Rep. Andy Biggs, the party’s likely nominee, faced criticism from fellow Republicans over his handling of a small police force more than a decade ago.
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Momentum was growing in 2013 to crack down on a polygamist religious group accused of sexually abusing girls in rural Arizona.
The Justice Department was suing. The group’s leader was in prison after a stint on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Arizona’s attorney general wanted to shut down the local police force, the Colorado City Marshal’s Office, which he accused of doing the bidding of sect leaders.
But a bill designed to strip authority from the marshal’s office never got a vote in the state Senate. Its Republican sponsor blamed then-Senate President Andy Biggs (R) for the bill’s failure to advance in that chamber. Now, more than a decade later — as Biggs cruises toward an expected victory in Tuesday’s primary for Arizona governor — the episode is likely to get renewed attention.
Democrats expect to highlight the old fight over the marshal’s office — one of many polarizing moments in Biggs’s long legislative record that some Republicans worry could come back to haunt them in a hotly contested swing-state race. The Colorado City issue left Biggs, a former chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, at odds with some members of his party.
“I would rather vote for somebody who has made a stand for women and children above religion,” said Buster Johnson, a longtime Republican supervisor for the county at the center of the controversy. He said he cast an early ballot against Biggs in the primary.
Asked whether he would nevertheless vote for Biggs in the general election, Johnson was noncommittal. “I’d have to look at it when it comes up,” he said.
A adviser to Biggs’s campaign, Drew Sexton, said in a statement that Biggs “has already addressed this poorly-written legislation, which was too broad and opposed by the Arizona Police Association.”
Sexton attacked the public safety record of Biggs’s expected opponent in the fall, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, pointing to a surge in overdose deaths in Arizona last year and criticism of the state child safety department. He touted Biggs’s support from the Arizona Law Enforcement Association and local prosecutors and said the congressman has worked to increase funding for Arizona’s child safety department, combat child exploitation and expand the Amber Alert notification system for child abductions alongside the late senator John McCain. Hobbs’s team defended her record, saying she has invested $215 million in law enforcement.
Biggs, who for the past decade has represented a solidly red district in the U.S. House, has seen success as a conservative congressman but now needs to convince some voters “that he’s not what he has been,” said Chuck Coughlin, a longtime political consultant in Arizona.
“What are you willing to do to show people you’re not still just this Freedom Caucus Republican who’s all fire and brimstone about how much libertarians hate government?” Coughlin said. “That’s going to be his challenge this cycle.”
The fight over the Colorado City Marshal’s Office was part of a years-long push for changes in two small towns it served along Arizona’s northern border: Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah. Authorities say a secretive religious sect wielded enormous power over the community — controlling public services, discriminating against nonmembers and forcing girls into underage marriages.
The group, known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), split from the Mormon Church after the latter banned polygamy more than a century ago. It drew renewed attention this year with the release of a Netflix documentary on a self-proclaimed FLDS prophet, Samuel Bateman, who prosecutors said sexually abused child “brides” as young as 9. Bateman was sentenced to prison in 2024 and convicted on additional charges this summer.
Scrutiny of the sect grew in the 2000s when officials charged its leader at the time, Warren Jeffs, with sex crimes. Jeffs was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list and convicted in 2011 of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, both of whom he forced into marriage.
The Justice Department sued the twin border towns in 2012, alleging that the Colorado City Marshal’s Office — which served both cities — acted as the “enforcement arm” of FLDS. Prosecutors said the marshals applied the law selectively and carried out the edicts of FLDS leaders, recounting how they killed dogs banned by the church and worked to return an underage bride to FLDS officials after she fled.
Seven members of the marshal’s office had already lost their state certifications for refusing to testify in court and for other misconduct since 2003, prosecutors noted.
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One of the decertified officers wrote to Jeffs while the FLDS leader was on the run, according to court documents.
“I want to … do the job the way that you would like it done,” the officer wrote.
Officials with the town of Colorado City and its police force did not respond to requests for comment. Colorado City and neighboring Hildale issued a joint statement last year saying their communities have “acknowledged the failures of the past” and changed after a court found civil rights violations.
The Washington Post was unable to locate a representative of FLDS for comment, and the group does not publicize contact information online.
In Arizona, top officials called to disband the marshal’s office. The Republican attorney general, Tom Horne, put his weight behind the 2013 bill. It would have created a mechanism to strip local departments of their authority in extraordinary cases in which many officers lost their certification. The legislation was designed to target the Colorado City Marshal’s Office.
“Women who have wanted to escape have been forcibly held by the marshals against their will,” Horne said at a January 2013 news conference.
The bill passed the state House 52 to 7, but it stalled in the state Senate and never made it to a vote. Asked last year in a TV interview about accusations that he helped kill the bill, Biggs said that officials were trying to gather more information and that he is “not sure we ever got to” the conclusion that the marshal’s office was fully corrupt.
“What I was concerned about is, did we have enough as a state to step in, as a state legislature?” Biggs added.
Others argue there was plenty of evidence. “They had more than enough,” said Flora Jessop, who left FLDS and then helped others escape.
“I thought, it’s never going to change, the community,” said Fawn Broadbent, another woman who left.
Over the next few years, Arizona officials launched reviews into alleged misconduct by six more officers in the marshal’s office, according to state records; local news reported at the time that one officer who eventually gave up his certification was accused of lying about sex-crime evidence. A county sheriff testified in 2016 that his department would not alert the marshal’s office when it got called to respond to child custody disputes, because deputies feared they would arrive to find the child gone. Residents accused the marshals of unlawful arrests, court documents show.
Women who fled FLDS also kept raising alarms. In a lawsuit, one recounted “difficult negotiations through the FLDS police” to get her children back, while another enlisted a different law enforcement agency to help retrieve her kids and was swarmed by FLDS followers in an ABC “20/20” episode.
The federal lawsuit against Colorado City eventually triggered changes: In 2017, a judge ordered reforms and 10 years of oversight at the marshal’s office.
The crackdown came too late for Biggs’s critics.
“Women and children suffered three years longer than they should have because he protected the bad guys,” Michelle Ugenti-Rita, then a Republican state lawmaker, said after the federal government won its FLDS lawsuit. Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored the 2013 bill, did not respond to a request for comment.
One of Biggs’s lesser-known rivals in the governor’s race, businessman Scott Neely, has sent out texts telling voters that Biggs “blocked reforms against child predators in Colorado City.”
But the GOP primary has mostly focused on other issues such as affordability and who has the best shot of defeating the Democratic incumbent. Biggs, who has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, is expected to win the Republican nomination in a landslide.
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