Florida's red wall on immigration is starting to crack

Cracks are widening in the Republican Party’s support for the Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration enforcement. The latest fissure developed this week in deep-red Florida. A panel of Republican sheriffs and chiefs of police, the backbone of Florida’s law enforcement establishment, agreed on Monday to draft a letter to President Donald Trump and congressional leaders urging them to stop rounding up immigrants who they said arrived in the U.S. “inappropriately” but have otherwise lived law-abiding lives.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, chairman of the State Immigration Enforcement Council, argued that Congress should provide undocumented immigrants “who are being very productive” with “a path forward” because “These are the folks we need in this country.”

“We are a country of immigrants,” he observed.

It was an extraordinary development. Judd, 72, is a die-hard conservative Republican and an architect of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ aggressive immigration enforcement agenda. He stood by the governor’s side at numerous news conferences and tough-on-crime political stunts as DeSantis erected Alligator Alcatraz, the trouble-plagued detention camp in the Everglades that made Florida the poster child for Draconian immigration enforcement.

Now, Judd was voicing what much of America has known for years: “There needs to be a conversation at some point in time about a path forward for the appropriate people,” he said. Six other law enforcement leaders on the legislatively created advisory board agreed.

Maybe Judd has spent too much time spinning in teacups in nearby Disney World, because his call for congressional action is something we’ve seen over and over again.

It’s what Democrats have been saying for years, and the leadership of the Republican-controlled Congress has ignored. It’s what Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, a Miami Republican, and a collection of bipartisan co-sponsors have sought for months with the Dignity Act, which hasn’t gotten a hearing. It’s what Republicans recognized was needed in 2007, and again in 2013.

And it’s what then-candidate Donald Trump ordered killed in 2024, when Senate Republicans came close to a bipartisan compromise for undocumented immigrants.

But Judd is also one of the most politically astute of Florida’s 67 sheriffs. When his comments attracted headlines on Monday, he called a news conference on Tuesday to say it was “offensive” for anyone to suggest he was breaking with DeSantis or Trump.

That’s wrong. Neither DeSantis nor Trump have called for “a path” to help people who are “helping society” stay in the country, as Judd suggested. Instead, as Trump vowed to target “the worst of the worst,” his Department of Homeland Security sent heavily armed masked agents into America’s blue cities, targeting law-abiding parents and innocent children for deportation.

Polls show that 65% of the public now believes that Trump’s immigration enforcement policies have made Americans less safe.

Law enforcement officers spend a lot of time thinking about how to stop crime, so they must be familiar with the argument that driving immigrants into the shadows will make them hesitant to call the police when crimes happen. But Florida officials have been notably quiet about that risk over the past year. So why would they choose now to argue that immigration enforcement should focus on public safety?

They’re providing cover for Trump and Republicans. The party needs Trump to pivot on immigration if they are going to resurrect their hopes in the midterm elections. The White House last week leaked word that it was telling Republicans to stop emphasizing mass deportation and focus more on removing violent criminals.

The Polk County sheriff obliged. Judd said he didn’t want to give people without papers “a free pass” but suggested instead they be given five years to learn to speak English, pay a fine for entering the country illegally, get a job, put their kids in school and “not be on the taxpayer dollar.”

Judd accurately noted that immigrants who enter the country unlawfully commit what he called a “civil event” under the law, and not a criminal infraction. But Trump and his supporters have insisted that any undocumented immigrant in the U.S. is inherently a criminal. As a result, nearly 74% of people now detained by ICE have no criminal convictions.

If the federal government wanted to be serious about leaving law-abiding immigrants alone, it would start by ending the practice of apprehending people with valid asylum claims who show up at courthouses for their check-ins.

“It’s a Catch-22 that doesn’t keep anyone safe,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council.

The Trump administration has so dramatically changed the profile of who is being arrested that the number of people with no criminal record in ICE detention has risen 2,450% in the last year, Robbins told me.

The question now is: Will Trump follow the advice of the Florida Immigration Enforcement Council? If he’s serious about leaving law-abiding immigrants alone, he’ll drop the arrest quotas for federal agents, stop deporting DACA recipients, scale back the $38 billion plan to build massive new detention centers across the country, and insist that Congress finally advance reforms that give people a way to get right with the law.

Not everyone in the GOP will be on board. A day after the law enforcement council meeting, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, an anti-immigration absolutist, said he “would not support” the sheriffs’ proposed letter.

But Judd and his law enforcement colleagues make a compelling case that the federal government should focus its resources on people who are actually a threat. It’s a reasonable way out of Trump’s self-imposed immigration mess. He should take it.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.