Florida considering temporary housing to hold detained immigrants. Here's what we know
Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration wants to set up temporary housing for immigration detainees in Florida, but has yet to release specifics on what such a plan would entail or say whether the idea has the support of the federal government.
Top Florida lawmakers have few or no details about the proposed plans, which were made public during a State Immigration Enforcement Council meeting on Monday. Senate President Ben Albritton and House Speaker Perez said this week they have not been briefed on specifics yet.
'There aren't any specifics or details for him to consider at this time,' a spokesperson for the Senate president said in an email Thursday. 'We don't even know if this would require state funding, or what the Legislature's role, if any, would be.'
Perez told reporters on Thursday that while he does not have the details yet, he understands that, in general, detention capacity for detained immigrants is a top priority for the Trump administration.
'Eventually, I'm sure we'll be brought up to speed,' the Miami Republican said.
The revelation that the state is seeking to house detained immigrants comes as DeSantis and other state officials are pushing local and state law enforcement officers to help the Trump administration identify and detain immigrants who are in the country illegally.
As the state's efforts ramp up, sheriffs have raised concerns that there are not enough beds to hold the number of immigrants that could soon be detained. Florida sheriffs had proposed a plan that would have allowed deputies to transport immigrants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices within the 48-hour period they are required to hold them in custody, but the federal government rejected it.
The push to find alternatives for detaining immigrants also comes as one of the four ICE detention facilities in Florida, Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, deals with overcrowding issues.
The idea for the state to step in and help with temporary housing was first brought up at the Monday meeting as law enforcement officials on the council talked about how housing and transportation were two top areas where the state can assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it ramps up arrests and deportations.
At the meeting, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, who serves as the chairman of the State Immigration Enforcement Council, said the state should be allowed to 'set up temporary housing to create much needed additional detention capacity.'
State Board of Immigration Enforcement Executive Director Larry Keefe then said that Kevin Guthrie, the head of the state's Division of Emergency Management, is taking the lead on the idea and making the pitch to the federal government.
'He is really good about safely moving people and stuff around in high-stress, high-pressure emergency situations, including soft-sided facilities, hard-sided facilities,' Keefe said of Guthrie. 'Whatever the state of the art is on planet Earth on how to house people, how to move people, and feed people and treat people safely and well, he knows it.'
The Florida National Guard could help with security issues if the plan takes off, Keefe added.
Beyond those details, not much else is known about the plan. For instance, the state has not said where it would set up the housing, what its capacity would be, if there would be a cost to Florida taxpayers or if the state has made headway on getting support from the federal government.
Keefe did not have an update on the Trump administration's stance on the idea. But he broadly talked about 'choke points' at the federal level that could prevent some of the state's immigration enforcement ideas from happening. One of those 'choke points' could be fear of lawsuits, he said.
'And if at the end of the day, it turns out to be 'Oh, well, we might get sued,'' he said, 'well, maybe that's where it needs to play out.'
The Florida Division of Emergency Management did not respond to repeated requests seeking comment. A spokesperson for the Florida National Guard referred questions to the Division of Emergency Management, saying 'it is their proposal and therefore out of our scope.'
Judd said in an interview this week that Guthrie and Florida's Adjutant General John Haas 'have made it abundantly clear that they're eager and want to help with housing and transportation issues.' Haas oversees the overall management of the Florida National Guard and serves as DeSantis' senior military advisor.
In Tallahassee, the plans have not been formally presented to state lawmakers. Republican leaders in charge of setting the budget for the Division of Emergency Management said they had not heard anything about the plans or whether it would require state funding.
Albritton, the Senate president, said through a spokesperson that he trusts the law enforcement officials leading the council, and the ideas they will consider.
'He trusts law enforcement, so if there is a proposal brought forward from the council about something they feel is needed, certainly he would want to learn more before making a decision,' the spokesperson said.
