As mayors in some parts of the country are demanding greater transparency from federal immigration enforcement following reports of aggressive arrests, Orange County mayor Jerry Demings argued Tuesday that county officials don’t really have the power to address these concerns themselves. That’s despite growing pressure for them to do so.
“The resolution to this issue is not in these chambers, it is somewhere else,” Demings stated bluntly in response to public criticism from local rights advocates. “If there’s a complaint about how these individuals are doing their business, if they’re violating rights, I believe that the appropriate venue for those types of complaints is either with the federal government, with the state or the courts — not the Orange County Commission.”
Demings, a former sheriff and Democratic mayor governing in a Republican-controlled state, was placed on the hot seat during a county board meeting Tuesday by advocates with the Immigrants Are Welcome Here Coalition, made up of 64 local legal aid, social advocacy and labor organizations and 140 faith leaders.
Hope CommUnity Center organizing director Ericka Gomez-Tejeda said immigrant communities in Orange County, including U.S. citizens afraid of being racially profiled by ICE agents, “are living the nightmares that we and every U.S. American citizen dreads.”
“We are seeing people aggressively being taken by masked agents in our communities. Unmarked uniforms, arrests without warrants,” she told the county board of commissioners and the press. “Now we have the [Florida] Fish and Wildlife and, incredibly, even the [Florida] Department of Finance agents in our streets, at our doors, working for ICE,” she added.
Both the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and state Department of Financial Services entered into 287(g) agreements with ICE earlier this year, authorizing employees of the two agencies to carry out certain immigration enforcement duties.
Florida, a state with one of the largest populations of undocumented people in the U.S., has been recognized as an “essential” partner in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants living in the country without legal status. Although ICE claims to be going after the “worst of the worst illegal aliens,” Orange County corrections data reveals a sharp influx in the number of people who are being detained solely on federal immigration holds, not any actual criminal charges.
“We are seeing people aggressively being taken by masked agents in our communities.”
Hope CommUnity Center organizing director Ericka Gomez-Tejeda
Deputy county administrator of public safety Danny Banks said, as of Tuesday, the jail was holding 120 people detained by ICE solely on the alleged charge of being in the country illegally.
“As recently as last week, that was down as low as 25,” Banks told county leaders. “In the last six months, we’ve seen it sharply decline and then come back up again. But the point is, yes, 120 is a lot.”
The Orlando Sentinel confirmed through a jail official that, as of Nov. 30, the Orange County Jail has booked nearly 6,000 people on ICE detainers this year alone.
‘We spent hours looking for my mother’
Johanna Alvarez, a U.S. citizen and daughter of an immigrant, said her own mother was lured out of her home last month and subsequently detained on a federal immigration hold by men who had identified themselves to her as state police.
According to Alvarez, the men told her mom they wanted to talk to her about her car. “My mom, thinking something had happened to me since I had gone to go drop off my daughters at school, went outside with them. And as soon as she passed the gate of our house, they arrested her and took her to the Immigration Detention Center.”
Alvarez said a man who identified himself as a “financial detective” called her shortly afterward to let her know her mom had been detained. “He said he didn’t know where they had taken her, which was a lie, because he was the one who took my mom to the detention center,” she said.
“We spent hours looking for my mother without answers.”
Alvarez’s mother, originally from Mexico, had lived in the U.S. for 26 years, “always fulfilling” what immigration authorities asked of her, according to Alvarez. She was detained by agents on Nov. 19, and was released only on the condition that she return to Mexico. On Dec. 14, her mother returned to Mexico with Alvarez’s 2-year-old sister, leaving behind Alvarez, her 18-year-old sister, and grandchildren.
“This will be our first Christmas without her,” Alvarez told the press Tuesday, as tears streamed down her face. She said she and her sister, both born in the U.S., have started carrying their U.S. passports with them everywhere “in fear,” after an immigration officer allegedly told them “we didn’t look like U.S. citizens.”
Farmworker Association of Florida organizer Aaron Quen, out of Apopka, told the press his community has seen an increase of Florida Fish & Wildlife officers acting as ICE agents, “creating fear, confusion, and distrust.”
Banks, the public safety director, said that county staff are “not privy” to federal law enforcement operations, “so I really wouldn’t know what their plans are, or how they choose where to go, who to arrest, who gets arrested, who doesn’t get arrested, and so forth.”
Mayor Demings backed away from calls for transparency on ICE arrests that came not just from local advocates, but also county commissioners Kelly Semrad and Nicole Wilson, who have been sympathetic to the immigrant coalition’s cause.
“I watched the city of New Orleans struggle with this type of thing, and the mayor there very strongly said, we need transparency. We need to know which agents are pulling people from these homes,” Wilson pressed. “For all we know they’re being smuggled into human trafficking. We don’t know who they are, they don’t show their badges, they don’t show a judicial warrant, and we don’t get any of that information.”
