A day after announcing he would kill a “weak” immigration bill passed by the Legislature, Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed lawmakers' opposition to his proposals and stressed his desire for local law enforcement to be involved in deportation efforts.
Passed this week by the state House and Senate, the bill — known as the "Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy (TRUMP) Act" — shifts immigration oversight from DeSantis to the state’s Agriculture commissioner, Wilton Simpson.
DeSantis wants to remove what he says would be “a new bureaucracy” under the Florida Department of Agriculture, arguing that the agency would be too lenient on deportation to prioritize the state’s economic interest in the industry.
At a roundtable in Palm Beach County on Thursday, he explained that is one of the reasons he believes the “structure of the bill is patently ridiculous and designed to fail.” He reiterated to WLRN that he is going to veto the bill, in hopes to put community pressure on individual lawmakers.
For lawmakers who supported the bill, “ on this issue, you owe (voters) an explanation for your actions,” DeSantis said.
He said there is a "undercurrent of folks, particularly in Republicans, who campaigned so hard against the illegal immigration. They're gonna be tough. They're gonna do all this stuff and everything. But in reality, they want to preserve a lot of illegal foreign labor."
"They do. It's a corporatist thing," he added.
Spearheaded by House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton, the bill would allocate more than $500 million to enhance penalties for undocumented criminals, among other key provisions. It came in defiance of DeSantis' own proposals, in a showdown between the governor and Republican lawmakers over whose approach would be better at carrying out President Donald Trump's immigration directives.
DeSantis said lawmakers risk jeopardizing his ongoing effort to “have the strongest law in the nation on immigration enforcement” and eliminate, among many of his proposals, “magnets such as remittances” and “catch and release,” which refers to the practice of releasing people who are detained back into their communities to await scheduled immigration court hearings instead of holding them in detention centers.
DeSantis told WLRN that, under his proposal, remittances would be subject to a new verification system to dry up “a big part of the incentive to come."
“U.S. citizens can send remittances. Legal foreign residents or workers on visas can send remittances,” DeSantis said. “It's the illegal alien that would have to show.”
DeSantis was joined in the roundtable by Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, state Rep. Mike Caruso, and Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Training Facility.
Each emphasized their support for the governor. “Our border is the ocean. You can’t put up a fence,” Bradshaw said. “We’re the fence.”
DeSantis held similar roundtable discussions Wednesday with law enforcement in Fort Myers and Titusville.
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