Iron bars now cover the windows of state Rep. Alma Hernandez’s Tucson home. A floodlight blazes over her front porch at night. A fingerprint-activated lock guards her door, and two trees in her yard are gone after police warned they could give an intruder cover. The security overhaul came after years of escalating threats culminated last year when gunfire struck a car parked outside her house.
Hernandez, a fourth-term Democratic lawmaker who has represented her Tucson-area district since 2019, has received threats arriving through social media, email and her office phones, according to The New York Times. Her home address was circulated online, her mother received menacing calls, and in 2025 an aide’s car parked outside her house was struck by gunfire. Police have not determined whether that gunfire was targeted or random, and investigators did not find the shooter, the Times reports. The bullet shattered a car window while Hernandez’s brother, former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez, was running for Congress, according to the same report.
That June 2025 shooting also drew separate local coverage. A bullet hit a campaign staffer’s car parked outside the Hernandez family home in Tucson, with no injuries reported, according to the Tucson Sentinel. Tucson Police said at the time that the motive remained unclear. Daniel Hernandez had previously interned for then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 and provided first aid when she was shot outside a Tucson Safeway, according to the Times; he received his own first death threat just three days after that shooting. By late 2023, worry over his sister’s safety led him to move into her Tucson home part-time, a arrangement that continues today.
Threats From Both Political Extremes
Hernandez has received threats from the far left and the far right, the Times reports, with the hostility tracing back to her support for Israel, her vaccine advocacy and even her first campaign for office. She said the volume of threats increased sharply after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, telling the paper that her support for Israel has brought more violent messages over the past three years than at any other point in her career. This year, Arizona state police opened an investigation after someone sent her a social media message pledging to “find, torture and brutally murder” her and her friends, and threatening one of her two Chihuahuas, according to the Times…