An Arizona politician orchestrated an illegal adoption scheme that smuggled at least 40 pregnant women from a Pacific Island nation into Utah, prosecutors said.

Paul Petersen, who was re-elected as assessor of Maricopa County in 2016, was arrested in Arizona late Tuesday for allegedly recruiting and transporting pregnant women from the Marshall Islands by offering them up to $10,000 to give up their children in the Beehive State, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said.

“The commercialization of children is illegal, and the commoditization of children is simply evil,” Reyes told reporters during a news conference Wednesday.

Investigators started looking into the Republican — a licensed adoption lawyer in Utah, Arizona and Arkansas — after a hospital worker in Utah called a tip line to report a possible illegal adoption involving a Marshallese woman.

That led authorities to unravel a scheme that they allege involved dozens of women between December 2016 and August, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

The pregnant women stayed at homes throughout north-central Utah and came to the state in some cases just weeks prior to giving birth, prosecutors allege.

One adoptive couple told police they visited a residence in West Valley City that housed at least 15 pregnant women — a “baby mill” that the couple claimed “just did not seem right,” according to charging documents cited by the newspaper.

It’s unclear exactly why Petersen chose Utah to allegedly smuggle the pregnant women, but Reyes cited the state’s lax adoption rules and its high Marshallese population as possibilities.

Petersen, whose website claimed he was successful in “hundreds of Marshallese adoptions” prior to it being shut down, also served a two-year mission in the Marshall Islands for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Reyes said.

Court documents allege that Petersen charged adoptive families up to $40,000 per child, raking in about $2.7 million in less than two years.

Authorities will not work to “unwind” any of the adoptions, which violated a compact banning Marshallese residents from traveling to the US for adoptions without a special visa, Reyes said.

An attorney for Petersen, meanwhile, disputed the allegations during his initial court appearance Tuesday, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

“These are proper business practice that they simply disagree with,” attorney Matthew Long said.

Petersen is facing charges in Utah, Arizona and Arkansas, including human smuggling, sale of a child, fraud, forgery and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Arizona’s governor, Republican Doug Ducey, has called on him to resign.

With Post wires