Florida leads nation with nearly 100 police partnerships with ICE to deport undocumented

The vast majority of local and state police departments nationwide that have signed written agreements to assist the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda on the street level are in Florida.

As of Tuesday, 140 law enforcement agencies at the state, county and local levels have signed “task force” agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the nation, according to an ICE database.

A total of 97 of them are in Florida, including the sheriff's office in each of 67 counties.

“President Trump promised to conduct the largest deportation operation in American history,” announced Gov. Ron DeSantis at a press conference late last month at the Homestead Air Force Base. “The fact is if the state and locals are not fully participating in those efforts it’s going to be very difficult to achieve that.”

READ MORE: ICE is quietly expanding operations with local law enforcement across the nation

But in the wake of the unprecedented alignment of local, state and federal powers, many residents and experts worry that the closer local officials work with ICE officials, the higher the cost in the community when it comes to the foundational thing that law enforcement relies upon to keep communities safe: trust.

“Before the elections, we always had a good relationship with the sheriff’s office. They would always be there for community sporting events and other events and they were always welcome,” an indigenous Guatemalan resident of Lake Worth Beach told WLRN, on the condition that his name not be used to protect his privacy.

“But now we’re scared to get close to them.”

Last year, the man got his asylum claim approved to remain in the country legally. Even still, knowing that the sheriff’s office plans to work closely with ICE makes many in the community nervous, including himself.

“There’s a certain risk that I will be detained,” he told WLRN.

Nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., according to the latest Homeland Security Department estimates. Florida, with 590,000, has the third highest number of any state in the country.

In early February, ICE announced the arrest of 32 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions in Palm Beach County. They were from Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission assisted federal immigration authorities.

In late February, there was an ICE raid conducted in Lake Worth Beach, and at least a dozen people reportedly got rounded up.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told WLRN that his office was not involved with either operation. The office does have a new agreement under the 287(g) program with ICE, he acknowledged, but for now deputies are limited to transporting detainees once they are already under ICE custody. The new agreement that will allow sheriff’s deputies to start asking for papers during regular traffic stops is not in effect yet, because the needed training has not taken place.

Bradshaw said ICE agents in the community are mainly looking for people with criminal histories, but that they might do “collateral arrests” in the process, scooping up people with no criminal records.

“When you talk about collateral, our entire community has become collateral damage, if they're trying to capture a dozen, two dozen folks who have criminal records,” said Mari Blanco, Assistant Executive Director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth Beach, a non-profit serving immigrants.

For Blanco, the new partnership with ICE — whether it is currently in effect or not — is already having real world consequences.

“PBSO has been working towards creating a relationship with the community for years to be able to properly identify crimes and do their policing. This is going to harm their relationship,” said Blanco. “It takes years to build that trust and seconds to destroy it.”

Lake Worth Beach Commissioner Christopher McVoy is pushing for a series of townhall meetings about immigration policy to help maintain trust in community policing as the crackdowns intensify.

“The community starts losing confidence in law enforcement if they're not sure where law enforcement falls on all this ICE enforcement,” he said. “We need law enforcement in our city. It's a big deal.”

Wilkine Brutus

Florida's history with racial profiling

Florida was actually the first state to adopt a program that let local and state police interrogate and detain people suspected of being in the U.S. unlawfully, back in 2002 under then Gov. Jeb Bush.

The thinking back then was that local and federal agencies needed to work together to combat international terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Florida jumped on the program early because a majority of the Saudi pilots were found to have done flight training in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

This month, President Trump announced he is invoking wartime powers to combat what he says is an “invasion” of unlawful immigration to the country. “This is a time of war,” the president declared, even though Congress has not declared any war.

In the years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Aarti Kohli closely studied the intersection of local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement, when she was a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Her studies found that trust fell as local and federal authorities integrated on enforcement efforts.

“Witnesses wouldn’t come forward, or victims of crime wouldn’t come forward. It really eroded trust in local communities and it increased racial profiling,” Kohli told WLRN.

