Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings signed an updated agreement with U.S. Immigration and Enforcement (ICE) on Friday, although he later said he did so under “protest and extreme duress.” Via the Florida Phoenix:
It came days after Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier threatened the mayor and all six county commissioners that their failure to do so would result in their removal from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Yes, we signed the damn thing because we really had to. We were put in a tough spot,” Demings said during a late afternoon press conference in Orlando. “I can’t let our entire board of county commissioners and myself be removed from office.”
Demings signed an addendum to modify the 287(g) Warrant Service Officer (WSO) Memorandum of Agreement that will allow county jail officials to transport immigration detainees to ICE facilities — although he said he still needs to assess the readiness of his corrections department staff to do so while keeping everyone safe at the county jail. He said that there are 212 vacancies within the Orange County corrections department right now, a vacancy rate of 24%.
Speaking in Orlando earlier on Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said that local governments could apply for grants from the state to reimburse their costs for detaining and transporting detainees. “I think the detention transport, that’s something that would be appropriate to do, and we approved the guidelines for the grants to go out,” he said.
In his letter posted on X earlier this week (which Demings said his office had just received on Friday), Uthmeier wrote that “prohibiting your corrections officers from transporting arrested aliens to ICE-approved detention facilities squarely prevents your corrections officers from cooperating with ICE and participating in federal immigration operations.”
Failure to back down, he added, would result in removal from office by DeSantis.
So basically, Trump is coercing local law enforcement to cooperate with illegal ICE actions, thereby involving many more in their corruption.
