Beat the cops to the guards of the game, Florida extends “the army” of immigration executors
Eager to join the Trump administration’s thrust to expel unauthorized migrants, Florida is now raising what some people call an army of immigration officials by recalling beaten cops and even gaming guards to arrest unauthorized residents.
Having already deployed this extended and deputy body to carry out the largest scan of unauthorized immigrants in the history of the state – a one -week bite operation last month called Operation Tidal Wave – Florida is now a Belwether for the effort of the Trump administration to achieve a deterrence in the United States.
The 1990s saw a massive militarization of the American police. Playing now, with Florida, is one of the most muscular police movements in modern times. It targets unauthorized immigrants but with repercussions beyond this issue. The new effort includes the threat of local authorities and the police with sanctions for having omitted to get on board with a new state law, currently pending by the courts, which makes Florida without legal immigration documents a crime.
Why we wrote this
Florida is at the front with one of the most aggressive police movements since the 1990s, which have seen increased militarization of the American police. New tactics, intended for unauthorized migrants, can have wider consequences over time.
At a press conference on Monday, Governor Ron Desantis said that cooperation between Florida police and officers of the American Immigration and Customs Agency (ICE) is “a model for the rest of the country”. This has led to arrests of nearly 400 people with expulsion orders, he said.
“No state even does near what Florida does,” the governor told journalists in Tampa, Florida.
That the large -scale abolition of police as an immigration agents will improve public security or undermine the economy of Florida immigrants remains an open question. Up to 1.2 million unauthorized immigrants now live in Florida, according to a 2022 Pew Survey, many of whom work in construction, food services, retail and agriculture. (In 2022, the total population of Florida was 22.4 million. In 2024, it had jumped at 23.4 million.)
Regardless of the result, the state of Sunshine is about to give Americans an overview of mass deportation with the help of the application of local laws. So far, Florida has done $ 250 million in grants Available to reimburse the local police services that register to collaborate with the ice. These are cash subsidies to pay the salaries of the officers involved in sweeping and other cooperation on the ice. The participating officers are also eligible for an incentive bonus of $ 1,000.
Whoever has a badge
Other organizations for applying Florida law – the local national guard and the intervention team in the event of a state disaster to road patrols and game guards – have been deputies to detail unauthorized migrants.
“Florida is now evolving in the direction of … the application of immigration to the level of the state,” explains Austin Kocher, expert in immigration to Syracuse University in New York. “In some respects, it is the most extreme – or the most experimental version – of immigration policy.”
Judicial decisions have traditionally prevented the local police from the immigration obligation. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001, the Bush administration widened the 287 (G) program which allows local officials and states to conclude cooperation agreements with the Federal Immigration Application, within the limits.
Florida was the first to register in 2002.
A decade and a half later, during the first Trump administration, the law enforcement organizations in around 150 of the country counties (more than 3,000) concluded such agreements, said Professor Kocher.
This number is now booming. On May 9, President Trump announced “Project Homecoming” and, during the last week of February, Ice had concluded agreements with 140 law enforcement organizations, Professor Kocher said. Overall, at least 559 such partnerships are now in place, with dozens more. Modified training and standards facilitate participation.
So far, the program has been an aberrant value, because mainly sheriffs in the southern states have registered. The most popular model for partnership is the one where the County jailers inform ice when unauthorized immigrants are reserved in their prisons.
But a rekindled working group model, which allows agents to check the immigration status during the “routine functions of the police application”, wins the field. At least 625 officers at the national level are now substituted as an agents of the application of immigration after receiving the formation of ice.
This does not only happen in the South. The working group program was adopted in the New Hampshire States in North Dakota and beyond.
But no state was more eager for Florida, a Petri box for conservative policy where almost half of the 287 (G) – 249 – agreements – are in place. All the 67 sheriff departments of the state county are on board.
Of the 1,120 people arrested in Florida during operation Tidal Wave, 63% had arrests or existing criminal convictions, According to ice.
Posser of moderate courts and republicans
A new law used to justify such arrests was suspended by a federal judge in Miami on April 2, but that did not prevent the Florida police from continuing to apply it. In mid-April, an American citizen who does not speak fluent English was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol under the law and owned by ice.
There was also an attempt to decline some in the GOP. No civil servant or policeman was sanctioned for non-compliance. But the members of the Fort Myers municipal council, who voted not to participate in the program, would have reversed the course After Governor Desantis and Florida Prosecutor James Uthmeier threatened to withdraw them from his functions so as not to be online.
“Set this problem or face the consequences,” wrote Mr. Uthmeier on social networks.
Jessica Pishko, an expert in police power, says that she was surprised by the speed with which program 287 (G) has turned into a main application tool not only for border states, but also for interior states.
“They adopt this fragmentary approach to intimidation of people or force people to compromise how they will cooperate with immigration”, explains Ms. Pishko, author of “the highest law of the country: how the uncontrolled power of sheriffs threatens democracy”.
In addition, the Florida Gambit “returns the script” for the conservatives, who opposed the 1990s to the idea that the sheriffs had to follow a federal law which forced them to carry out checks of firearms of firearms, explains Daniel Rodriguez, law professor at the Northwestern University in Chicago.
In 1997, the Supreme Court confirmed this post, claiming that local authorities did not have to enforce a federal law.
“What limits is there on the ability of the federal government to conscript or the repertoire of authorities and local officials to enforce federal law?” said Professor Rodriguez, author of “Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States”.
However, Florida's approach could also discourage illegal migration, explains Dan Mears, director of the Florida State University Research Institute, thanks to a more muscular application and clear messages that unauthorized migrants will be confronted with consequences.
But reaching the state thrust takes a certain adjustment.
Earlier this spring, officials of High Springs, Florida, an ordered suburban oasis of around 8,000 in the North Center of Florida, signed a memorandum of 287 (G). The 20 High Springs patrol agents, including chef J. Antoine Sheppard, have followed the online training required and are now certified to hold those suspected of being illegally in the United States.
With the approval of the city's prosecutor, the Sheppard chief bypassed elected officials and signed the Trump administration agreement without any other contribution. While the sheriffs mainly respond to voters, police chiefs generally operate under the competence of elected officials and directors of the city.
“I do not know that an organization has a lot of choices to join,” given the new law of the State, explains the Sheppard chief in an interview with The Monitor.
There is a community of Latin workers in High Springs and in the surrounding rural counties, where farms grow everything, from blueberries to green beans.
Although it supports the deportation of unauthorized migrants who “push drugs or assaulting children”, seasonal workers who stop, many of whom are illegally here, is less urgent for his officers, who have not participated in the Tidal Wave operation. He said that he did not intend to offer his officers the greater operations and scalable deportation.
“We are a smaller agency,” he says. “If we meet illegal foreigners or something like that, we have the capacity to hold them and transport them in the county prison.”
Under the new rules, his officers can now have unauthorized migrants until federal officers collect them, a successful proposal in previous years.
For at least some residents, this is good news. Loretta Godden recently lost one of her daughters because of an accidental fentanyl overdose. Replacing a transnational fentanyl pipeline, or stopping foreign drug traffickers who often crisscross the borders, is an indicated objective of experience in Florida.
“These are federal problems that affect everyone, so our local police should work with federal people [to make immigration arrests]”Said High Springs' resident for life.” Otherwise, these problems spread. It is already very frightening.
