Colorado’s Manny Rutinel and Arizona’s JoAnna Mendoza have denied supporting efforts to defund the police, but evidence shows otherwise
The Democratic nominees running in two of the most competitive House races this year, both of whom have worked to distance themselves from their activist pasts, are set to join an event hosted by an anti-police and anti-ICE group.
Manny Rutinel, the Democratic nominee in Colorado’s Eighth Congressional District, and JoAnna Mendoza, who is running in Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, are the featured guests at a Thursday evening virtual town hall hosted by CareWins, and paid for by the MomsRising PAC, whose affiliate group, the Moms Rising Education Fund, published a blog post by a volunteer leader who called on elected officials to “close immigration detention centers” and “prohibit police and ICE from working together.” She encouraged parents to engage in activities with their children including playing with paper dolls “representing children and families held in detention,” an activity she described as “craftivism.”
The post includes an image of a paper doll she made with her nine-year-old daughter that was glued to a “letter”—a prewritten form with blanks for children to fill in—to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), thanking him for “freeying [sic] people like Mr Abrego-Garcia,” referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran illegal immigrant—and accused MS-13 member and wife-beater—who last year became a liberal cause célèbre.
The MomsRising network, which includes the PAC and several dark money and advocacy groups, describes itself as an organization “working to achieve economic security for all moms, women, and families.” Yet it also has joined with left-wing activist groups like the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation to pursue left-wing causes. Across the network, MomsRising has received funding from a litany of liberal sources, including nearly $2.8 million from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, more than $4 million from Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, and $1 million from the Ford Foundation.
MomsRising is also a member of the Community Safety Working group, a coalition of more than 50 groups that aims to “shrink the size, scope, and footprint of policing” and pursue “non-carceral programs.” It supports initiatives like sending mental health professionals rather than police to handle mental health crises and calls to “dismantle our public safety system’s instinct to criminalize and punish, replacing it with a system that provides care, support, and healing.” Other members include the Movement for Black Lives, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and the Bail Project, which aims to end cash bail and in at least two instances sprung offenders who were subsequently charged with homicides.
MomsRising has long aligned with such groups, calling on lawmakers in 2020 to defund the police, dismantle “the prison industrial complex,” and provide resources to communities “most harmed by systemic racism and our racist justice system.” It also pressured banks to stop financing private prisons as the chair of the Families Belong Together Corporate Accountability Committee. That coalition included the Soros-funded Action Center on Race and the Economy, which demanded that Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D.) cut the police budget and raise taxes on businesses, and the Rockefeller Foundation-funded National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has campaigned for legal protections for illegal immigrant workers and lobbied against immigration enforcement.
The panelists joining Rutinel and Mendoza have their own left-wing backgrounds. Alida Garcia was a Biden White House senior adviser on migration in 2021, when a record 1.7 million migrants were apprehended after illegally crossing the southern border, while Paid Leave for All director Dawn Huckelbridge has worked for numerous pro-abortion groups, including the DC Abortion Fund and a Planned Parenthood affiliate.
Rutinel’s and Mendoza’s participation on the MomsRising panel comes as the Democrats attempt to distance themselves from their past ties to left-wing causes as they try to win what are considered among the most competitive House elections this year and could determine which party controls the lower chamber.
Neither the candidates nor their fellow panelists responded to requests for comment. MomsRising and its funders also did not respond.
For Mendoza, a former political consultant with ties to Soros, it’s just her latest instance this year of her joining groups that have called to defund the police. And in 2020, she said that police reform was “just one aspect of addressing systemic racism in our nation” and that she supported “the reallocation of funding” away from law enforcement. Yet when Fox News reported on those remarks in March, her campaign said that Mendoza “has been on the record for years that police need MORE resources to do their jobs” and that “she has repeatedly stated that she does not support defunding the police.”
Rutinel is also facing accusations that he helped defund the police. As Colorado faced a $1.5 billion deficit, Rutinel voted for budget cuts to its Bureau of Investigation, its Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and a grant program that provides mental health support to law enforcement officers by 10 percent. The measure did, however, preserve Cover All Coloradans, a program that provides taxpayer-funded health care for “pregnant persons” and children who would qualify for Medicaid if they weren’t illegal immigrants. Rutinel supported a 2025 bill to fund the program, which cost $104.5 million—six times more than the original estimate.
When Rutinel was asked in a video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon why he defunded the police, he replied, “I didn’t,” then questioned why his Republican opponent, Rep. Gabe Evans, and President Donald Trump gave money to billionaires instead of “social programs that are the foundation of the American dream, like Medicaid and food stamps.”
Rutinel’s appearance alongside abortion advocates could also raise questions about his amorphous positions. His campaign website says “the government needs to respect Americans’ freedom to make our own decisions,” but Cobalt, Colorado’s largest independent abortion fund, declined to endorse Rutinel because he declined to answer its questions, a journalist for Denver’s NBC affiliate, Kyle Clark, reported while noting the Democrat’s struggles to explain his shifting views.
Rutinel has walked back his penchant for socialism and claims he no longer wants to eliminate animal agriculture now that he is running to represent a district that relies on ranching and farming. He even abandoned his vegan lifestyle and recently bit into a beef taco after seeming uncertain about what meats typically go with the Mexican staple.
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