Masked federal agents descending on city streets. Elected officials denied access to detention centers. Scores arrested without a trace.
As President Donald Trump pursues his plan of deporting immigrants at a massive scale, the federal agency tasked with rolling out the policy — Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — is limiting access to information about its extensive operations in Florida and across the country.
“We have to sound the alarm and let everybody know that this is a threat to democracy,” said David Cuillier, a scholar whose work has focused on journalism and government transparency. A member of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee, Cuillier has worked as a newspaper journalist and currently serves as director of the University of Florida’s Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project. He described ICE’s efforts to shield its operations from public view as an alarming trend.
“Everybody needs to voice their concern about this,” Cuillier said.
The pattern of secrecy extends beyond ICE itself.
In Florida, all 67 sheriffs’ offices and more than 160 police departments have signed 287(g) task force agreements with the federal agency — partnerships that deputize local officers to conduct immigration enforcement in the streets. Buried in those agreements is a sentence stating that local agencies must coordinate with ICE before sharing information about the program with the public. Multiple sheriff’s offices denied requests from Suncoast Searchlight for information about the task force program, stating that such materials must be obtained from the public information office of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency within which ICE operates.
Suncoast Searchlight spoke with Cuillier about government secrecy in immigration enforcement — and why it should alarm noncitizens and citizens alike.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you talk about the lack of transparency surrounding the 287(g) agreements between local law enforcement agencies and ICE?
What we've seen overall, and increasingly accelerating, is more secrecy and control of information. In particular, now, I'm getting calls from people all around the country where ICE raids are occurring. [The raids] are out in public. They'll even put out press releases about the raid, but then when you try to get the search warrant or some arrest warrant, they'll say, “Oh, that's secret. We can't even confirm nor deny that that exists.”
It's all about image control. Like with these [287(g)] agreements, where they require any information to first go through the public relations person at the agency — I mean, clearly that shows what it's all about. They may say it's about protecting, you know, law enforcement tactics or individual privacy, but that's not what it's about. It's about protecting [ICE] from being embarrassed. And we're seeing this more and more.
It has been building for decades across all forms of government, and the downside is the public isn't going to get the real information on what's happening. They're going to get a sanitized, spun version of reality of what the government wants them to see or know.
And that's just dangerous for a democracy, because ultimately, we're in charge, and we deserve to know what our government's doing. We pay their salaries, we delegate authority for them to do stuff for us, and so we're the bosses, and we should be able to see what's happening without spin and filtering.
Are the transparency problems coming mostly from ICE, or are local law enforcement agencies also not being open?
It's more ICE. I think a lot of county sheriffs and police departments are pretty forthcoming, because they're used to telling people, “We went to this residence and arrested these people for this reason.” Generally, they shouldn't have much to hide. But then you get ICE coming in, and they're throwing on this cloak of secrecy and saying they control the information.
And we're seeing that all around the country. In Denver, for example, there was a case where they were executing arrest warrants and publicizing it, and bragging about it and, and yet, saying nobody could see the warrants. In most parts of America, once the warrants are executed, once the police have gone in and done their job, we get to see what happened. And so for them to be all secretive is new and it's alarming.
Law enforcement has the power to detain you, to throw you in a cell, to take your kids, to take your money, even take your life. That's a lot of power, and with that power comes authority, responsibility and transparency. So there's a reason why the judicial system and law enforcement have presumptively been deemed transparent, or should be transparent.
Something that we’ve noticed through our reporting on ICE detainers in jails around Florida is that it seems like the counties are not uniformly dealing with these records in the same way. So, for example, in Alachua County, the sheriff is no longer informing the court when somebody has an ICE detainer or when a defendant has been taken into ICE custody. What they’ve said is that it's because they were told by ICE, ‘you can't do that.’
Have you heard from local officials who are trying to figure out how to deal with some of the secrecy demands that ICE may or may not be placing on them?
I don't have firsthand information about that, but I do know that it is ridiculous to keep the identities of people arrested secret.
