The sheriff’s offices in Broward and Palm Beach counties won’t participate in roundups of undocumented immigrants envisioned by former President Donald Trump, who has promised “the largest deportation in the history of our country” if he’s again elected president.
Sheriffs Gregory Tony of Broward and Ric Bradshaw of Palm Beach County said their departments, which are the largest local law enforcement agencies in their counties, wouldn’t deploy deputies to take part.
And the candidates — Democrats and Republicans — who are hoping to replace them in this year’s elections said they, too, would not go along with such a program.
Deploying deputies for immigration roundups is both unworkable from a practical standpoint given staffing and other responsibilities, the sheriffs and candidates said, and would erode public trust in their agencies among some communities. A lack of trust could make people less likely to seek help in emergencies.
Sheriffs’ stands
Tony said the Broward Sheriff’s Office would “absolutely not” participate.
He said there “has been a big scare that’s been occurring” after the state required counties operating detention facilities to enter into agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Tony, a former Coral Springs police officer and sheriff since 2019, said that “shook up the community thinking that BSO is going to be going out to the community and knocking on doors and bringing in immigrants. We don’t do that here, and I’m not going to allow it out of our deputies.”
Bradshaw, a former West Palm Beach police chief who has been sheriff since 2005, said immigration enforcement is “mainly the federal government’s responsibility, not local law enforcement.”
He said his agency “declined to be cross trained with the Border Patrol.”
“We’re not going to do immigration sweeps,” Bradshaw said. “You can’t gain the trust of the people in the community if they’re worried about being deported.”
None of the sheriffs or candidates would hesitate to turn over undocumented immigrants who commit crimes to federal authorities.
They’re adamant about not getting actively involved in rounding people up. Federal law allows state or local law enforcement officers to participate in immigration enforcement “with the consent of the head of the department.”
Trump’s position
Trump has repeatedly promised massive deportations. The Republican platform passed at last month’s national convention echoed his priorities, including what it said would be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”
One element, Trump has said, is utilizing local police.
“We’re going to be using local police because local police know them by name, by first name, second name, and third name. I mean they know them very well,” he said earlier this year in an interview with Time magazine.
And he told Fox News that “local police are going to turn them over, and we’re going to have to move them back to their country.”
In the Time interview, Trump acknowledged some law enforcement agencies wouldn’t want to be involved. “Well, there’s a possibility that some won’t want to participate, and they won’t partake in the riches, you know. We have to do this. This is not a sustainable problem for our country.”
Trump didn’t directly answer whether he imagined funding incentives for local agencies to get on board. “It could very well be,” he said.
‘Behind fences’
Bradshaw has been outspoken about the situation on the southern U.S. border, where he said some of the people crossing into the country commit serious crimes.
But he said that needs to be dealt with at the border, to prevent people from entering.
Bradshaw was especially critical of an aspect of the Trump immigration plans that would involve rounding up undocumented immigrants and placing them in camps pending deportation.
He said that has echoes of U.S. government roundups of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “This reminds me of putting people behind fences … during the war with the Japanese,” Bradshaw said.
Citizens and non-citizens of Japanese ancestry often first were sent to racetracks or fairgrounds before they were relocated to internment camps, where they spent years. A 1998 federal law provided compensation to people who were interned and still alive.
Public concern
On the campaign trail, Trump often talks about border security and sometimes cites horrific crimes committed by undocumented immigrants against American citizens. He has used those incidents as a political line of attack against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Researchers have found there isn’t a correlation between immigration and more crime but the public is concerned.
A national poll from the Pew Research Center in January found that 57% of Americans said the large number of migrants seeking to come to the U.S. leads to more crime; 39% said it didn’t make much difference in crime.
Part of the reason is that “horrific” crimes are sometimes committed by people who aren’t in the country legally, said Lauro Diaz, a former captain and deputy chief in the Bartow Police Department and former Highlands County Sheriff’s Office captain. Diaz is seeking the Republican nomination for sheriff in Palm Beach County.
“So that’s going to get a lot of limelight,” he said.
Michael Gauger, a former chief deputy in Palm Beach County who is seeking the Republican nomination to run for sheriff, said he was asked by someone in the audience at an event why, if he becomes sheriff, he couldn’t just arrange to “just take them and put ’em on a plane and send them back where they came?”
He said it’s impractical for many reasons and like other candidates said the federal government needs to fix the immigration system. “We do not enforce the federal laws regarding immigration,” Gauger said. “But mass deportation is going to be extremely difficult for local police.”
The numbers are daunting.
The Department of Homeland Security estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants were living in the U.S. in 2022, including almost 600,000 in Florida. Trump gives higher numbers, from 15 million to 18 million nationwide.
The Migration Policy Institute’s most recent estimates are that Florida has an unauthorized population of 772,000, including 117,000 in Broward County, 82,000 in Palm Beach County and a combined total of 198,000 in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.
