‘Miami-Dade is a place that makes room’: Mayor Levine Cava calls for unity

With thousands of Miami-Dade’s immigrant residents facing deportation under the Trump administration, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava on Wednesday used her annual address to call for unity over fear.

“This is the most diverse community in America, and that diversity is our greatest strength,” the Democrat told a standing-room-only crowd in Miami Gardens for her yearly State of the County address. “To turn away from it would be to turn away from who we are.”

The second-term mayor did not mention President Donald Trump, undocumented immigrants or deportations in her speech. But she’s condemned the president’s deportation policies in past public statements, including the administration’s revoking of protections for Haitians, Venezuelans and others previously allowed to remain in the U.S. legally based on dangerous conditions in their home countries.

In her State of the County speech at Florida Memorial University, a historically Black college, the mayor held up Miami-Dade as an example of a welcoming community. And she urged her audience to demand unity.

“We choose to stand together, just as we always have,” she said. “And that is why the state of the county is strong … Miami-Dade County is a place that makes room.”

Affordability, transit and MIA highlighted in mayor’s speech

Levine Cava did not mention some of the biggest challenges Miami-Dade faces this year. Those include a contentious decision on whether to build a new garbage incinerator, a push in Tallahassee to drastically cut revenue that local governments collect from property taxes and the budget squeeze looming with a $117 million deficit predicted for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

She used most of her speech — an address the county charter mandates a mayor deliver by Jan. 31 each year — to tout accomplishments since taking office in late 2020. Those included construction of 9,000 workforce and affordable housing units; opening the South Miami-Dade rapid-transit line approved under the previous mayor, Carlos Gimenez; and launching construction of Miami International Airport’s first new concourse in decades.

“Leadership must be measured by results, and it must reflect our community’s values — that everyone belongs in our shared future,” she said. “That is how I govern today.”

Levine Cava is nearing the end of her time as mayor — term limits require her to leave office in 2028. She’s facing a recall effort by one of her Republican opponents in the 2024 mayor race, YouTube host Alex Otaola, and also some chatter about a possible run for Congress. In an interview before the speech, Levine Cava all but dismissed that possibility this year. “I have almost three years left in my term, and I am determined to complete the work that I was elected to do,” she said.

Unity was the night’s theme. Multiple speakers noted FMU is the birthplace to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a 1900 song known as the Black national anthem. Commissioner Oliver Gilbert, a former Miami Gardens mayor, introduced Levine Cava and noted more than half of Miami-Dade’s residents were born in other countries. “That’s not a weakness,” he said. “That’s our magic.”

Poet Caridad Moro-Gronlier read an original work for the evening extolling Miami-Dade’s accepting culture.

“Miami does not ask who you are,” Moro-Gronlier said. “‘Come in,’ she says. ‘There is room.’”

This story was originally published January 29, 2026 at 5:00 AM.