Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake are facing off in battleground Arizona in a high-profile Senate race as Democrats seek to hang onto their narrow control of the chamber at large.

Gallego and Lake have been duking it out for the open seat after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a former Democrat turned independent, opted not to seek reelection. The seat is among a number that Democrats have been fighting to hang onto this cycle, with a Senate map that’s put them on defense across a handful of races in 2024. 

Gallego, 44, is a Marine combat veteran who was first elected to the House in 2014 and represents a district that includes parts of Phoenix and Glendale. In his campaign for Senate, the progressive lawmaker has worked to court voters in the middle, while painting his opponent as extreme. Gallego would be the first Latino senator to represent Arizona. 

Lake, who narrowly lost a hard-right campaign for governor in 2022, is a former TV news anchor and close ally of former President Donald Trump. The 55-year-old, who has widespread name recognition in the state, has been a vocal election denier regarding the outcome of both her own gubernatorial race and Trump’s 2020 matchup against President Biden. But she often reeled in that message during the Senate campaign. In the lead-up to Election Day, Lake launched personal attacks at Gallego, including about the circumstances of his divorce.

Until Sinema won her Senate race in 2018, a Democrat hadn’t been elected to the Senate in Arizona in three decades, though Sinema went on to leave the party. Then in 2020, Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, won a competitive Senate race to serve the remainder of Sen. John McCain’s term after his death, becoming the first Democrat to hold the seat since 1962. 

The historically Republican state has been a key battleground this cycle, and as a border state, has seen immigration become particularly salient for voters — an issue that has tended to be more favorable for Republicans. 

Still, Gallego has led in the bulk of statewide polling in the months leading up to the election, and Democrats invested heavily in advertising in the state, which saw among the largest advertising reservations disparities of all the battleground races this cycle. Arizona also has an abortion initiative on the ballot — an issue that has appeared to drive Democrats to the polls in previous elections.

Serving in the U.S. House of Representatives comes with a six-figure salary, along with perks including paid travel and housing costs.

While the $174,000 annual pay likely doesn’t sound too shabby to those living in a country where the median individual wage comes to just over $59,000 a year, members of Congress are earning wages that were set in 2009. They haven’t gotten an automatic cost-of-living adjustment since 2009.

In getting elected as Speaker of the House in October of 2023, Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson’s annual salary jumped to $223,500. Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise and New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries each make $193,4000 a year as the House majority and minority leaders, respectively. 

Members of Congress are not allowed to continue in their prior jobs while working on Capitol Hill, although their net worth continues to increase through investments. Indeed, many Washington, D.C., lawmakers were already millionaires when they began their political careers, especially in the Senate.

Although pensions are increasingly uncommon for most American workers, the perk is alive and well for lawmakers. Since 1946, members of Congress with at least five years of service or federal employment are eligible for “a generous pension that pays two to three times more than pensions offered to similarly salaried workers in the private sector,” according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. 

The value of the pension benefit is determined based on when a lawmakers was elected to office, time served and the average of the three years of their highest salary, noted NTUF, an affiliate of the National Taxpayers Union. 

A lesser-known congressional benefit is the practice of leaving death gratuity payments to the heirs of members who die while serving in office. Equal to the member’s yearly congressional salary, the payments are provided regardless of how wealthy the deceased lawmaker was. From 2000 to 2021, the payments have cost taxpayers $5 million, the nonprofit research group found.

Mexico’s National Guard fatally shot two Colombians and wounded four others in what the Defense Department claimed was a confrontation near the U.S. border.

Colombia’s foreign ministry said in a statement Sunday that all of the victims were migrants who had been “caught in the crossfire.” It identified the dead as a 20-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman, and gave the number of Colombians wounded as five, not four. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy. The victims were identified by the foreign ministry as Yuli Vanessa Herrera Marulanda and Ronaldo Andrés Quintero Peñuelas.

Mexico’s Defense Department, which controls the National Guard, did not respond to requests for comment Monday on whether the victims were migrants, but it said one Colombian who was not injured in the shootings was turned over to immigration officials, suggesting they were.

If they were migrants, it would mark the second time in just over a month that military forces in Mexico have opened fire on and killed migrants.

On Oct. 1, the day President Claudia Sheinbaum took office, soldiers opened fire on a truck, killing six migrants in the southern state of Chiapas. An 11-year-old girl from Egypt, her 18-year-old sister and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador died in that shooting, along with people from Peru and Honduras.

The most recent shootings happened Saturday on a dirt road near Tecate, east of Otay Mesa on the California border, that is frequently used by Mexican migrant smugglers, the department said in a statement late Sunday.

The Defense Department said a militarized National Guard patrol came under fire after spotting two vehicles — a gray pickup and a white SUV — in the area, which is near an informal border crossing and wind power generation plant known as La Rumorosa.

One truck sped off and escaped. The National Guard opened fire on the other truck, killing two Colombians and wounding four others. There was no immediate information on their conditions, and there were no reported casualties among the guardsmen involved.

One Colombian and one Mexican man were found and detained unharmed at the scene, and the departments said officers found a pistol and several magazines commonly used for assault rifles at the scene.

Colombians have sometimes been recruited as gunmen for Mexican drug cartels, which are also heavily involved in migrant smuggling. But the fact the survivor was turned over to immigration officials and that the Foreign Relations Department contacted the Colombian consulate suggests they were migrants.

Cartel gunmen sometimes escort or kidnap migrants as they travel to the U.S. border. One possible scenario was that armed migrant smugglers may have been in one or both of the trucks, but that the migrants were basically unarmed bystanders.

The defense department said the three National Guard officers who opened fire have been taken off duty while the incident is being investigated.

Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office Sept. 30, gave the military an unprecedentedly wide role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the combined military forces as the country’s main law enforcement agencies, supplanting police. The Guard has since been placed under the control of the army.

But critics say the military is not trained to do civilian law enforcement work. Moreover, lopsided death tolls in such confrontations – in which all the deaths and injuries occur on one side – raise suspicions among activists whether there really was a confrontation.

For example, the soldiers who opened fire in Chiapas – who have been detained pending charges – claimed they heard “detonations” prior to opening fire. There was no indication any weapons were found at the scene.