The issue with racial profiling became most prominent in Maricopa County, Arizona, where then Sheriff Joe Arpaio used new powers granted to him by ICE to conduct broad raids on Latino communities more than a decade ago. The Justice Department found widespread and documented evidence of racial profiling, with U.S. citizens being caught in the dragnet simply because of how they looked or sounded.

Notably, the DOJ also found crime rose when local police carried out enforcement of immigration laws. “From 2004 to the end of 2007, reported violent crimes grew by over 69 percent, including a 166 percent increase in homicides over the three-year period,” found a 2011 DOJ report.

“It was all about Community Oriented Policing in the past. That’s what the DOJ wanted to resource. These 287(g) agreements gut that,” said Kohli. “These programs are just counter to the whole notion of Community Oriented Policing, because the whole notion of that is trust.”

Pushback from residents in some communities

In Coral Gables, the city police department entered into an agreement with ICE without any public input, prompting pushback from residents and activists.

Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak, who is also the legislative chair for the Florida Association of Police Chiefs, defended his decision to partner with ICE during an interview Sunday on Local 10's This Week In South Florida.

"This does not make us the ICE agents that are actively going to be looking for individuals," Hudak said.

Alana Greer, an attorney at the Community Justice Project, said city police should have no role in civil immigration enforcement.

"It breaks the trust between our residents, it diverts our resources and our taxpayer dollars and it harms our neighbors, our friends and our community,” Greer said.

By contrast, the City of Hialeah held a meeting about whether it should enter into one of these agreements. Facing pushback from residents who said working with ICE would hurt community trust, Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo said it was nothing to worry about.

“Many might wanna go and put fear mongering out there so everyone gets nervous, but tomorrow morning it will be business as usual in the city of Hialeah,” said Bovo.

Cities, large and small, across Florida have recently penned agreements with ICE, ranging from Panama City and Key West, to Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Davie and Naples.

Three members of the city council in Fort Myers voted against entering into a 287(g) agreement with ICE, bogging down the decision in a tie. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that he would investigate the council members over their votes.

By state law, police agencies are only explicitly required to enter into 287(g) agreements if they operate a county jail. In January, DeSantis proposed a law that all agencies with 25 or more officers would be required to enter into a 287(g) agreement with ICE, but that provision was stripped from a bill that became law in February after lawmakers pushed back on it.

In a letter sent to Fort Myers commissioners, Attorney General Uthmeier alleged that the commissioners are breaking 2019 anti-sanctuary city law. That law was passed six years before the current 287(g) task force model even existed, but the office is interpreting that law extremely broadly, suggesting any city that does not enter into an agreement with ICE is breaking Florida law. Over 300 municipalities have not done so, the vast majority of cities.

"By failing to approve the Department's 287(g) agreement, Fort Myers is implicitly implementing a sanctuary policy," Uthmeier wrote in the letter. "Prohibiting city police officers from receiving the necessary federal training to adequately enforce U.S. immigration laws not only prevents city police from enforcing current federal immigration law but effectively prevents the city police department from participating in federal immigration operations."

DeSantis was more blunt. "Govern yourselves accordingly," he posted Tuesday on X above a news story on the commission's actions.

One thing is clear, whatever the law might require: dozens of Florida agencies are entering into agreements with ICE, marking a major shift following 9/11.

In 2004, David Harris, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, testified before Congress about the use of local police to help immigration enforcement. He told WLRN that congressional leaders were perplexed about why more local police did not assist ICE at the height of the Global War on Terror, and that they were surprised at what police had to say about it at the time.

“I had with me eleven pages of quotations from police chiefs, police union leaders, sheriffs, all kinds of people — just saying no. Bad idea. Not good for our communities’ safety, and that’s our priority,” Harris told WLRN about the 2004 congressional hearing.

What most surprises Harris is that it is not just statewide law enforcement agencies or countywide sheriff’s offices that have agreed to partner with ICE, but small, medium and large cities as well.

“Obviously the political climate has changed, and the social climate has changed,” said Harris. “The cities that do this — if they have any immigrant population at all, and if as is typical the household are mixed as to status — they will pay a price for this that they may not want to recognize.”
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