy hat and intercepts women and children arriving at a gap in the wall to request asylum. “De dónde vienen?” Lamb says, asking how long they traveled and how old the kids are.

As Lamb’s black and white sheriff’s helicopter flew over Nogales, Hathaway was puzzled. If there was something so important that Lamb needed to fly over to Santa Cruz County, shouldn’t he notify that county’s sheriff? “My chief deputy reached out to the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office and to our own Search and Rescue group to see if there were any joint rescue operations in progress,” Hathaway wrote in an op-ed for the local Nogales International afterward. “The PCSO said that there were no search-and-rescue operations or other joint activity with our county and that Sheriff Lamb was working ‘Operation Stonegarden,’ a federal grant program related to the border.” Operation Stonegarden is a federally funded Homeland Security program that funds local law enforcement agencies in operations related to border security.

Hathaway called Sheriff Lamb on his cell phone, he wrote, to tell him he’d been spotted in Santa Cruz County. “He said that he was sorry that he hadn’t called … and had accidentally failed to let me know that they were in Santa Cruz County.”

It wasn’t long before Hathaway understood the real reason for Lamb’s visit. “That same day, Lamb made a national network media broadcast talking about patrolling the border in his helicopter and taking action ‘on the border.’ This broadcast was obviously scheduled in advance. But, poor Sheriff Lamb, lacking a border backdrop, had to sneak into Santa Cruz County for the stunt,” Hathaway wrote.

Hathaway grew up on the Arizona-Mexico border, and his family has been there for generations. Lamb grew up in Hawaii.

“Hollywood is theater and Sheriff Lamb is theater,” Hathaway wrote. “Often in media footage, he is holding a machine gun or crouching in fearful fashion as if he is in a community theater production simulating a border war zone with danger lurking at every turn—in his non-border county.”

The campaign ploy raises another question: What role does the Border Patrol play in this? In cooperating with Lamb, has the organization tacitly endorsed him? At the very least, the BP officers have served as a taxpayer-funded campaign prop for Lamb’s Senate run.

It’s not the first time Lamb has been filmed alongside Border Patrol for an election campaign. In 2022, he appeared in an infamous Superbowl ad for a failed Arizona Senate bid by energy exec Jim Lamon. In the ad, Lamb sports chaps and brandishes a pistol as he stands alongside Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, in a faux Wild West town. Lamon takes aim and shoots at actors playing Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Mark Kelly (whose wife, former congresswoman Gaby Giffords, barely survived a gunshot to the head in 2011). The ad was widely criticized for stoking political violence.

I called CBP seeking comment about the Border Patrol’s involvement in Lamb’s campaign filming expedition, and a spokesperson said they would not comment, only noting that the outing was “a regular scheduled Stonegarden flight.”

“So how does a regular Stonegarden flight from Pinal County end up in Santa Cruz County?” I asked.

“No comment,” said the CBP spokesperson.

Pishko said Lamb bought his helicopter with funding from the federal Stonegarden program. Ironically, he’s using a federally funded helicopter, and riding along with federal employees—U.S. Border Patrol agents—to criticize the federal government’s handling of the southern border in his U.S. Senate campaign. “The far-right sheriffs really do like their tanks and helicopters,” Pishko said. “And I’ve often been asked, ‘shouldn’t there be some guidelines on how this equipment can be used under Operation Stonegarden?’ You know, why does Mark Lamb need a helicopter anyway?”

Good question: Why does Sheriff Hollywood need a helicopter? Maybe it’s just to star in his own border action movie, one—he hopes—that will ultimately land him in Washington D.C.