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Haldeman, in one August 1972 meeting captured by the White House taping system. At times, Nixon succeeded in channeling that power against his targets. He successfully pressed the Justice Department to intensify an investigation into kickbacks and illegal campaign contributions swirling around Alabama Gov. George Wallace. The administration tried for years to deport John Lennon (over a British conviction for possession of a half-ounce of marijuana) after Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond sent a letter to the Justice Department warning that the former Beatle might headline a series of concerts intended to mobilize young voters against Nixon's reelection. A team of White House operatives — known informally as 'the plumbers' because they were supposed to stop leaks to the press — undertook a succession of shady missions, culminating in the break-in to the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building that eventually led to Nixon's resignation. 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The White House actually compiled multiple overlapping lists, all fueled by Nixon's fury at his opponents, real and imagined. 'It clearly originated with Nixon's disposition, anger, reaction to things he would see in his news summary in the morning,' said Dean. In an August 16, 1971, memo — titled 'Dealing with our Political Enemies' — Dean succinctly explained that the list's intent was to find all the ways 'we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.' Dean told me he wrote the memo in such stark terms because he thought it would discourage the White House. 'I actually wrote that memo that way thinking I would make this so offensive … that they would just say, 'This is silly, we don't do this kind of stuff,'' he said. 'I never got a response to that directly, but when I went to the (National) Archives decades later, (I saw) Haldeman had written 'great' on the memo with an exclamation point.' In fact, though, enthusiasm in the White House did not translate into action at the agencies. On the advice of Treasury Secretary George Shultz, the IRS commissioner put the list in his safe and ignored the White House request that he audit the people on it. Subsequent investigations found no evidence that those on the enemies list faced excessive scrutiny from the IRS or other government harassment. Once Dean revealed the list's existence during the 1973 hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, inclusion on it became 'something for people to celebrate,' he recalled. 'I have actually spoken to (reunions of) a couple groups of members, people who have been on the list, because they had no consequences other than a badge of honor.' That was a common outcome for Nixon's rages. The Justice Department eventually dropped the case against Wallace. The courts blocked Lennon's removal. The Washington Post did not lose licenses for any of stations, said Feldstein, author of 'Poisoning the Press,' a book about Nixon's relationship with the media. 'Trump is doing what Nixon would have liked to have done,' Feldstein said. 'Even Nixon didn't take it as far.' The differences between Nixon and Trump in their approach to federal enforcement and investigative power extends to their core motivations. Nixon, as Dean and other close observers of his presidency agree, wanted to retaliate against individuals or institutions he thought opposed or looked down on him. Trump certainly shares that inclination. But Trump's agenda, many scholars of democratic erosion believe, pushes beyond personal animus to mimic the efforts in authoritarian-leaning countries such as Turkey and Hungary to weaken any independent institutions that might contest his centralization of power. 'Although some of it was (motivated by) revenge, the huge difference here is most of what Nixon did was to protect himself, politically and personally,' said Fred Wertheimer, who served as legislative director of the government reform group Common Cause during the Watergate scandal. 'Trump is out to break our democracy and take total control of the country in a way that no one ever has before.' One telling measure of that difference: Trump is openly making threats, or taking actions, that Nixon only discussed in private, and even there with constant concern about public disclosure. Trump's willingness to publicly deliver these threats changes their nature in several important ways, said David Dorsen, an assistant chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee and former federal prosecutor. Simply exposing an individual or institution to such an open threat from the world's most powerful person, Dorsen noted, can enormously disrupt their life, even if the courts ultimately prevent Trump from acting on it — a point recently underscored by Miles Taylor in an essay for Politico. And because Nixon's threats were always delivered in private, Dorsen added, aides dubious of them could ignore them more easily than Trump officials faced with his public demands for action. Maybe most important, Dorsen said, is that by making his threats so publicly, Trump is sending a shot across the bow of every other institution that might cross him. 'Trump is legitimizing conduct that Nixon did not purport to legitimize,' Dorsen said. 'He concealed it, he was probably embarrassed by it; he realized it was wrong.' As the IRS pushback against the enemies list demonstrated, Nixon's plans faced constant resistance within his own government, not only from career bureaucrats but often also from his own appointees. 'He failed in getting key officials in the government to do what he wanted,' said Wertheimer, who now directs the reform group Democracy 21. If that kind of internal stonewalling is slowing Trump's sweeping offensives against his targets, there's little evidence of it yet. Congress was another constraint on Nixon. Not only did the administration need to fear oversight hearings from the Democrats who controlled both the House and Senate, but at that point a substantial portion of congressional Republicans were unwilling to blink at abusive actions. Ultimately it was a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative icon and former GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who convinced Nixon to resign during Watergate. By contrast, Trump today is operating with 'a completely compliant Republican Congress' and has filled the federal government, including its key law enforcement positions, with loyalist appointees who 'operate as if they are there to carry out his wishes, period,' said Wertheimer. As Feldstein pointed out, Trump also can worry less about critical press coverage than Nixon, who governed at a time when 'there were just three networks and everybody watched those.' That leaves the courts as the principal short-term obstacle to Trump's plans. In Nixon's time, the federal courts consistently acted across party lines to uphold limits on the arbitrary exercise of federal power. Three of Nixon's own appointees joined the unanimous 1974 Supreme Court decision that sealed his fate by requiring him to provide Congress his White House tapes. John Sirica, the steely federal district judge who helped crack the scandal, was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Today, federal district and appellate courts are mostly demonstrating similar independence. The New York Times' running tally counts nearly 190 rulings from judges in both parties blocking Trump actions since he returned to office. 'I think we've seen the largest overreach in modern presidential history … and as a result, you've triggered a massive judicial pushback,' said Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group fighting many of Trump's initiatives in courts. 'I won't say democracy has won so far, because of the damage that Trump and his ilk have done, but I will say Trump lost.' But even if courts block individual Trump tactics, the effort required to rebuff his actions still can impose a heavy cost on his targets. And, on the most important cases, these lower court legal rulings are still subject to reconsideration by the Supreme Court — whose six- member Republican-appointed majority has historically supported an expansive view of presidential power and last year voted to immunize Trump against criminal prosecution for virtually any actions he takes in office. So far, the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals by ruling to restrain Trump on some fronts while empowering him on others. 'We haven't found out yet what the Supreme Court is going to do when … they get the really big cases,' said Wertheimer. Those decisions in the next few years will likely determine whether Trump can fulfill the darkest impulses of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign for his actions in office.
