Of all the GOP candidates, Mitt Romney staked out the most extreme immigration positions during the Republican primary. He said his immigration plan would be to make undocumented immigrants “self-deport,” and he vowed to veto the DREAM Act. Since he effectively locked up the nomination, however, Romney tried to distance himself from his earlier hardline stances, and a Republican Party official even tried to claim that Romney is “still deciding what his position on immigration is.”

But Romney is still losing among Latino voters by an enormous (and widening) margin. While Romney has tried to moderate his immigration views from the primary to the general election, his immigration advisers and supporters still include extremely anti-immigrant officials.

KRIS KOBACH

Currently serving as Kansas’ secretary of state, Kobach is the author of harmful state and local anti-immigrant ordinances like those in Arizona, Alabama, and South Carolina. He wrote the vast majority of them as senior counselor to the restrictionist Immigration Reform Law Institute and as a private consultant. He has insisted that Romney wants SB 1070 as a national model, and he doesn’t expect Romney to soften the extreme immigration positions he took during the GOP primary. And following President Obama’s directive to halt deportations for up to 1.4 million young undocumented immigrants, Kobach called the policy “illegal.” Kobach advised Romney’s 2008 campaign on immigration and homeland security, and he returned to that role for the 2012 election after he endorsed the GOP presidential candidate in January. In April, Romney tried to distance himself from Kobach while softening his immigration positions, saying he was a “supporter,” not an “adviser” before conceding that Kobach was still an “informal adviser.”

PETE WILSON

After the former Republican California governor endorsed Romney, the presidential candidate named Wilson honorary California chair of his campaign. In a statement touting the endorsement, Romney said, “I’m honored to have Governor Pete Wilson’s support, because he’s one of California’s most accomplished leaders.” As governor of California, Wilson prominently supported Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant ballot initiative that made unauthorized immigrants ineligible for public services such as health care or public education. California voters approved the measure in 1994, a precursor to Arizona’s SB 1070, before courts declared it unconstitutional in 1997.

RUSSELL PEARCE

The former Arizona Senate president, who was ousted in a recall election, was the architect of Arizona’s infamous SB 1070. He threw his support behind Romney and said that the GOP presidential candidate’s “immigration policy is identical to mine.” And Pearce said Romney “absolutely” called for Arizona’s law to be used as a national “model” because Romney has advocated for self-deportation. “[Self-deportation] is in SB 1070,” Pearce said in April.

JAN BREWER

Citing only Romney’s “pro-business background” and his “political history,” Arizona’s nativist Republican governor endorsed Romney ahead of her state’s primary in February. Brewer is one of the nation’s most anti-immigrant governors, and she signed SB 1070, the first of a wave of anti-immigrant bills authored by Kobach.

RAY WALSER

After President Obama announced the directive to halt deportations for DREAM Act-eligible young adults, Romney refused to say whether or not he would undo the policy. But Walser, a co-chair of Romney’s campaign for issues pertaining to Latin America, said he thought Romney would get rid of it. “My anticipation is that he would probably rescind this directive were he to be elected in November,” he told The Daily Telegraph. He added that the decision would match up with the “very tough” positions Romney had taken on immigration. Walser is a senior policy adviser at the Heritage Foundation who spent 27 years working for the U.S. State Department.

LAMAR SMITH

The Texas Republican, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, became one of Romney’s earliest congressional endorsers in October 2011, choosing to back the former Massachusetts governor over Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Smith has pledged to not hold a hearing on the DREAM Act in his hearing, which Romney vowed to veto.

Thirteen Arizona county prosecutors are urging Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) to shut down the state’s medical marijuana facilities, which are allowed to seek permits under a 2010 state law, because medical marijuana is not permitted under federal law. Although public support for medical marijuana is currently at an all-time high, the Department of Justice continues to clash with states that have legalized marijuana for medical purposes — most notably in California, where the DOJ has targeted legal medical marijuana shops in an attempt to shut them down. However, Brewer will continue to implement her state’s law regardless of its split with federal policy.

