Miami-Dade County Democratic state Rep. Dottie Joseph at the Capitol on Nov. 19, 2024. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
Floridians of all political stripes are gearing up for what President-elect Donald Trump has promised will be the largest deportation effort in American history when he returns to the White House in January.
Thomas Kennedy is a spokesperson for the Florida Immigrant Coalition. He takes Trump’s words seriously but says that there are considerable roadblocks ahead for the president-elect to fully fulfill his promises.
“One is the budget and resources,” he said. “They’re going to have to hire a lot more agents — ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], CBP [Customs and Border Enforcement], and immigration enforcement substantially to carry this out.”
Another problem will be whether the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua accept citizens sent back by the U.S. government.
“These are geopolitical opponents of the United States, and they are not going to accept those deportation flights,” he told this reporter on WMNF radio last Friday. “And deportation flights can’t land in a foreign country unless they are allowed to land by that foreign country. So, we can expect foreign policy jockeying negotiations from those countries if they want to carry out those deportations.”
“It’s yet to be seen what specifically he wants to do,” added North Miami Democratic House Rep. Dotie Joseph.
“The concept of having these mass deportations is going to be significant, and they’re going to have to re-work a lot of things to make it happen. From my review of Project 2025, it seems more of a mass detention program than a mass deportation program initially, which is problematic. They’re seeking to change some of the procedural due process things that we have in place and some of the requirements that are existing.”
Tom Homan, President-elect Trump’s choice for “border czar,” has acknowledged that ICE may have to detain some undocumented immigrants for weeks.
“What people don’t understand is we can’t just put [them on] a plane,” he said, according to a report from ABC News. “There’s a process we have to go through. You have to contact the country, they have to agree to accept them, then they got to send you travel documents. And that takes several days to several weeks. So, we need detention assets.”
Haitian Americans and more
Joseph was born in Haiti and raised in Miami. She now works as an attorney in North Miami and has represented 108th District in the Florida House since 2018. She says she’s worried for the Haitian American migrants in her community.
“How that’s going to play out within the Haitian American remains to be seen,” Joseph said.
“We know that [Trump] has said that he wants to eliminate TPS, not just for Haitian Americans but basically all Black and brown countries. Which is problematic, especially for people who were recipients of the humanitarian parole program, specifically people from Haiti, Venezuela, and I think Nicaragua. So that’s going to impact our community from South Florida and throughout Florida altogether. So, a lot of it is a bunch of question marks right now and how much latitude Congress and the courts will give him.”
TPS stands for Temporary Protected Status, created by Congress in 1990 to provide a temporary immigration status to nationals of specifically designated countries that are confronting an ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
There are currently 16 countries designated for TPS in the United States — Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen.
Pinellas County Republican Florida House member Berny Jacques was also born in Haiti, but he has a different take on the issue.
“Mass deportations is a policy proposal that was central to Donald Trump’s campaign,” he told the Phoenix in a text message. “The American people and Floridians gave President Trump a resounding victory, and they expect him to follow through with the deportations. I support it and stand ready to help it.”
According to the Associated Press VoteCast exit poll of Florida voters, 23% considered immigration the second most important issue going into the election, trailing only the economy.
First target
Trump has promised to remove millions of undocumented immigrants during his presidency, but border czar Homan has said that the first target will be those who have committed crimes.
“I think they’re putting together a plan that includes all of the protections that have been voiced and that’s a plan that prioritizes those who are being held in jails right now for criminal acts that they’ve committed here in the United States,” said Deb Tamargo, former president of the Florida Federation of Republican Women.
Pinellas County U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican who has been critical of the Biden-Harris administration regarding immigration, responded to questions from the Phoenix with an emailed statement:
“No family should go through what Laken Riley’s and many others have gone through, their children murdered by people who should not be here. Just last month, we saw three men arrested in our state of Florida for sexual crimes against a child,” Luna wrote.
“Mass illegal immigration has ravaged our country, and President Trump has a mandate from the people to secure our borders, apply our laws, and protect our communities We are a country of law and order. It is not about politics. It is about putting Americans and their safety first. As the designated Border Czar, Tom Homan has clearly stated that they will begin the deportation of the over 10 million illegals allowed under Kamala’s watch and locate the over 300,000 missing migrant children lost by the Biden-Harris administration.”
(The 300,000 missing migrant children reference comes from an August report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody, the Associated Press reported. The story went on to say that “experts say it is a stretch to refer to roughly 300,000 children as “lost” or “missing.”).
Samuel Vilchez Santiago chairs the Orange County Democratic Party. He said there’s “broad agreement” that migrants with criminal convictions should be targeted, but that that’s not all that Donald Trump is talking about.
“He’s talked about doing that, but he’s also talked about getting rid of TPS, not only getting rid of the parole program that’s successfully lowered illegal border crossings, but he’s also talked about targeting and deporting those people on TPS,” he said. “He has talked about even denaturalizing citizens who are here legally and who have not committed crimes.”
During Trump’s first term in office, his Justice Department created a denaturalization program called “Operation Second Look” to investigate the citizenship of thousands of immigrants suspected of obtaining naturalization by fraud, misrepresentation, or deceit.
Reluctance to comment
Any type of mass deportations could threaten the construction and agriculture industries in Florida, but the state’s new legislative leaders said this week that the issue is beyond their authority, and they were reluctant to comment on how that could play out.
“Any sort of immigration policy comes from the federal government,” House Speaker Daniel Perez told reporters in Tallahassee on Tuesday. “It’s for the federal government to decide. That’s a question that you should be asking the president.”
“The federal government is the federal government. State government is state government,” declared Senate President Ben Albritton on Tuesday.
“That’s a federal issue. My purview and my calling as of this morning when I was sworn in and voted in by my senators in this body was to oversee the operation of the Florida Senate. I don’t serve in the federal government. So, we can pontificate, I guess, all the time about it.”
Warning
Those answers were lacking, says one Florida Senate Democrat.
“If Trump implements the militarized mass deportation program as he has promised, it will have serious consequences for Florida’s families and economy, including family separations, labor disruptions, and declines in state revenue,” predicts Central Florida Democratic state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith.
“Republican leaders can’t suddenly look the other way after years of state-level interference in federal immigration policy. What is their plan to protect Floridians from these disastrous impacts?”
Florida Republicans weren’t willing to concede that immigration was just a federal issue in 2023, when the Legislature passed and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed what was considered at the time to be the strongest anti-illegal immigration bill in the country.
“The biggest consequence of that was it just created fear in immigrant communities,” said Vilchez.
“A lot of people who were undocumented left this state but, even then, we’re talking about a mass deportation program that has been reported to potentially impact a million Floridians if not more, and that’s definitely going to have negative consequences in our state. I think in terms of consequences from SB 1718, combine that with a massive deportation program at the federal level, and we are talking about a worst-case scenario.”
The Phoenix has reached out to the governor’s office to ask his thoughts about the potential for mass deportations for undocumented immigrants. While some Democratic governors have said they will actively oppose such plans, in Texas the state land commissioner has offered a parcel of rural ranchland along the U.S.-Mexico border to use as a staging area for such deportations.