Florida Legislature votes to strip DeSantis of immigration oversight powers

In collaboration with the White House, Republican leaders in the Florida Legislature revamped and approved a bill on Tuesday that seeks tougher penalties on undocumented immigrants that commit crimes — and removes much of the governor’s authority over immigration, an issue that Ron DeSantis has made a cornerstone of his legacy in Florida.

The legislation — nicknamed the TRUMP Act — was amended to include several new provisions that House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton said were suggested by the Trump administration. They said the changes will align the state’s immigration laws to the new changes ushered in by President Donald Trump to identify and deport scores of people who are in the country illegally.

Notably, Republican leaders are stripping much of the governor’s immigration oversight authority and giving it to Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, a Republican statewide elected official. DeSantis has railed against this move, saying that putting the official who oversees farming in charge of immigration would be like putting the “fox in charge of the hen house.”

“So why did we pick [Simpson]? Well, cause he’s a good man,” House Appropriations Chair Lawrence McClure told House members on Tuesday evening. “Why did we pick his agency? Because they’ve got good people.”

The bill includes more than $500 million in funding and new provisions that are meant to help with one of the Trump administration’s biggest needs right now: detention beds at the local and state level that U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement can access.

It also eliminates a state law that offers undocumented students in-state tuition at Florida’s public universities and colleges — something that has been in place since 2014 and that DeSantis has pushed to repeal in the past.

DeSantis, though, continued Tuesday to publicly deride the legislation, hinting that he might veto the bill. He described it as a watered-down version of a proposal he released publicly after calling lawmakers to Tallahassee this week to address immigration enforcement in a special session.

In an interview with conservation host Dana Loesch on Tuesday morning, DeSantis said his office was not involved in making any changes to the bill. He said that even with the added provisions on illegal immigration, the bill was “weak, weak, weak.”

As Florida lawmakers debated the bill, DeSantis said that lawmakers are “intentionally” trying to “weaken interior enforcement” of immigration laws with the policies they put forward.

“They never wanted to do a special session, said the issue of illegal immigration wasn’t urgent, and derided my call for acting on immigration a ‘stunt,’” DeSantis posted on X on Tuesday night.

Revoking DeSantis’ oversight over immigration is a stunning example of resistance from Republican leaders who have long catered to the governor’s legislative proposals, including giving DeSantis the authority to relocate migrants anywhere in the country and giving him access to millions of dollars to use as he pleases on immigration.

The rebuke, according to several Republican lawmakers interviewed this week, stemmed from frustrations over how DeSantis has carried out many of his key immigration initiatives and the lack of transparency the governor offered to lawmakers about the effectiveness of his efforts.

Albritton and Perez also said they did not like some of the governor’s proposals, including one that sought to criminally charge local police officers who did not cooperate with state and federal immigration directives.

“Law enforcement is our partner, not our enemy,” Perez and Albritton said in a joint statement Monday night.

On Tuesday night, six Republicans voted against the bill in the Senate and one Republican voted against the measure in the House. Most voted in favor of legislative leaders’ bill despite DeSantis’ protests.

“The voters of the state of FL overwhelmingly elected a Republican Supermajority legislature to support the policies of @realDonaldTrump, not those of a lame-duck governor gasping for political relevancy after losing his presidential primary,” state Rep. Juan Carlos Porras, R-Miami, said in a post on X.

Democrats largely voted against the bill, mostly criticizing it for being rushed through the legislative process and saying they disapproved of the amount of money that Republicans would be pouring into the state’s enforcement of immigration laws. They also tried but failed to protect a state law that gives undocumented students the ability to pay in-state tuition at Florida’s public universities and colleges.

“Don’t pull the rug out from underneath so many of these students who did nothing wrong, who themselves committed no crime and actually want to share with us the American dream,” state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, said.

What is in the proposal sent to DeSantis

The revamped bill approved by Florida lawmakers on Tuesday includes changes to several criminal state statutes such as creating tougher penalties for undocumented immigrants who are members of gangs and commit crimes.

Other changes include a requirement that Simpson – who would be designated as the state’s chief immigration officer — review all local agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure they are “robust enough to cover the anticipated needs of the federal government.”

