Across Florida, local and state law enforcement agencies are rushing to meet the Trump administration’s call for police to help find and arrest immigrants here illegally, positioning the state on the vanguard of the president’s plan to carry out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.

Just six weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, 97 Florida police forces and sheriff’s offices have been approved to participate in a revived program that will allow them to stop, question and detain undocumented immigrants out in the communities they police. That’s nearly five times the number of law enforcement agencies partaking in the program in the rest of the country.

The high participation rate could make Florida — where immigrants make up more than a fifth of the population — a testing ground for local immigration enforcement under Trump, who has resurrected a program shuttered by the Obama administration after concerns of racial profiling and a lack of oversight.

“We are ahead of the curve,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a Florida Cabinet meeting Wednesday. “We didn’t want to wait. We didn’t want to let this drag on for many months. We wanted to be there right at the outset of the Trump administration and anything that they’re going to do policy wise, we’ll be ready to go.”

Encouraged by DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-led Legislature, police agencies have signed up so quickly to help with immigration enforcement that the Trump administration can’t keep up. So far, no one has been deputized by the federal government to hit the ground with the new enforcement powers.

Florida’s newly minted immigration czar, Larry Keefe, told the governor the state is “getting too far ahead of our federal leaders and partners” — and DeSantis has tasked him with finding ways to “accelerate” the process.

Already, there are more police agencies in Florida signed up to help enforce immigration law than there were in the entire country when the Obama administration shut down the program — known as the 287(g) task force model — in 2012. Today, participating agencies include the Florida Highway Patrol, sheriff’s offices in Miami-Dade, Monroe and Hillsborough counties and local police departments in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Key West.

Other agencies are waiting for approval, including Coral Gables Police and the Florida State Guard, which is under the command of the governor. On Friday, the Florida Department of Education encouraged police forces that work for school districts to get involved if they think it would be “beneficial to the safety of the school district.”

DeSantis has publicly said that he wants local and state officers to be proactive in finding immigrants who are here illegally and enforcing a new law that makes it a crime to enter Florida after coming into the country without proper immigration status.

“If you are here illegally that is a crime too, OK?” DeSantis said after signing the law. “You can’t just say you have free range to be here illegally until you commit some type of felony. I want you out before you commit the felony.”

‘It’s going to be a challenge’

For now, Florida’s police agencies have to wait to engage in the task force program. The federal government hasn’t yet been able to train local officers to participate. Agencies don’t have the forms to nominate officers and deputies, much less train and certify them.

“It is going to be a challenge,” said Keefe, who blamed the lag at the Department of Homeland Security on a “state of complete atrophy during the Biden administration.”

Before officers can enforce federal immigration violations locally, they are required to undergo a 40-hour online mandatory training. Records show the training includes lessons on “relevant immigration law,” the scope of immigration officers’ authorities, as well as instruction on civil rights laws, liability issues and “cross-cultural issues.”

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who was appointed to advise Florida’s State Immigration Enforcement Council, said it is important to follow the training process to ensure officers are able to carry out the mission of the program.

“Just because we got training, that doesn’t make us immigration experts,” Gualtieri said. “That makes us where we can help and we can assist, but you have to be careful in this, because the last thing that anybody would want to do is to improperly arrest a U.S. citizen, or somebody that is here lawfully.”

But the process will take time.

“It is not going to be all of a sudden, poof, you’ve got all these people out there. It’s not going to work that way,” he said.

Legal scholars say the implementation of the program could reshape community dynamics and raise racial profiling concerns, citing past problems with the program.

Under the program’s framework, police officers are authorized to stop and question people about their immigration status during routine stops, so long as they have a basis — however minimal — for suspicion, Nayna Gupta, the policy director at American Immigration Council, told the Herald/Times.

“What makes them suspect somebody violated immigration laws, of course, is where racial profiling comes into play,” Gupta said.

Studies and federal investigation have shown findings of racial profiling, particularly in Latino communities, in some jurisdictions where the program was active in the 2000s.

A 2011 report from the Migration Policy Institute found that in some jurisdictions, participation in the task force model resulted in stops and arrests that disproportionately targeted Latinos. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona and found a “pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos.” That same year, ICE discontinued the task force model, saying in a memo that other enforcement programs were a “more efficient use of resources for focusing on priority cases.”

Other 287(g) programs remained operational, allowing local correctional officers to issue warrants and identify undocumented immigrants in detention facilities for deportation. All Florida sheriffs and the Florida Department of Corrections are enrolled in these detention programs.

Racial profiling concerns emerge

In a press conference last week, some Florida sheriffs dismissed concerns that racial profiling could play a role in how local officers enforce federal immigration violations while doing their routine work in the community.

“We are tired of hearing that crap,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, who also serves as an adviser to the State Immigration Enforcement Council, told reporters. “It is total BS. It is woke, left, crazy talk.”

At the same press conference, Gualtieri, the Pinellas County sheriff, told reporters that cops are “going to do the right thing.”

“If somebody has an allegation that one of us, one of our people, is doing something improper, bring it to us,” he said. “We are going to investigate it thoroughly and if somebody needs to be held accountable for doing something wrong, we are going to hold them accountable.”

But some legal scholars say that the risk of racial profiling can increase depending on how diverse a community is and how police officers choose to enforce immigration violations.

“If you are a police officer, even if you have no racial prejudices, you know that a person who looks like they’re Hispanic, or Black or who’s speaking Spanish is statistically speaking more likely to be an undocumented immigrant,” Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University, said in an interview. “Therefore, it’s very difficult to resist the temptation to engage in this kind of profile.”

Somin argued that “taking a very rational action” does not necessarily mean it is good for the community, noting that the cumulative impact of repeated racial profiling could hurt the community’s trust on police.

In an interview Thursday, Gualtieri said that while the task force model would allow officers to ask about someone’s immigration status in any interaction, officers will be focused on arresting those who meet the ICE criteria for detention, such as those who are a public safety threat.

Gualtieri said that his goal is not to have officers “going out and looking for people who are simply here illegally.”

“What I want to focus on are the people who are a threat to others, who are public safety and national security threats who are here illegally,” he said.

Miami-Dade County Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz recently said that deputies will continue to help federal immigration officials arrest people who are committing crimes. She said that inquiring about a person’s immigration status will not be a priority if someone is not committing a crime.

If a person is pulled over for a traffic stop, they will still only be asked for their license, insurance and registration — not proof of residency status. If that stop leads to an investigation of more serious crimes or an arrest, then that may change, she said.

The problem is oversight over how those interactions go, said Gupta, with the American Immigration Council.

“There’s nobody on the ground monitoring whether there’s a valid basis to stop people in the first place or to monitor the kind of police activity that leads to this interrogation,” she said.

The other question is: how much enforcement will these state officials actually do?

“Just because they’re signed up for a program, that doesn’t by itself dictate how much enforcement they actually undertake,” Somin said.

_____

©2025 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.