As the federal government intensifies its immigration crackdown, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office has emerged as one of the Suncoast’s most active partners with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In recent months, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman’s deputies have patrolled the Everglades immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” and shuttled immigrants between detention facilities in Florida, earning more than $280,000 in state funding for the work. Meanwhile, the number of ICE detainers — which keep people up to 48 hours past their release date for possible detention and deportation — have quadrupled this past year inside the already crowded county jail.
Sarasota County’s ICE activity stands in sharp contrast to neighboring agencies. The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office has not sent deputies to Alligator Alcatraz or transported immigrants for ICE, according to a spokesperson. And while North Port sought state reimbursements, its request was only a third the size of Sarasota’s.
The county’s growing role comes as Florida positions itself as a testing ground for aggressive, state-backed immigration enforcement — with cash incentives for local agencies and expanded powers under a federal program called 287(g).
The initiative, named for a section of federal immigration law, authorizes local police and sheriff’s deputies to perform duties typically reserved for ICE agents, including making civil immigration arrests on the streets and holding people inside jails in coordination with the federal agency.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has promoted the program, which the federal government has called a “force multiplier” for immigration enforcement. During a press conference in Bradenton on Monday, Noem told reporters it was “fantastic to see” how Florida has jumped on board.
But immigrant rights groups have warned that it diverts local staff time from normal policing and risks racial profiling and eroding community trust – problems that surfaced in the years before the government abandoned this same enforcement model more than a decade ago.
“The task force model really changes the culture of law enforcement agencies and the officers who are deputized and pushed to do this kind of work,” said Lopez, a senior staffer with the group Texas Civil Rights Project, who has closely followed Florida’s immigration policies.“That kind of approach is harmful to policing writ large.”
Hoffman told Suncoast Searchlight during a Sept. 9 interview that the program allows his deputies to act quickly on immigration warrants. He described the 287(g) task force model as a way to serve warrants “expeditiously — and not wait for ICE” to come in person.
The office has since cut off communication with news outlets on the topic of immigration after adopting a policy routing all 287(g)-related media requests through ICE — a move transparency experts say reflects ICE’s broader retreat from public accountability.
“Law enforcement has the power to detain you, to throw you in a cell, to take your kids, to take your money, even take your life,” said David Cuillier, director of the University of Florida’s University of Florida’s Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project, calling policies like this alarming and arguing they shield local agencies from accountability. “With that power comes authority, responsibility and transparency.”
Papers, please
As U.S. immigration enforcement shifts from the border to the interior of the country, few states have supported President Donald Trump’s efforts as enthusiastically as Florida.
Each of its 67 sheriff’s departments and more than 150 police departments have signed 287(g) “task force” agreements with ICE — a controversial practice that no other state has adopted so broadly.
In Sarasota County, Hoffman said in September that 20 of his deputies would be “cross-sworn as task force members” and able to coordinate with ICE to search for undocumented immigrants in the field — citing traffic stops as a typical gateway to immigration arrests.
“If you get stopped for driving on a suspended license or speeding or something, and we find out that you’re foreign born, [under] the task force model, the deputy out there can then contact ICE,” Hoffman said. “Then that deputy, under the task force model, will charge them, bring them into the jail, and in the jail could process the warrant.”
The sheriff’s office also is a regional transportation hub: Deputies transport people accused of immigration violations from the Hardee, Manatee and Sarasota County jails to ICE custody in the Tampa area. And in August, the office sent a contingent of deputies to patrol Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center in the Everglades.
Since training deputies on the task force model this fall, Hoffman’s agency has reported 16 “encounters” with people suspected of lacking proper authorization to be in the country, according to a statewide database hosted by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s State Board of Immigration Enforcement. None of those resulted in immigration-related arrests.
Most of the office’s immigration enforcement still occurs inside the county jail, where officers may hold people flagged by ICE for up to 48 hours beyond their scheduled release. ICE issued 173 detainers to the jail between Jan. 20 and late July — four times as many as during the same period last year.
Big money in immigration enforcement
Bolstering the immigration crackdown is a growing flow of money, incentivizing and rewarding local police departments to do federal work.
