Ford says Lombardo ‘afraid to stand up to Trump’ in RJ interview

Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Aaron Ford said he was against Gov. Joe Lombardo’s authorization of Nevada National Guard troops to provide support to federal immigration enforcement efforts, he said in an exclusive interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

It’s not the first time the Democratic attorney general — who launched his bid for the state’s top office last month — and Republican governor have made their differences known since the possibility of a 2026 match-up became clear.

On Wednesday, Ford and the Review-Journal held a phone interview to discuss his campaign, litigation against the Trump administration and various policy stances. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q Since you kicked off this campaign a few weeks ago, what is the most significant issue you’ve heard from constituents and how do you want to address it as governor?

A I have had conversations with Nevadans from every corner of the state, from Clark County to Elko. The recurring things that I hear are pretty simple. Most folks want a good job in order to be able to buy a home in a safe neighborhood where the schools are good and preparing their children for careers or college and that their health care system responds to their needs and through it all, they are treated with humanity, dignity and respect.

As governor, those are going to be my areas of focus. But they won’t be new to me, because I’ve been working in the same areas as either a state senator or as attorney general. I’m looking forward to helping people accomplish these and achieve these goals as the next governor.

As attorney general, you’ve been a part of multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration. Are you seeing the results you want to see?

Yes, absolutely. First, I’ll say that I acknowledged, right after Mr. Trump was elected, that he was our president, soon-to-be. I’m not an election denier. He won. What I’ve said is that he gets to implement his plans, his policies, his platform, his promises, but it must be so lawfully. And when he does not act lawfully, and if he negatively affects Nevadans, I’m going to see him in court. And now that has happened nearly 50 times, and virtually every single time we’ve met him in court, we’ve defeated him in court — either preliminarily, during the pendency of litigation or via a permanent injunction — and that’s because he’s violating the law and he’s negatively affecting the guidance.

Whether it’s from freeing up important funds that were flowing to victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, or whether it was freeing up funds that related to medical research, whether it was ensuring that he couldn’t engage in certain activities that were unlawful at the outset and negatively harm Nevadans, I’m quite pleased with the work we put in and the results we received.

How much are those lawsuits costing your office?

My office does its work irrespective of cost, point blank. We don’t run around trying to figure out a cost allocation component. We do what’s necessary to protect Nevadans from any harm or danger, especially from the federal government when they’re breaking the law and/or violating our sovereignty.

(A Ford campaign spokesperson said after the interview the office is within its “legislatively approved budget and spending money as approved.”)

How do you see the state’s role in immigration?

It’s limited by constitution and by design and also by state statute. We have a statute that goes back to the 1930s indicating that, for example, law enforcement agencies should not be engaging in immigration work. That’s because the federal government has a constitutional requirement to address immigration issues, and both parties, Democrat and Republican, and administrations of a Democratic and Republican leadership have failed to address these issues.

What is your response to Gov. Lombardo’s authorization of Nevada National Guard supporting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement work?

Our state has scarce resources. From the conversations I’ve had with people in every corner of the state, they don’t want us spending our money doing someone else’s job. They want our state money, our scarce resources, to be spent on improving our educational system, on improving our healthcare system. They want to ensure that our environment is clean, and our water is safe. They want to ensure that we are focusing on state related issues, using our state resources, and not doing the job of other folks, especially in the circumstance where we now see the federal government has given a lot of money to immigration based issues, and so I don’t think many people agree with this notion of allocating state resources to the fed’s jobs, and I don’t agree with it either.

What would you like to do to address the housing crisis in Nevada, if elected?

The price to buy a home is at record highs, nearly half a million dollars in Clark County. The price to buy a home in Reno is more than $600,000. In 2023, (Lombardo) vetoed a bill to limit corporations from buying up homes and pricing hardworking families out of the neighborhoods.

Yesterday, you all at the RJ ran a headline saying that a Texas-based hedge fund is now the second-largest owner of homes. This bill that he vetoed could have addressed that issue.

Not only did he veto that bill, this year he forced Republicans to block (a similar bill). That’s the first thing I would do — I would sign a bill that limits the amount of homes that out-of-state corporations and hedge funds can buy and pricing us out of our neighborhoods.

I’ve demonstrated my ability to work with Democrats and Republicans alike to get affordable housing projects for veterans, for example, when I was senate majority leader. As attorney general, I prioritize the pocketbooks of hard work in Nevadans by going after corporate landlords who’ve been jacking up costs and pricing out working families.

I’ll leave it to you to go find all of the vetoes that Lombardo signed that could have addressed some of these issues, including Assembly Bill 44 which I passed (as the sponsor) that would have allowed me to crack down even more on price fixing on essential goods and services like rent.

What are your thoughts on the national conversation about affordability in the Las Vegas tourism market? What can or should be done at the state level to address that side of the economy?

It goes back to Lombardo being afraid to stand up to Trump and not standing up to Trump and instead putting Trump’s interests ahead of Nevadans, whereas I’ve sued Trump for his tariffs, for example, that have led to a dramatic decrease in tourism and visitation in our state. We prevailed at the (U.S. Court of International Trade), and we are now going to the court of appeals to work through this.

We have the highest unemployment rate in the nation for the first half of 2025. Last year we lagged behind the rest of the country in job growth. We’ve lost nearly 5,000 jobs in June, and travel in Las Vegas is down 11 percent year-over-year, and (13 percent) on top of that from international travel.

What’s Lombardo’s response? He said that we need to feel pain from Trump’s price-raising agenda, again, showing that he’s aligned more with Trump and putting Trump’s interests over in Nevada’s interests.

That’s not the vision I have in this state. I want to create a government that sees people like I was back in the day, a single dad who was struggling on Medicaid and food stamps, and I want that government to say that you matter and to invest in people, as opposed to aligning yourself with corporations that are pricing us out of everyday goods and services that we need.

When we put in records requests with the Attorney General’s Office, sometimes we see several months’ delay and have different challenges when it comes to the records we’re seeking. What kind of standards do you want to set when it comes to transparency and records releases as governor?

I’m sure you have noticed that every municipality, every state, every public entity, has issues relative to manpower that it takes to respond to public records requests. My office is no different, and I frankly think it’s improper to imply that it’s my office that is any different than any other.

What I would like to do is to have additional resources allocated to every agency that’s out there to respond to y’all’s multiple public records requests, but also an understanding from the public that we have limited manpower in that regard as well. We respond, generally speaking, in order in which records are received, and try to get these out as quick as we can.

Contact McKenna Ross at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.