Challengers agree
The candidates for sheriff have essentially the same positions as the current sheriffs.
The incumbents and candidates shared their views on the subject during recent individual and joint interviews as they seek support in advance of the Aug. 20 primaries.
Bradshaw and Tony face challengers in their respective Democratic primaries.
Two Republicans are competing in their party’s primary to face the Democratic primary winner in Palm Beach County. The Democrat who wins the primary in Broward faces nominal opposition from an independent candidate in November and is virtually certain to win.
“We will not be going around Broward County if I’m sheriff picking up people for not having paperwork, for being in the country. If they commit a crime, we will arrest them and turn them over. But other than that, no,” said Democratic candidate Al Pollock, a retired Broward Sheriff’s Office colonel. “I will not be assigning people to any federal task force that’s dealing with immigration where they’re going around knocking on doors, you know, tracking people down.”
Democratic candidate Steve Geller, who rose to the rank of captain in the Plantation Police Department and later worked as a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said immigration enforcement is a federal issue.
However, he said, if there’s a safety issue that requires Sheriff’s Office support “we’re always there for our fellow law enforcement officers, but that would be a federal initiative and I believe that it would be carried out that way.”
David Howard, another Broward Democratic candidate who is a former Pembroke Park police chief and West Palm Beach police shift commander, said involvement of deputies if he were elected sheriff would depend on how any law implementing such a program is written.
“I’m not going to violate the law, but I agree that (we’re) not going to go out and seek. But if somebody gets arrested and it turns out that their status is such that we have to turn them over, then turn them over,” Howard said. “I’m not going to go round up anybody, that’s not my job. My job is crime in, the suppression of crime for, our county.”
Republican candidates for sheriff in Palm Beach County agreed.
Diaz was an emphatic no.
“To tell you that I can take 50, 100, 200 men and women in uniform to go out around the county and round up illegals, I would just simply be lying to you. We simply do not have those resources,” Diaz said. “We’re not built for that.”
But, he said, “if an illegal commits a crime, we arrest them … and hold them and then turn them over to ICE for deportation.”
Republican Gauger said it would “take a total revamping of the system” for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office to get involved in immigration enforcement.
Alex Freeman, a former Riviera Police Department major and Midway police chief who is challenging Bradshaw in the primary, said he wouldn’t allow PBSO to participate in roundups.
“Absolutely not. Like Mr. Bradshaw said, it is up to the federal government to do their job and so I wouldn’t partake in that,” Freeman said.
Crime
The sheriffs and candidates for the jobs said that even though undocumented immigrants commit crimes, there isn’t evidence that they are responsible for a crime wave or commit crimes at disproportionately high rates as sometimes gets implied in the political back-and-forth on the issue.
“We haven’t seen anything to indicate that here in Broward County,” Tony said. “I can tell you, I have not seen one intelligence report that has come through my Strategic Intelligence Division or through Homeland Security that suggested we had some influx of criminal patterns by immigrants coming from anywhere.”
Geller said “there is no truth” to the idea that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime.
Pollock, too, said he’s seen “no spikes that validate” the suggestion that undocumented immigrants are driving crime rates. “Most of the crime, the violent crime, that we’re having now is being committed by people that are already here.”
Some are more concerned about the potential for more crime caused by undocumented immigrants, however. “I agree with my contemporaries to a point,” Howard said.
Diaz said people who are in the country illegally aren’t responsible for an outsized share of crime. “I wouldn’t say that they make crime worse,” he said, but “it does have an impact.”
Tighter border
Gauger said he is concerned that the U.S. is “not vetting correctly the immigrants that are coming in, the undocumented folks. They’re not being vetted for criminal histories. They’re not being vetted for their terrorism backgrounds or their associations with terrorist organizations,” he said.
Echoing the former president, Gauger said some people entering the U.S. illegally intend to do harm in this country. “We’re looking at military age Chinese. We’re looking at military age Middle Easterners that come from countries that want us to be exterminated,” he said.
Bradshaw, chair of the Regional Domestic Security Task Force for southeast Florida, said better border security is essential, and would prevent some crime.
“You’ve got some very, very bad people that are mixing in with the other people that are coming in, and they do the same thing in the community that they go to (live here) that they did where they came from,” he said. “It’s not that there’s a gigantic crime wave from all of the people who came across the border, but there’s some very bad people that came across there.”
In March, Bradshaw delivered an impassioned demand for tougher border enforcement after three undocumented immigrants were arrested on charges of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman in Lake Worth Beach.
“I’m just here to deliver a message and the message is, don’t think for a minute that what happens at the Mexican border doesn’t affect us here,” he said at a news conference. “Here you have three illegals that should have never been in this country that have committed a very serious crime, kidnapping and sexual battery of a lady. They shouldn’t be here. …
“For them to be in this country to be able to commit these types of crimes is unconscionable. The federal government has put the American people in jeopardy,” Bradshaw said. “These idiots in Washington, D.C., need to close this border.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