That's where it's getting to the worst scenario that we can imagine. Because, remember, this transparency is to avoid what we've seen in other countries. We don't want to be like Russia or China, where they can rouse you out of bed in the middle of night and throw you in a gulag.
That's what happens when you make this secret. You know, when we were throwing people in Guantanamo Bay, alleged terrorists, people were trying to find out who was there, and the government would say, ‘No, we can't release the names of people who have been detained there because it would invade their privacy. It would be embarrassing to them if people knew they were in Guantanamo Bay.’
That's [often] what ICE is using — they're pinning it on the privacy invasion thing, and that's ridiculous. We deserve to know who is having their liberty taken away and why. If they deserve to be detained and deported or jailed or imprisoned, then prove it. And you know what, there's a process for that — but if we start allowing them to do this in secret, then that opens a whole can of worms that can be abused in terrible ways. And people say, ‘Well, trust the government.’ Really?
In what ways have you seen the public successfully pushing back against these secrecy claims by ICE and other agencies?
One, we have to shout it out to everybody in the community that this is what they're doing.
That if [ICE] could rouse this person off the street, out of bed, and throw them in some jail in secret, they can do it to you. And so we have to sound the alarm and let everybody know that this is a threat to democracy. Everybody needs to voice their concern about this. So that's number one. Number two, it needs to be litigated. These things violate laws, and there's a reason we have public record laws. There's a reason we have a variety of processes to ensure the accountability of government. So when they start breaking these laws, frankly, we just need someone to sue them. Now that's difficult because you have to hire a lawyer, and it's expensive and time consuming. A lot of journalists don't have a lot of money for this or their organizations don’t. And the average person certainly doesn't. So the system is a little stacked against the average person. This is a pivotal point in the history of this country, and I think it is a time that we really need to challenge these actions in court, because that's the only real way that a lot of this will be stopped.
Public awareness and shaming and litigation, that's pretty much the best thing we have.
You mentioned Sept. 11 and Guantanamo Bay earlier. Sept. 11 was a turning point for the government’s expanded use of things like surveillance. Do you trace some of these transparency issues back to Sept. 11-era policies too?
Oh yeah, it was a turning point, absolutely. With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, things became much more secretive. When we look at the data on Freedom of Information Act requests, the Department of Homeland Security is the big bottleneck, the big clog. That's where most FOIA requests are sent, and where they're backlogged, and where you get the highest secrecy. Now, of course, there are valid reasons for secrecy — national security reasons. I think we all acknowledge that there are appropriate things to keep from the public, and that's written into law.
But unfortunately, they move far beyond the law, and they're hiding things that they're not supposed to hide, and this has been building for the past 20, 25 years since 9/11, and every year it gets worse. I mean, the federal government's own data, you know about, 10 years ago, if you asked for a public record from the federal government, on average, you get about 40% of the time. Now it's down to 12% of the time, and it's been a steady line going down.
What happens when it gets to zero? That's when we lose this democracy. That's when we lose this republic, this country.
What should Floridians in particular be keeping an eye on with regards to public records and transparency around immigration enforcement?
Florida has long been known as one of the most transparent states in the country. Everywhere I go in the country, everybody says, ‘I wish I lived in Florida, it has the best, most transparent Sunshine laws around,’ and they are pretty good. They're not perfect, but they're pretty good.
And what we've seen is a lot of caving lately. We've seen them, you know, remove information from the website about “Alligator Alcatraz” and its contractors and the money spent building it.
We've seen these arrests going on, as you mentioned, in Alachua County, where you can't find out who's where and so on.
So if Floridians really do care about their Sunshine laws and transparency and holding government accountable, then they should speak out. Because whether you're a Democrat, Republican, whatever, it doesn't matter if you're an American, if you're a Floridian — this is about our right to know what's going on, whether it's in law enforcement or how they're spending our taxes, whether it's how well they're handling the parks or other programs. It’s something we have to stay firm on. And I'm hoping people do.
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
