But could a perception that the GOP has overreached to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations bring a correction next year? That’s apparently the philosophy several Florida Democrats are pushing, as demonstrated by their comments in Tampa on Tuesday night.
“Republican leaders are fighting communities, not crime,” said Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly, speaking during an immigration forum hosted by the Hillsborough County Democratic Hispanic at the Cuban Club in Ybor City.
Jolly maintains that the GOP has gone down the wrong path by conflating undocumented immigration with crime.
“This is a contrast of values and, fundamentally, the American people understand, regardless of party registration, cruelty and broken promises,” he said. “And we’re living through an era of cruelty and broken promises. It’s not new. We’ve seen it in years past, and it has taken people to speak up and say, ‘Enough.’”
When speaking about immigrants lacking legal status, Gov. Ron DeSantis often focuses on those who have committed criminal acts, such as the immigrant accused of killing three people while trying to make an illegal U-turn in a tractor-trailer on the Florida Turnpike in Fort Pierce last week.
The Associated Press reported last month that ICE statistics showed that, as of June 29, 57,861 people had been detained by ICE, of whom 41,495 — 71.7% — had no criminal convictions. That included 14,318 people with pending criminal charges and 27,177 who are subject to immigration enforcement but have no known criminal convictions or pending charges.
The governor also boasts about how no state has done more to fulfill the president’s agenda. Those actions include legislation requiring many local and state law enforcement agencies to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in detaining and potentially deporting individuals.
It also includes building the state’s own immigration camp to hold detainees (“Alligator Alcatraz”), and the governor announced last week that a second facility will soon open in North Florida.
‘Political theatre’
Former Miami-Dade County state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, a candidate for attorney general next year, denounced the Everglades detention center.
“If I was attorney general, what I would be focused on is going after the insurance companies,” he said. “Going after the utilities that are screwing people and taking advantage of us and getting away with anything with whatever they want in Tallahassee, right?
“Instead, we have this political theater where the only purpose is for the current attorney general and the governor to get a pat on the head by the president, and that’s what they got, right? But meanwhile, we are the ones who are left with the costs of this thing.”
Tampa Bay area Democratic U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor said U.S. immigration laws are broken and repeated a talking point made by Democrats last year blaming Trump for killing a proposed bipartisan bill dealing with immigration.
That proposal would have raised the bar for migrants to claim asylum, created a temporary procedure to shut down the border at particularly active times, and ended the practice of allowing migrants to live in the United States while waiting for their cases to be heard by an immigration judge, among other policies.
“He was the one who blocked a bipartisan immigration reform effort where we would ensure those pathways to work in citizenship exist while strengthening border security and investing in the immigration courts, to make sure things moved smoothly,” Castor said.
“So instead, right now, playing on the fears and prejudices and abusing his powers, because I think that everyone agrees that If you are not here legally and you violate the law, you’re subject to deportation. But what they’re doing now goes far beyond that.”
She added that the bulk of her work in her congressional office is dealing with “egregious case after egregious case” of people who she said were following the law but have now been detained and subject to deportation.
Joining the professional politicians on the stage were two Tampa immigration lawyers who, along with Javier Rodríguez, occasionally responded in both Spanish and English to the audience.
Expedited removal
Attorney Danielle Hernandez previously served as assistant chief counsel for the Department of Homeland Security in both the Obama and (the first) Trump administrations. She said that among the changes that the current Trump regime has enacted is expanding what is known as expedited removal.
Previously, ICE and Customs Border Patrol only used expedited removal against people within 100 miles of the border and within two weeks of their arrival in the U.S., Hernandez said. However, an executive order signed by the president in January changed that.
“They expanded that criminality and said, ‘Hey, if you came in illegally, you’re a criminal.’ Which is not true,” she said. “Coming in through the border is a civil infraction, it’s not actually a criminal action unless you re-enter through the border, then it becomes a federal crime, right? So that’s one thing that people don’t know.”
Hernandez explained that now anyone who entered the country after April 2023 is “fair game to absolutely any arrest.”
“They can go into any court, terminate your asylum proceedings, and arrest you outside. So that’s what you see on the news,” she added.
Combined with the discussion of illegal immigration on Tuesday night was talk about how Democrats have lost their share of the Latino vote in recent elections — a trend that started in Florida years ago.
“We definitely have a war against Hispanics going on in the country,” said La Gaceta editor and publisher Patrick Manteiga.
“The real problem is many of them agree with the Trump administration and helped put them into place today. I think they thought that it was some other Hispanic that was going to get picked up rather than themselves, and they were happy to close the door right behind them, and that’s a real shameful part of this whole thing.”
Jolly said that Democrats need to talk to Latino voters about something other than immigration all the time.
“The way we get them back is we speak to their true concerns that will inform their votes,” he said.
“What the other side got right in the last few cycles was they understood the anger and anxiety and they spoke to that. And it wasn’t necessarily around immigration, and we make a mistake by thinking that if I walk into a room of Black pastors, that somehow I have to speak about Black pastor issues, when their issue of getting their kid to school on time that was the same as mine. That’s where I think we have an opportunity to make up ground.”
Changing sentiments?
Polls show political sentiment may be changing, however.
A Suffolk University/WSVN-TV 7 News survey of 500 residents of Miami taken last month — 52% of whom identified as Hispanic or Latino — showed that 61% said recent ICE enforcement raids had gone too far, and 52% of respondents said recent deportations of Venezuelans, Cubans, and Argentinians living in Miami made them less likely to support President Trump going forward.
And a YouGov survey of 2,156 U.S. adult citizens published Wednesday found that 53% of Americans (and 56% of independent voters) say Trump’s approach on immigration is too harsh, with 36% saying it is “just right.” Two-thirds of those polled believe the Trump administration has wrongfully detained U.S. citizens in immigration detention centers.
Towards the end of the two-hour forum, a group of people began shouting suggestions to the panel about what do to reverse the situation.
Nearly all of the speakers on stage said, “vote.”
“What about now?” came one response.
The lack of an immediate call to action frustrated another member of the public, who said later that “we feed those communities. What do you do?”
“We cannot wait until November of next year,” cried another voice.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
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This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2025.