Days before President Donald Trump even took office, Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed that Florida would work hand-in-hand with federal immigration officials to carry out the president's plan for mass deportations.
DeSantis has ordered local law enforcement agencies to participate in the 287(g) program, which allows local police agencies to assist with certain immigration enforcement tasks within county jails.
Recently, state officials also signed an agreement that will give Florida Highway Patrol the ability to interrogate and arrest immigrants without legal status. The agreement is "much broader in scope than previous agreements reached with county sheriff’s offices," writes partner station WLRN.
RELATED: Florida Highway Patrol troopers will soon aid ICE in deportation efforts
Immigration advocates are warning that these partnerships will likely erode trust between police and the communities they protect.
"If they see local police and federal law enforcement entangled, they're less likely to report crimes, less likely to cooperate," said Paul Chavez, litigation director for nonprofit law firm Americans for Immigrant Justice.
"Say a homicide investigator wants to be able to knock on a door and talk to people about what happened. If somebody in the family doesn't have immigration status, they're not going to open the door because they're afraid that interaction may lead to their loved one being deported. So it creates that distrust that a lot of those local police stations spent years trying to avoid."
What is 287(g)?
The 287(g) agreement comes from that particular code section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996.
The current models don't allow for what's known as street-level enforcement (discontinued in 2012) but authorizes local officers to interrogate and detain suspects in their custody or jails.
For example, officers may arrest someone for a traffic violation, then bring that person to a county jail. When the detainee's information is entered, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement database could flag the person as a noncitizen with a pending immigration court order.
If so, ICE can send the local law enforcement agency a detainer request to hold the suspect in jail for an additional 48 hours until federal immigration officers arrive.
The program has two basic frameworks: the jail enforcement model and the warrant service officer model.
Both ultimately allow officers to hold people for the additional 48 hours, but there are differences.
Under the jail enforcement model, officers go through a four-week training, where they learn how to interrogate suspected noncitizens to determine their immigration status within the jail and then issue the ICE detainers.
The warrant service officer model requires just eight hours of training. Local officers are only allowed to serve federal immigration warrants and not interrogate people.
287(g) and racial profiling
The more extensive jail enforcement model training teaches officers about "multicultural communication and the avoidance of racial profiling.”
ICE's factsheet on the program also says "racial profiling is simply not something that will be tolerated, and any indication of racial profiling will be treated with the utmost scrutiny and fully investigated."
But past studies and investigations have shown that racial profiling does happen.
"We see officers pull over Black and brown people at increased rates thinking that they might be able to bring them to jail to get fingerprinted," said Chavez.
RELATED: How school districts across the Tampa area are responding to potential for immigration agents
In 2011 and 2012, investigations, the Department of Justice found that sheriff's offices in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Alamance County, North Carolina, targeted Latino neighborhoods and conducted "sweeps" that led to Latino drivers being stopped and arrested more often than non-Latino drivers.
A 2022 study from Texas A&M University also found that there were spillover effects from these agreements.
Researchers analyzed about 18 million traffic stops between 2000 and 2016. They found that state troopers in North Carolina and South Carolina that were not part of 287(g) agreements still stopped Hispanic drivers more often than white drivers "to funnel them into the intensive immigration screening" conducted at jails shared by agencies that had agreements with ICE.
What have counties said?
Florida's efforts to participate in the 287(g) program are not new.
A 2022 law mandated that agencies operating a county detention center enter into a 287(g) agreement.
But ICE had stopped processing applications under the Biden administration.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and the Pasco County Jail are the only agencies in the Tampa Bay region that do not have an agreement. However, both have submitted applications, which are pending, according to the ICE website.
The Hernando County Sheriff's Office, along with three other county agencies in Florida, appear to be the only ones operating under the jail enforcement model, where officers can interrogate suspects about their immigration status.
Polk, Sarasota, Manatee and Pinellas counties all operate under the warrant servicer officer model.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in a statement to WUSF that his "concern about immigrants is centered on those who are not U.S. citizens, illegally in the country who commit crimes."
"Deputy sheriff’s only arrest those who violate our laws, we have never gone into neighborhoods or schools or businesses checking people for their immigration status — that’s not our job," Judd wrote. "We work hard every day in diverse neighborhoods working hand in hand with our residents and building positive relationships to prevent, investigate and solve crime so that we can all enjoy a great quality of life.”
According to a Polk County Sheriff's Office spokesperson, its jail capacity ranges between 2,676 to 3,000.
In January, officers issued 255 ICE detainers; 53 were still in custody at the end of the month and 202 were released.
Of those released, 170 were transferred to ICE, 18 were transferred to other agencies and 14 detainers were removed by ICE.
Judd, who pledged "full cooperation with ICE," said that the jail sends the federal agency a daily list of people booked who are classified as "foreign born or as a non-citizen, so that ICE can check them for legal status."
