headline news online news Trump & deportations

By Max Greenwood, Syra Ortiz Blanes and Douglas Hanks
Miami Herald headline news online news

(Miami Herald) — Former President Donald Trump says he wants to use local law enforcement to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Republicans running to become Miami-Dade County’s sheriff say they don’t want to help with that.

In interviews with the Miami Herald, many candidates — including the Republican endorsed by Trump — balked at the notion of using local police to identify and apprehend the estimated tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants who call Miami-Dade County home. They argued that doing so would erode the community’s trust in law enforcement and pull officers away from their ultimate mission of ensuring public safety.

“As far as I’m concerned, if the law stays the way it is, immigration stays in their lane and I stay in mine,” said John Rivera, a former longtime police union boss who’s now running for sheriff.

Another Republican candidate, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Joe Sanchez, was even more blunt: “We’re not going to help the president on that one.”

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Trump’s campaign pledge to launch an immigration crackdown comes as Miami-Dade prepares to elect a sheriff for the first time in decades, forced by a change in Florida’s Constitution. Currently, the county’s Democratic mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, oversees the Miami-Dade Police Department, which would become the county Sheriff’s Office in 2025. Florida rules also require partisan elections for sheriff, meaning Republican and Democratic voters will select their nominee for sheriff in the Aug. 20 primaries.

Despite the partisan incentive of Republican candidates to align themselves with Trump, there’s a divide over immigration enforcement between the presumptive GOP nominee and Miami-Dade’s GOP sheriff candidates. The gap underscores a key challenge that a second Trump administration could face in carrying out his mass deportation plan, even in friendly jurisdictions.

The former president has repeatedly suggested deputizing local law enforcement agencies, the National Guard and even the U.S. military, if necessary, to remove the roughly 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. But he has said little about how he would secure cooperation from local and state agencies that might be reluctant to participate in such an operation.

Trump suggested in a recent Time Magazine interview that he could use financial incentives to get local law enforcement on board with his plan, though he declined to outline specifics.

“We’re going to be using local police, because local police know them by name, by first name, second name, and third name,” Trump told Time. “I mean, they know them very well.”

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A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not respond to the Miami Herald’s request for comment on how he sees the role of local law enforcement in carrying out his mass-deportation promises.

U.S. law states that federal officials can’t deputize state or local law enforcement officers to carry out the work of federal immigration officers without permission from the agency’s head — like, for example, a sheriff.

But even the candidate endorsed by Trump in the race — Rosanna Cordero-Stutz — said that she would only be willing to help federal immigration agents in limited circumstances.

Dominican-born Cordero-Stutz told the Herald that it’s necessary for the federal government to crack down on the country’s “open borders” and suggested sending Miami-Dade police officers to back up federal agents on immigration raids that she believes could become violent. But, she added, “to provide deputies just for the sole purpose of enforcing immigration laws? Absolutely not.”

“I do not support local law enforcement, including the sheriff’s office, enforcing immigration or any federal law,” Cordero-Stutz, an assistant county police director, told the Herald. “There is a reason we have jurisdictions.”
“I don’t think we have the time for that”

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Most Republican candidates who spoke with the Herald agreed that the only overlap between the sheriff’s job and federal immigration enforcement would be if an undocumented immigrant has committed a serious crime. Rivera, the former police union boss, said he has no interest in the department “becoming an immigration office or annex.”

“If an immigrant is a victim, I’m going to treat them like anybody else,” he said. “If he’s a criminal — commits a crime — I’m gonna treat him like anybody else.”

The newest candidate, Jose “Joe” Martinez, filed Thursday for the Republican sheriff primary while he’s awaiting trial on corruption charges related to his tenure as a Miami-Dade Commissioner. Martinez denies any wrongdoing.

A retired lieutenant from the Miami-Dade Police Department, Martinez said he would stick with the current county approach of steering clear of immigration issues.

“We never asked people for papers,” he said. “We didn’t do the federal government’s job.”

Martinez, suspended from his District 11 commission seat since last fall following his arrest, said it could become challenging to resist White House demands for local help if a future administration tied local law enforcement grants to whether a police agency assists in immigration operations. Miami-Dade police expects to receive about $12 million in federal funds this year for its $950 million budget.

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“It does get tricky if they withhold funding,” he said. “But we’re not there yet.”

Several candidates also said that it was crucial for public safety to build trust with all residents regardless of their immigration status, since undocumented people are also witnesses and victims of crime in Miami-Dade County.

“As a police department, we’re not here to enforce the federal immigration laws, because we need to have a relationship with every member of our community,” said Ignacio “Iggy” Alvarez, an attorney and former Miami Police officer who’s running for sheriff. “The community cannot be scared of the police department. If not, they’re not going to reach out to us when they’re a victim of a crime.”

Mario Knapp, a retired Miami-Dade Police major, said that local law enforcement can’t afford to “alienate” undocumented people with the threat of deportation.

“Now, if you are illegal and you’re breaking the law, we are going to throw every local, state and federal law at you to try and get you out of here,” he said. “I’m talking about a criminal. Somebody who is a predator … A violent person.”

Trump has repeatedly linked undocumented immigrants to making crime worse in the United States, despite research showing that immigrants are incarcerated and convicted for crimes at lesser rates than their U.S.-born counterparts.

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Asked how he might deal with an undocumented immigrant picked up by police on a civil citation for marijuana, Knapp said he’s “not interested.”

Some candidates said that the idea of using Miami-Dade officers to enforce federal immigration law would pose too much of a burden on the department and its roughly 3,000 officers.

“Quite frankly, I don’t think we have the time for that,” said Jose Aragu, a Republican candidate and MDPD major. “We’re busy dealing with robbery suspects, with burglaries, with auto thefts in our community.”
Some candidates open to limited cooperation

Some candidates held out the possibility that they could offer at least some support to a hypothetical Trump administration in immigration enforcement operations.

Jeffrey Giordano, a Republican who is a 30-year veteran of the Miami-Dade Police Department, said local law enforcement should have a role enforcing federal immigration law, “to an extent.” He said that “on day one” as sheriff he would enter into an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to join a program that empowers officers from state and local public safety departments to carry out certain federal immigration enforcement duties.

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Under its Jail Enforcement Model, the program — called 287(g) — allows “designated immigration officers” “to question people in custody about their immigration status and prepare charging documents for deportation proceedings.” Under the Warrant Service Officer Model, officers can serve administrative warrants. Giordano did not specify which model he would prefer.

“What happens if we have another boatlift like the Mariel Boatlift? We’re not going to have tools in our toolbox to be able to enforce this. We have to be proactive ahead of time and be able to set ourselves up for success,” Giordano told the Herald, adding that if local police already enforce narcotics laws, they should enforce federal immigration laws. But he said regarding Trump’s deportation plans, he would leave it up to a task force made up of ICE agents to decide how to proceed. He also said that it’s not the job of police officers to round up undocumented immigrants “like cattle.”

Giordano and several other candidates acknowledged that they are the children or grandchildren of people who came to the United States to seek a better life. Many of them are immigrants themselves, a reflection of the majority-foreign-born county they hope to protect.

“This community is based on immigration,” said Sanchez, who was born in the Cuban city of Cardenas. “I’m an immigrant myself. And people that are here and they were able to come in and they are working on the process of paperwork … those people deserve to have an opportunity.”