The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona announced the termination of U.S. Attorney Gary Restaino this week as part of the Trump administration's removal of U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Joe Biden.

Restaino, appointed to the position in November 2021, said he expected the termination since the turnover of top federal prosecutors is common between administrations.

In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Restaino looked back on his time in office and warned against the termination of any more staff members in the U.S. Attorney's Office, whose work he said was critical for the safety of Arizonans.

Restaino's responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What crime trends did you see during your tenure heading the agency?

Fentanyl trafficking is a big deal, but the fentanyl deaths are what we really focused on. We had a couple dozen cases where we were trying to get justice against the people who had sold the pills that turned out to kill someone. And those are, of course, individualized circumstances. They don't need 20 years in prison, but we did try to put some greater repercussions on them, and that was a way of engaging with the victims' families as well.

Threats against election workers were another trend we focused on . We had done some threats prosecutions in the past, but we really formalized it and tried to get some consistency among how we treated the different threat actors. It's election threats, it's threats at universities, it's threats to President Trump and to President Biden; it really cuts across all sectors. So we've come up with a threats working group in the office to try to make sure we were treating these cases and investigating them consistently. And it really was pretty critical, from a victim perspective, to get some justice there and also to explain why some cases are just malicious and not actually crimes. I think that's an important part of our civic discourse and civil engagement with the community.

Do you think President Trump's pardons of the January 6 Capitol attackers could embolden people to make more of these threats?

I do think that's a concern. These people are not reacting as people who are pardoned normally do. Normally, people who are pardoned are contrite and looking forward to a second chance, not emboldened. And that particularly concerns me because the mob violence resulted in the death of law enforcement officers, and it shocks me that we are exonerating people who killed cops.

Was there anything that surprised you while you led this office?

I am a firm believer that Arizona does not have sanctuary cities. No one's obstructing federal law enforcement, but obviously, our local partners have to decide how much they want to engage proactively on any immigration sweeps. And I certainly hope our local partners can find a way to maintain the confidence of the underserved communities around them.

What are the biggest challenges to immigration enforcement?

Rhetoric. Rhetoric is what gets people thinking about the issue. Simply put, undocumented aliens commit crimes at a far lower rate than United States citizens. All the data backs that up, and yet, somehow, Americans and Arizonans have this idea that undocumented aliens are here for malice rather than for the American Dream. So putting that into practice, our challenge is focusing and prioritizing on those who are criminal aliens or are adjacent to danger.

Here's the trend that concerns me: We're going to run out of criminal aliens real quick, and it's going to be more difficult to figure out how to prioritize and how to effectuate the administration's vision through the criminal justice system. There's other solutions there, but the criminal justice system, I think, has more limited solutions for immigration.

What would you have done if you had more time in office?

We would have continued to do the immigration work. We would have continued to evolve on how we handled firearms prosecutions. And we would have done much more with civil rights. Had I had another four years, we could have continued to ramp up the district's positive efforts in connecting with underserved communities — and in getting more prosecutions and also civil interventions through the civil rights perspective.

What area of civil rights would you have liked to have focused on more?

We had been looking for sexual harassment in housing. Our civil rights lawyers (put) a lot of effort in making sure everyone understood what we're looking for: a pattern in practice that the federal government can rectify through litigation. Many of our neighboring districts had had those cases. We were just never able to generate one. I'd like to believe that's because Arizona landlords are just better, but I fear that we just never quite got there, and I think that's an area of possible focus (in) the future.

What would you say is the biggest threat to the safety of Arizonans at this time?

I really worry about personnel in the federal government. And look, I know that the protection of federal employees probably isn't most on people's minds, federal employees have lots more protections than private employees. But let me give the pitch of why it simply matters. We can't get the job done without having people in the positions, and we can't get the job done well if the people that have been in the positions are forced out. Institutional knowledge is good, and government is good.

Just at the U.S. Attorney's Office, we've got about 36 employees still on probation, and the (Trump) administration is talking about potentially trying to fire all of them, and that would just be outrageous, and I certainly hope that those people can get some finality in knowledge that they will be able to stay in the office. We're talking about one-tenth of our workforce that is on a probationary status, and that would have devastating effects, in my opinion. There's another class of workers — we had to rescind offers to about six personnel, again because of this DOGE ( Department of Government Efficiency ) desire to cut the workforce. And that, to me, is outrageous.

I will tell you that we've got two law clerks to Republican judges, and we've got an active duty service member for whom we had to rescind offers. That just seems like it is inconsistent both with the administration's desire to protect Arizona and to reward public and military service, and so we certainly need to get those personnel on board and to get people doing the work that is critical to the protection of Arizona and America.