Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz says her deputies will be getting trained to work with federal immigration authorities “to get very bad criminals off of our streets” as part of an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out President Donald Trump’s aggressive plan to deport undocumented immigrants.
“We’re still early on in the [training] process,” said Cordero-Stutz during an interview Sunday morning on WPLG Local 10’s “This Week in South Florida,” with host Glenna Milberg.
The “labor intensive” training course for its deputies runs 40 hours long and that upon completion her deputies need to be vetted and credentialed by ICE officials, Cordero-Stutz said.
“We continue to support our federal partners when it comes to immigration, as we have done for many years,” said Cordero-Stutz, who Trump endorsed during the MDSO Republican primary. “It is very important to remember that the basis for these agreements is to get very bad criminals off of our streets.”
Immigrants and advocates of immigrants in Florida have denounced the partnership between ICE and local police departments statewide through the so-called 287(g) program.
“When local police act like ICE, entire communities go silent. People stop calling 911, they stop reporting crimes, they pull their children out of school, they pull their children out of different programs,” said Tessa Petit, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, at a recent press conference.
ICE’s 287(g) program is a decades-old program that has been revived and expanded under the Trump administration. It trains local law officers to interrogate immigrants in their custody and detain them for potential deportation.
The voluntary program — named for a section of the 1996 law that created it — currently applies only to those undocumented immigrants already jailed or imprisoned on charges. Each of Florida’s 67 county jails has signed the agreement.
Nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., according to the latest Homeland Security Department estimates. Florida, with 590,000, has the third highest number of any state.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has said the agreement with state and local law enforcement will help “fulfill the president’s mission to effectuate the largest deportation program in American history.”
The Florida Sheriffs Association, in a Feb. 24 statement, said the partnership will “ensure that Florida’s immigration laws are upheld and that our streets remain protected.”
The New York Times reported Saturday that ICE officers, along with state law enforcement officials, arrested nearly 800 immigrants in Florida in an operation this past week, according to ICE data obtained by the national newspaper.
The operation began Monday and targeted immigrants living in the country illegally with final deportation orders, according to an ICE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. The officers picked up more than 275 migrants with final removal orders, the data showed, The Times reported.