The county attorneys signed onto the three-page letter written by Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk to express concern that Arizona’s medical marijuana dispensaries will be targeted by the DOJ in the same way that California’s have. Because the federal government is “vigorously enforcing the Controlled Substance Act by seizing and closing medical marijuana dispensaries in other states,” Polk wrote, the attorneys are concerned about Arizona business owners opening marijuana shops only to be hit with federal fines.

Brewer responded with her own letter, explaining that while she understands the concerns about legalizing marijuana trade for medicinal purposes, Arizona has the right to follow its own state law rather than bending to pressure from the DOJ:

BREWER: As previously noted, I did not support the passage of [the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act], and I share your concern regarding [the] implementation of the AMMA. Arizona voters, however, cast ballots in sufficient numbers to enshrine this measure into Arizona law. As such, I am duty-bound to implement the AMMA, and my agency will do so unless and until I am instructed otherwise by the courts or notified that State employees face imminent risk of prosecution due to their duties in administering this law.

Some lawmakers are working to address the disparity between federal law and state laws. A bipartisan group of Congress members introduced legislation to bridge the gap earlier this month, proposing a law that would allow individuals who are using marijuana for medical purposes in accordance with their state’s laws to better defend themselves against federal law. Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also recently suggested that House Democrats may take up federal medical marijuana legislation after the upcoming election, noting that it is “really important” to make changes to the current federal law against medical marijuana to “prevent the federal government from acting to harm the safe access to medicinal marijuana provided under state law.”

In addition to Arizona, 16 other states and the District of Columbia have also legalized medical marijuana.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program is supposed to help prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes. It formed agreements with state and local police departments to check the fingerprints of every person booked at jails against an immigration database to identify who is undocumented. But the program failed to focus on serious criminals — most people identified through the program were charged with traffic-related offenses in some jurisdiction — and thousands of U.S. citizens have been detained through the program.

Following Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that invalidated three sections of Arizona’s immigration law, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Secure Communities agreements with seven Arizona law enforcement agencies. They were the last agencies in Arizona with street-level task force agreements under the controversial program to check the immigration status of suspected undocumented immigrants. After the ruling let the “show me your papers” provision stand in SB 1070, a DHS official said the Obama administration determined that the agreements are “not useful” now in states that have Arizona-style laws.

Along with ending the partnerships, DHS officials said officials would not respond to calls from Arizona officials who want immigration agents to take undocumented immigrants into custody unless the suspects meet the criteria for enforcement priorities, such as convicted criminals or deportees who have returned to the U.S. While the task forces have been suspended, several Arizona departments still check immigration status in jails.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) accused President Obama of not thinking that Arizona is “part of the country anymore” if officials are pulling back on Secure Communities in the state. But a task force advising the president last year found that Secure Communities had a “negative impact” on public safety. It had “eroded the public trust” because even immigrants who had not committed serious crimes were being detained.

For the second time, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) rebuffed gun lobbyists’ efforts to enable people to bring firearms into public buildings by vetoing one of their pet bills:

Brewer’s veto of the bill, which could have let guns into city halls, police stations, county courts, senior centers, swimming pools, libraries and the state Capitol, was the latest setback for a push to expand the right to carry guns in public places in Arizona. . . .

Citing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in her veto letter, Brewer, who vetoed a similar bill last year, recognized the legitimacy of laws banning guns in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.

“The decisions to permit or prohibit guns in these extremely sensitive locations — whether a city council chamber or branch office staffed with state workers — should be cooperatively reached and supported by a broad coalition of stakeholders, including citizens, law-enforcement officials and local government leaders,” Brewer wrote in her veto letter.

Brewer’s citation to Scalia might seem counterintuitive, but it is not particularly surprising. As Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Second Amendment should not be read “to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”

Indeed, the fact that even staunch conservatives like Jan Brewer and Antonin Scalia find the gun lobby’s reading of the Second Amendment to be a bridge too far indicates just how radical those groups have become — and how out of touch their supporters in elected office are as well.