How a Florida driver reacts to seeing a border patrol car could get them pulled over, feds say
While driving on Florida roads, the way you react when you see a border patrol vehicle might determine if agents run your license plates to see if you are in the country legally, a tactic immigration advocates warn could lead to racial profiling.
The practice was one of the methods used by agents in recent weeks leading to the detention of hundreds of migrants in recent weeks, as local law enforcement agents team up with their counterparts in federal agencies in the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday afternoon in which Gov. Ron Desantis announced that more than 1,100 people were arrested in Florida in a joint anti-immigration sweep, Jeffrey Dinise, chief patrol agent in South Florida for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Florida agents are monitoring the roadways to see how drivers react when they see them inside marked border patrol cars.
“This is how they operate,” Dinise said at the press conference. “They’re cruising along the highway and they’re looking for reactions, reactions from the drivers. First of all, the driver looks over and then looks away and won’t look at them again. Then they vary their speed and move away from that marked unit.”
Once a plate is checked, Dinise said, the registered owner’s name and date of birth are cross-referenced with immigration databases. If the person is flagged as an undocumented immigrant, agents may stop the vehicle.
“So we know when we pull that person over that the registered owner of that vehicle” appears in the database, “which gives us reasonable suspicion to stop the vehicle,” Dinise said. The person designated as an illegal immigrant “may not be in that vehicle, but it gives us enough reasonable suspicion, which is what we need to stop a vehicle”.
“There is no racial profiling going on,” he said.
But immigrant rights groups disagree.
“Are we really supposed to believe that how someone reacts to seeing a patrol car is enough to justify pulling them over?” the Florida Immigrant Coalition said in a statement to the Miami Herald. “It definitely raises questions — like, how dumb do you think we are?”
This story was originally published May 2, 2025 at 1:06 PM.