While Demings acknowledged during the board meeting that questions about due process and transparency are “valid,” he argued that the county “is not involved in that.”
“We do not have authority over the state of Florida or the federal government in that regard,” he said. All the county can do, he said, is reassure the public that those who are detained in the county jail “are treated humanely, with dignity and respect.”
At what cost?
Meanwhile, the federal government has not even committed to fully reimbursing the Orange County government for holding people detained by ICE. While the cost of housing a person in the jail is about $180 per night, the federal government has only agreed to reimburse $88 per person, per night.
Jennifer Hall, an organizer with Orlando 50501, said an estimated $14.3 million has been spent so far this year to house people detained by ICE in the local jail. The calculation is based on the approximate number of people detained on ICE holds in 2025 and the approximate cost for doing so, per person. “Of that, $6.36 million dollars will never be reimbursed,” she said. A jail spokesperson estimates the figure is closer to $1.74 million.
From November 2024 to November 2025, the average daily population of people held solely on ICE detainers in the county jail increased 871 percent, from about 7 people to 70 people, according to corrections data.
Corrections officials for Orange County have said they’re working to renegotiate a higher reimbursement rate with the federal government. However, they say the process was delayed by the 43-day federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1. Banks said they received further communication on the matter as recently as last week and expect “some solution to that” within the next few months.
Demings similarly tried to downplay concerns about how much it’s costing taxpayers to detain people like Alvarez’s mom. “It is my intent that every dollar that we have spent to house the federal inmates, we will seek to get those dollars back,” he said. “That process is playing itself out.”
Urging court action
Advocates with the immigrant coalition have urged the county to take legal action in order to seek court guidance on the extent to which the Orange County government must cooperate with ICE.
“National news show political leaders from all around the country taking all actions possible to protect their residents from legally questionable ICE operations and the militarization of their cities,” said Gomez. “And yet here at home, this county commission is heading into the holiday break without filing for the legal clarity of your obligations to cooperate with ICE.”
Under state law, the county is required to cooperate with and aid ICE, at least to some extent. But not all of their obligations are so clear-cut. Earlier this year, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier bullied Mayor Demings and county commissioners into signing an amendment to the county’s contract with ICE that they had believed was voluntary, not necessary, for them to sign onto.
The amendment authorized local corrections employees to transport ICE detainees to other detention facilities across the state, upon request — a task that county leaders worried would unnecessarily stretch the corrections departments’ resources. County commissioners initially decided not to sign the addendum, but reversed course after Uthmeier threatened to remove them from office if they didn’t. Commissioners Semrad and Wilson were the lone dissenters.
“Yes, I signed the damn thing because we really had to,” Demings said at the time. “We were put in a tough spot.”
Kevin Parker with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, however, said legal professional and national advocacy organizations his group has spoken to “believe Orange County stands in a unique and perhaps the best position to seek court guidance on the limits of local government cooperation with ICE.”
“It’s important that the residents of this county believe that their local government officials are doing everything in their power to protect them from racial profiling and inhuman treatment they’re seeing online and in the news every day,” Parker said.
Demings, however, said that although they don’t agree with Uthmeier’s interpretation of their obligation to sign that ICE agreement addendum, he doesn’t see the point in taking legal action at this time. “I don’t see a legal predicate or something that we’re trying to clarify at this point that is necessary.”
County attorney Jeff Newton also said that he believed it would be “premature” to pursue litigation, arguing that there’s “no real basis” for doing so at this time. “I think there may come a point in time where this county may have to file some litigation, but that time is not today.”
Nearly 26 percent of Orange County’s population is foreign-born, as of 2023 Census data. That’s almost double the national U.S. rate of 14 percent. A new study from researchers at the University of South Florida in Tampa, surveying immigrant experiences in Central Florida, found that Florida’s immigration policies and the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants has had an emotional, financial and physical toll on migrants with mixed legal statuses, in addition to U.S. born citizens in mixed-status households.
Survey respondents told researchers they were afraid to go looking for work, go on walks or even listen to music too loud in their own homes for fear neighbors would call law enforcement.
“We’re good people; we’re people who, during the time we’ve been here, have contributed to this country. We pay our property taxes, our work taxes, our car taxes, everything, we pay taxes on everything,” said survey respondent Alberto, a 57-year-old undocumented man from Mexico who’s lived in the U.S. for 27 years. “They make us look like criminals, but in reality, we’re not.”
According to data from the Deportation Data Project, prepared by Stateline, Florida has seen more than 20,100 immigration arrests since January under the Trump administration. The vast majority of those detained — 68 percent — had no criminal conviction.
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