Beat cops to game wardens, Florida expands ‘army’ of immigration enforcers
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Patrik Jonsson Staff writer
| High Springs, Fla.
Eager to join the Trump administration’s push to deport unauthorized migrants, Florida is now raising what some call an army of immigration enforcers by enlisting beat cops and even game wardens to arrest the unauthorized residents.
Having already deployed this expanded, deputized corps to conduct the largest sweep of unauthorized immigrants in the state’s history – a week-long sting operation last month called Operation Tidal Wave – Florida is now serving as a bellwether for the Trump administration’s broader effort to achieve deterrence throughout the United States.
The 1990s saw a massive militarization of US police. Playing out now, with Florida leading, is one of the most muscular policing movements in modern times. It's aimed at unauthorized immigrants but with repercussions beyond that issue. The new effort includes threatening local officials and police officers with sanctions for failing to get on board with a new state law, currently on hold by the courts, that makes entering Florida without legal U.S. immigration papers a crime.
Why We Wrote This
The 1990s saw a massive militarization of U.S. police. Playing out now, with Florida leading, is one of the most muscular policing movements in modern times, aimed at unauthorized immigrants but with repercussions beyond that issue.
In a Monday press conference, Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the cooperation between Florida police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency officers is “a model for the rest of the country.” It has resulted in the arrests of nearly 400 people with deportation orders, he said.
“No state is doing even close to what Florida is doing,” the governor told reporters in Tampa, Florida.
Whether large-scale deputizing of police as immigration officers will improve public safety or undercut Florida’s immigrant-dependent economy remains an open question. As many as 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, Florida’s total population was 22.4 million. By 2024, it had jumped to 23.4 million.)
No matter the outcome, the Sunshine State is on course to give Americans a glimpse into what mass deportation could look like with help from local law enforcement. So far, Florida has made $250 million in grants available to reimburse local police departments that sign up to collaborate with ICE. These are cash grants to go toward paying salaries of officers involved in sweeps and other ICE cooperation. Officers who participate are also eligible for a $1,000 incentive bonus.
Anybody with a badge
Other Florida law enforcement agencies – from the local National Guard and the state’s disaster response team to the highway patrol and game wardens – have been deputized to detail the unauthorized migrants.
“Florida is now moving in a direction of doing … immigration enforcement at the state level,” says Austin Kocher, an immigration enforcement expert at Syracuse University in New York. “In some ways, it’s the most extreme version–or the most experimental version – of immigration policy.”
Court decisions had traditionally curbed local police from investigating immigration status. But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the Bush administration expanded the 287(g) program that allows local and state officials to enter into cooperation agreements with federal immigration enforcement, within limits.
Florida was the first to sign up in 2002.
A decade and a half later, during the first Trump administration, law enforcement agencies in some 150 of the nation’s counties (of more than 3,000) entered such agreements, says Professor Kocher.
That number is now surging. On May 9, President Trump announced “Project Homecoming,” and in the last week of February alone, ICE had entered agreements with 140 law enforcement agencies, says Professor Kocher. All in, at least 559 such partnerships are now in place, with dozens more pending. Modified training and standards make participation relatively easy.
Until now, the program has been an outlier, as mostly sheriffs in Southern states have enrolled. The most popular model for the partnership is one where county jailers notify ICE when unauthorized immigrants are booked into their jails.
But a revived task force model, which allows officers to check immigration status during “routine police enforcement duties,” is gaining ground. At least 625 officers nationwide are now deputized as immigration enforcement agents after receiving training from ICE.
It’s not just happening in the South. The task force program has been adopted in states from New Hampshire to North Dakota and beyond.
But no state has been more eager than Florida, a petri dish for conservative policy where nearly half of all 287(g) agreements – 249 – are in place. All of the state’s 67 county sheriff departments are on board.
Out of the 1,120 people arrested in Florida during Operation Tidal Wave, 63% had existing criminal arrests or convictions, according to ICE.
Pushback from courts and moderate Republicans
A new law used to justify such arrests was put on hold by a federal judge in Miami on April 2, but that didn't stop Florida police from continuing to enforce it. In mid-April, a U.S. citizen who is not fluent in English was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol under the law and detained by ICE.
There’s also been attempted pushback from some in the GOP. No government officials or police officers have been sanctioned for noncompliance. But Fort Myers city council members, who voted not to participate in the program, reportedly reversed course after Governor DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier threatened to remove them from office for failing to fall in line.
“Fix this problem or face the consequences,” Mr. Uthmeier wrote on social media.
Jessica Pishko, an expert on police power, says she has been surprised at how quickly the 287(g) program has morphed into a primary enforcement tool not just for border states, but for interior ones as well.
“They’re taking this piecemeal approach of bullying people or forcing people to compromise over how much they’re going to cooperate with immigration,” says Ms. Pishko, author of “The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.”
What’s more, Florida’s gambit “flips the script” for conservatives, who objected in the 1990s to the idea that sheriffs had to follow a federal law that required them to conduct gun-purchase background checks, says Daniel Rodriguez, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago.
In 1997, the Supreme Court confirmed that position, saying local authorities did not have to enforce a federal law.
“What limits are there on the federal government’s ability to conscript or commandeer state and local officials to enforce federal law?” says Professor Rodriguez, author of “Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States.”
Still, Florida’s approach might also discourage illegal migration, says Dan Mears, director of the Corrections Research and Policy Institute at Florida State University, through more muscular enforcement and clear messaging that unauthorized migrants will face consequences.
But joining the state push is taking some adjustment.
Earlier this spring, officials in High Springs, Fla., an orderly suburban oasis of about 8,000 in agricultural North Central Florida, signed a 287(g) memorandum. All 20 High Springs patrol officers, including Chief J. Antoine Sheppard, have taken the required online training and are now certified to detain those suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
With the approval of the city attorney, Chief Sheppard bypassed elected officials and signed the Trump administration’s agreement without other input. While sheriffs answer primarily to voters, police chiefs typically operate under the purview of elected officials and city managers.
“I don’t know that any organization has much choice but to join,” given the new state law, says Chief Sheppard in an interview with the Monitor.
There is a community of Latino workers in High Springs and the surrounding rural counties, where farms grow everything from blueberries to green beans.
While he supports deporting unauthorized migrants who are “pushing drugs or molesting kids,” arresting seasonal workers, many of whom are here illegally, is less urgent for his officers, who did not participate in Operation Tidal Wave. He said that he has no plans to offer his officers for the larger deportation operations and sweeps.
“We’re a smaller agency,” he says. “If we encounter illegal aliens or anything like that, we have the ability to detain and transport them to the county jail.”
Under the new rules, his officers can now hold unauthorized migrants until federal officers pick them up, a hit-or-miss proposition in previous years.
For at least some residents, that is welcome news. Loretta Godden recently lost one of her daughters to an accidental fentanyl overdose. Squelching a transnational fentanyl pipeline, or stopping the foreign drug traffickers who often criss-cross borders, is a stated focus of the Florida experiment.
“These are federal problems that affect everyone, so our local police officers should be working with federal folks [to make immigration arrests],” says the lifelong High Springs resident. “Otherwise, these problems spread. It’s already very scary.”