A lot of the focus is on making sure local law enforcement agencies have enough money to ensure there are enough detention beds in Florida to hold criminals who have deportation orders.

“That’s one of the specific things that the Trump administration has asked for,” Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, said. “They need more beds so we could shift these criminals over so they could have time to go through the process of deporting them to their respective countries.”

The bill drew the support of Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell, the president of the Florida Sheriffs Association, on Tuesday night, before state lawmakers voted on the measure.

“The Florida Legislature has worked closely with us to ensure our concerns are heard so we have the tools we need to effectively and efficiently remove criminal aliens from our communities across the state of Florida, thus protecting Floridians and visitors of our great state,” Prummell said. “We are thankful for their support.”

The association did not previously come out in support of the governor’s proposals.

DeSantis has sought to require all local and state law enforcement agencies to enroll in a federal immigration program, known as 287g, that currently allows local law enforcement agencies to perform functions of the federal immigration agents in county jails — not out in the community.

When enrolled in the program, local law enforcement officials have the ability to hold undocumented immigrants in custody for up to 48 hours if a federal immigration agent sends a detainer request for a detainee.

Under the bill approved Tuesday, there is no mandate for local law enforcement agencies to enroll in the program — but lawmakers did provide funding that would help local law enforcement agencies pay for the training needed to participate in the program if they choose to join.

The bill would also give Simpson the authority to start judicial proceedings against any local governments that refuse to comply with an immigration detainer from federal immigration agents — and a penalty of up to $5,000 could be imposed on an elected or appointed government official.

DeSantis had floated the possibility of criminally charging local officials or removing them from office who did not fully comply with federal immigration authorities — but that was quickly rejected by GOP leaders and Florida sheriffs.

The governor had also asked lawmakers to give him the extraordinary power to detain, transport and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally – and wanted $350 million to help him carry out the program’s mission with the help of the Florida State Guard and the Florida National Guard.

Those powers would be part of a state program that DeSantis used in 2022 to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

“We thought long and hard about that,” said McClure, the House Appropriations chairman. “Does the State of Florida need to be in the transportation business?”

Federal immigration officials seem to be doing a “fine job” deporting people out of the country, McClure said. He raised concerns that involving the state in deportation could cause an international incident similar to the one over the weekend, when Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia after they initially refused to accept those flights.

“So now you have the State Guard flying criminals to Colombia, and the Colombian government says, ‘No, thank you’?” McClure said. “Nope.”

Why lawmakers publicly split from DeSantis

The vote on Tuesday came after Republican lawmakers — in committee hearings and interviews with reporters — outlined a series of grievances over how DeSantis has handled many of the immigration initiatives that the Legislature has backed and funded in recent years.

Gruters pointed to the DeSantis administration’s lax enforcement of a law that requires businesses in the state to use E-Verify, a federal program that checks the legal eligibility of new workers.

Gruters said the state has only issued eight letters to companies for not complying with the state’s E-verify requirements. All of those letters were issued in 2022, according to the website of the Florida Department of Commerce, which reports to DeSantis.

“Eight letters since 2022. Why hasn’t it been more?” Gruters said.

Department of Commerce spokesperson Emily Hetherington said Tuesday that it was “actively conducting more than one hundred investigations,” which “take time.”

Gruters and McClure also took issue with the governor’s office not being transparent about how many people it has transported under the Unauthorized Alien Transport Program, which DeSantis used in 2022 to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard and in 2023, to transport people from Texas to Sacramento, California.

Under the legislative proposal approved on Tuesday, the chief immigration officer would study the effectiveness of DeSantis’ program, which lawmakers initially funded at $12 million, Gruters said As of March last year, $9.4 million of it was unspent. The program is still active and run by a private company whose operations have remained secretive. The contractor, for example, operates under a fictitious name.

The Legislation also requires the new office to update the Legislature annually about how state and local governments are cooperating with the federal immigration agencies.

“That’s why we should have accountability,” Gruters said. “That’s why having a single person, a single office and having a laser focus is going to help everybody.”

Tampa Bay Times reporter Romy Ellenbogen and Miami Herald reporter Alexandra Glorioso contributed to this report.

This story was originally published January 28, 2025 at 9:06 PM.