As President Trump plugs away at illegal immigration on the federal level, he’s found an unparalleled partner in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is now leading the country’s preeminent test of immigration enforcement at the state level.
The Republican governor has signed stiff new legislation criminalizing illegal immigrants’ entry into his state and ordering state and local law enforcement to sign cooperative agreements with the feds to enforce immigration laws to the maximum extent.
On Thursday, he stood with Homeland Security officials to announce a massive federal-state effort, Operation Tidal Wave, that nabbed 1,120 illegal immigrants with criminal records over one week last month. He called that effort a model for other states.
And on Friday he released his blueprint for the next steps, saying he’s ready to open temporary detention facilities, deputize state National Guard Judge Advocate General lawyers to serve as immigration judges to speed up cases, and have Florida arrange for deportation flights to get migrants on their way home.
He said he’s plowing ground that other red states should follow.
“I think this really represents a model,” the governor told reporters on Friday. “My hope is that as we’re doing this, then. you’ve got voters, particularly Republican voters in these other states saying ‘Hey why aren’t you guys doing this, why aren’t you doing what Florida’s doing?’”
He said it’s not enough to ban sanctuary jurisdictions and allow cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“You really, to be in the game, you need to be partnering with ICE and you need to be conducting your own operations,” he said.
Mr. DeSantis said Mr. Trump has performed a seismic turnaround at the southern border and “it’s pretty close to 100% secure.” But that’s only part of the answer.
It will take interior enforcement to oust the millions of new illegal immigrants that settled during the Biden years, and that’s where states can really help, the governor said.
“We just have way more people that are interacting in the community, that come into contact with illegal aliens more than the federal government does,” he said. “If we’re on the team and we’re supplementing these efforts, you’re going to see those [deportation] numbers go up dramatically.”
The biggest move so far is directing state and local law enforcement to sign partnerships, known as 287(g) agreements, with ICE. Those allow police to help directly enforce immigration law.
When President Biden took office, 148 state and local departments had 287(g) agreements. He cut that down to 135.
In little more than 100 days under Mr. Trump, that number has grown to 517 agreements, including 241 task force memo agreements, the most aggressive version that Mr. Biden had canceled altogether. Another 62 agreements were pending as of the start of this month.
Mr. DeSantis said Florida accounts for the lion’s share of the new sign-ups.
His new state enforcement blueprint also calls for training lawyers from the Florida National Guard’s Judge Advocate General staff to act as immigration judges to assist the feds in speeding deportation cases, and the state has vendors ready to provide up to 10,000 beds to help ICE with migrant detention.
Mr. DeSantis also offered Florida’s help in actually carrying out the deportations, saying the state has vendors “on standby” to fly people either within the U.S. or back to their country of origin.
Other GOP governors have been active, too.
During the Biden years, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott became the chief opposition voice by dint of his state’s lengthy border and the surge of illegal immigrants he was forced to deal with.
He came up with the plan to bus some of them directly to sanctuary cities, spreading a small bit of the pain Texas was facing. That worked beyond all measure, with New York, Chicago and Washington howling that Mr. Abbott was being unfair — but also beginning to chide President Biden for the crisis itself.
Mr. DeSantis took the busing idea and went a step further, intercepting several dozen newly arriving migrants in Texas who had been planning to head to Florida and instead flying them to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts’ playground for the liberal rich.
It went over like dropping a dead rat in the community swimming pool.
“That really changed the dynamic in terms of public perception,” the governor said Friday. “To have a wealthy enclave like Martha’s Vineyard freak out when they have 50 illegals show up, and literally declare a state of emergency and get the National Guard to deport them off the island immediately. It just showed these were people who wanted an open border for everybody else but didn’t want to live with it.”
At one point Haiti’s instability threatened a new wave of migrants arriving by sea. Mr. DeSantis said the Biden administration operated under a wet-foot, dry-foot policy where if they were interdicted on the water they were returned but if they reached land they were generally caught and released.
With the Coast Guard overstretched, the governor ordered the Florida National Guard to patrol the skies and spot migrant boats, and he deployed state forces to help interdict them before they reached land.
“We were able to supplement the Coast Guard and we’ve now gotten that down to a pretty good science where we’re able to stop almost all of these boats,” he said. “We’ve been in this fight for a long time in Florida.”
Mr. DeSantis’s efforts have been met with stark predictions of an economic collapse for Florida. When Florida also moved to expand opportunities for high school-aged teens to work, critics said the state was turning to children to fill jobs vacated by migrants.
UnidosUS, a Hispanic advocacy group formerly known as the National Council of La Raza, said the governor’s earlier actions had already cost the state tourism dollars and threatened tax receipts.
The governor called those “doomsday scenarios” and said they haven’t come to pass, and indeed there have been some early returns.
He said the state has seen savings from emergency room visits, which he attributed to a decline in illegal immigrants taking advantage of uncompensated care after Florida’s 2023 enactment of mandatory E-Verify, which allows businesses to vet their new hires’ legal work status.
He said those effects are seen elsewhere, too.
“I can definitely say wages have gone up,” he said. “Some of them may have to pay a little bit more to hire a legal worker, but that’s a good thing.”