Florida’s State Board of Immigration Enforcement has set aside a $250 million grant to reimburse agencies for their work with ICE, and released more than $14 million so far. ICE, too, is set to pour millions into Florida law enforcement, announcing Sept. 26 it had awarded Florida more than $38 million for that work.
Those agreements have begun to pay off.
Law enforcement agencies in 47 cities and counties received a first batch of reimbursements last month for time spent on ICE training, detention beds, vans and employee bonuses between February and June.
Some sought reimbursements for technologies and gear as wide-ranging as bullet proof vests, body cameras, finger print scanners, printers, monitors, laptops, virtual private networks (VPNs), handcuffs, leg irons, weapon lock boxes and automated license plate readers.
On the Suncoast, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office requested the lion’s share of reimbursements; neither DeSoto nor Manatee County sheriff’s offices requested funds. Only one other local law enforcement agency — the City of North Port — requested and received reimbursement, bringing in a total of $95,000.
In its application to the state, Hoffman’s agency requested: $62,400 to “sublet” beds for people held on ICE detainers; more than $10,000 for gas mileage and meals while transporting immigrants for ICE; more than $130,000 in employee bonuses; and almost $74,000 to purchase a transport vehicle.
The reimbursements were approved just after the sheriff secured a 12% budget expansion — the second-largest of any Sarasota County department — adding more than $20 million in new funding and helping drive a $2.52 billion county budget that has grown 73% in three years. The office now operates on roughly $220 million a year, most of it for personnel costs, technology upgrades and jail operations.
Hoffman also is managing an overcrowded jail and facing cost projections in the hundreds of millions to expand the facility. Against that backdrop, the state and federal reimbursements for immigration enforcement — just $283,390 — represent a slim fraction of the agency’s overall budget.
But for individual employees, the financial incentives are significant: Officers can receive $1,000 in one-off bonus payments for ICE training, plus additional pay for special assignments.
The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, for example, sought more than $7,500 in state reimbursements per officer for deputies to work security at Alligator Alcatraz in August. According to budget documents obtained through a public records request, the office requested an initial total of $52,454.50 for a 10-day “mission” from the state’s Division of Emergency Management, which built the detention center.
Civil rights concerns
But as money and manpower flow into immigration enforcement, critics warn of high human costs.
An internal Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office policy on the 287(g) program prohibits discrimination, as well as “profiling, stereotyping and biased enforcement practices.” But civil rights advocates say the task force model nonetheless opens the door to abuses — eroding trust between deputies and immigrant communities.
Florida’s widespread adoption of the program and its large-scale sweeps like Operation Tidal Wave — a 6-day push in April by federal and state agencies to arrest undocumented immigrants — has struck a nerve with advocates across the country.
“I've been watching and looking at Florida, especially with Operation Tidal Wave, and seeing how [it] bodes for Texas's future,” said Roberto Lopez, of Texas Civil Rights Project. “We aren't seeing, yet, that kind of task force model compliance that you’re seeing in Florida.”
Amid concerns about a lack of oversight for local law enforcement, the federal government previously dropped the 287(g) task force model in 2012. Maricopa County, Arizona, offered a worst-case scenario: There, the Department of Justice found deputies had systematically discriminated against Latino residents of the county. The county settled a lawsuit over the program and has spent more than $300 million on the court case and reforms required under the settlement, ProPublica has reported.
Under Trump’s second administration, ICE has brought back the model in full force, signing up hundreds of agencies across the country. Now, the federal agency has eroded its training requirements, too.
Under previous iterations of the program, officers were required to participate in weeks of in-person training; they are now required to complete 40 hours online.
Even law enforcement officials have expressed concern about the program.
Sarasota County Commissioner Tom Knight told Suncoast Searchlight that he harbored doubts about the model while serving as sheriff from 2009 until 2021. He allowed for some immigration arrests in the county jail but worried that taking immigration enforcement into the streets would instill fear in community members and jeopardize his relationships with constituents.
“My message was that my job as sheriff is not to be a border patrol agent or an ICE agent out in the field,” said Knight. “It was always an issue for me with the community: what does the hospitality industry think? What do the farmers think? I would talk to a lot of them – even if the people they were hiring were legal, they still had family members who were not here legally… It's a touchy situation.”
Suncoast Searchlight data investigative reporter Kara Newhouse contributed to this story.
