Federal officials are “overwhelmed” by the number of undocumented immigrants being locked up as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan because of a detention-bed shortage, according to a key player in Florida’s efforts to assist the White House.
The capacity issue is expected to escalate in Florida in the coming weeks as sheriffs and police chiefs ramp up arrests and detention of undocumented immigrants, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Cabinet members, who met Tuesday as the State Board of Immigration Enforcement.
“This housing system … is already overwhelmed. They cannot deal with this,” Judd, who also serves as chairman of the State Immigration Enforcement Council, said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Lawmakers created the State Board of Immigration Enforcement and its related council during a February special legislative session aimed at helping Trump’s sweep of people who are in the country illegally.
The board — made up of DeSantis, Attorney General James Uthmeier, state Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson — on Tuesday advanced a plan setting up a $250 million grant program for local law-enforcement agencies to help with the federal immigration dragnet.
The grant program, also part of the legislation passed in February, is based on recommendations from the council, which is made up of sheriffs and police chiefs. Judd told the governor and Cabinet members that grants should be prioritized for training of state and local officers so they can be allowed to assist in federal immigration-enforcement programs.
Another part of the legislation passed during the special session requires sheriffs and county jail administrators to cooperate with federal immigration officials and participate in what is known as the 287(g) program, which allows them to temporarily detain people who are suspected of being in the country without authorization.
But as more immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally are arrested and detained locally, Judd warned that the federal government lacks the capacity to house them on a more-permanent basis.
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Florida sheriffs have almost 2,000 county jail beds that could be used to house undocumented immigrants who haven’t been charged with other crimes for up to 48 hours, Judd told the state board. But he said the sheriffs have “been at loggerheads” with ICE officials over national detention standards required for people in federal custody, which he called “onerous.”
“We asked simply for a waiver that we could house these folks according to the Florida model jail standards. After all, if it's good enough for those that are innocent until proven guilty, and they're United States citizens, certainly those housing rules should be sufficient for those that are in this country illegally,” Judd said, adding that discussions about a waiver of the national standards were ongoing.
The state’s housing capacity for the immigration effort is “a drop in the bucket,” Judd told the board.
“The speed we’re operating at is like cruising down the road at 20 miles an hour. When we put the pedal to the metal and get up to the speed limit, there is no way on God’s green earth they can handle this capacity,” he added.
Five-hundred deputies in Florida in the past two weeks have received credentials to participate in the immigration-enforcement effort, according to Larry Keefe, executive director of the State Board of Immigration Enforcement.
State and local officials in Florida who have authority to “find illegal aliens and arrest them … have the capability and capacity to do far more, to conduct far more arrests than we are doing right now,” Keefe told the board.
The result is what Keefe called a “bottleneck … that really is having what we call a modulating effect to where we have far more capability to arrest illegal aliens than we have accommodations, in terms of detention and transportation.”
Increasing demand for housing comes amid legal wrangling over an immigrant-detention complex in the Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” that can hold up to 3,000 people. State officials began holding people at the center this month but have not confirmed the number of detainees onsite.
Keefe said Tuesday he first scouted the Everglades site, which was erected adjacent to a remote airstrip, in February on a tour with state Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie and Florida National Guard Adjutant Gen. John Haas.
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Plans to launch a similar facility at North Florida’s Camp Blanding, a training facility for National Guard troops, are on hold until the Everglades complex is full, DeSantis said last week.
Florida’s participation in the national immigration-enforcement effort “will have huge positives,” the governor said Tuesday. But DeSantis cautioned that the Trump administration needs to do its part, pointing to a bill recently passed by Congress that set aside more than $170 billion for immigration enforcement.
“At the end of the day, the ability to house and process these illegals is the responsibility of the federal government. We’ve gone above and beyond to assist this mission … but they absolutely are going to need to take that massive amount of money they just got and be able to provide a better ability to hold, process and deport illegals, totally separate from anything our sheriffs are doing or our state agencies are doing,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis emphasized that detainees at state facilities need to be processed quickly.
“What I don’t want to do is just babysit people for six months. … I don’t think that’s what our role is. Our role is to assist with deportation,” he said.
In addition to reimbursement for training, the immigration-enforcement grant program approved Tuesday will allow state and local agencies to be reimbursed for detention and housing costs, transportation, equipment, travel and lodging and $1,000 bonuses for specially trained law-enforcement officers.
The board also advanced guidelines for a data-collection system that will require state and local law-enforcement agencies to track and share information about interactions with undocumented immigrants.
Judd said his “biggest fear” is about what will happen when more police officers and deputies are trained to join the immigration effort.
“It’s quite frankly like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s that many of them (undocumented immigrants) out here,” Judd said. “They’re immediately going to meet with what I call capacity resistance, because there's not going to be any place to put them.”
