Police chiefs around Tampa Bay signed voluntary agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in February of last year, and have since been reassuring concerned community members that their involvement with ICE is limited. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri wants to end that, demanding the state go after local departments he says aren’t putting enough resources towards doing ICE’s job.
Without 287(g) agreements—formal, written arrangements between local agencies and ICE—local police generally have no authority to enforce immigration law. At last Tuesday’s meeting between the sheriffs and police chiefs who make up Florida’s State Immigration Enforcement Council, agencies that chose not to sign voluntary 287(g) agreements with ICE weren’t brought up at all, but those who signed on were scrutinized by Gualtieri for inadequate participation.
During the council’s discussion of ways to get agencies to comply with reporting requirements, council member Gualtieri chimed in with his own complaint.
“Where they have agreements, but they’re not participating, I think the question there, of course, is why,” Gualtieri said. “… It’s been long enough now where everybody who has an agreement should have credentialed DIOs.”
Designated immigration officers, or DIOs, are individual officers deputized to carry out some ICE duties, like arresting people for immigration warrants that are typically only enforceable by federal agents. DIOs are nominated by a police department to take a training course provided by ICE that teaches them to enforce immigration law. The course—previously a multi-week, in-person event—is now a 40-hour online class.
Several Pinellas police chiefs who signed 287(g) agreements incorrectly said that they were required to join the voluntary program. All the county’s chiefs signed on last year just days after Gualtieri warned them via email that they were all required to “do certain things” regarding immigration enforcement or face removal from office by the governor.
Local police say collaboration is limited; legal experts disagree
St. Petersburg Chief of Police Anthony Holloway has insisted that the arrangement with ICE is limited, stating at a community forum in December that they only call ICE when they come across someone with an immigration warrant. Holloway also said at that forum that St. Petersburg had no DIOs.
Immigration attorney Daniela Carrión told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that this strategy won’t withstand state pressure, and that ending the agreement is the only effective alternative.
“A department may try to limit how many officers it deputizes or how often it uses that authority, but it cannot publicly minimize away the legal effect of the agreement it signed,” Carrión told CL. “That distinction matters even more now that Florida officials are pressuring agencies to move beyond paper compliance.”
Routinely, police chiefs in progressive cities try to publicly downplay the impact of ICE agreements without fully ending them, a move that could reduce state pressure while appeasing progressive voters.
“Ultimately, the issue is not what local officials say at a press conference. It is what they agreed to in writing,” Carrión told CL. “Once a department signs a 287(g) agreement, it has created a formal partnership with ICE, accepted federal oversight over delegated immigration functions, and tied itself more closely to Florida’s broader immigration enforcement funding and compliance structure.”
Currently, all municipal police departments in Pinellas are under a type of 287(g) agreement called the “task force model,” and many of them follow the same blueprint.
In the course of their regular duties, officers run IDs through a national criminal database to check for outstanding warrants. Police can now see immigration warrants in this database too, since ICE loaded it with 700,000 such warrants last year.
Only DIOs can arrest people on immigration warrants alone. Non-DIO agents who encounter someone with an immigration warrant during a traffic stop can call ICE or a DIO in to enforce the warrant, provided the person with arresting powers can get there in the time it would otherwise take to complete the stop.
DIOs can also investigate the legal residency status of people they stop. If the DIO has reason to believe someone isn’t a legal resident, they can call ICE to determine next steps.
“Florida cities are not required to join 287(g). City police departments who have already entered can and should exit them,” said attorney Alana Greer, co-founder and director of the Miami-based Community Justice Project.
Greer told CL that the officers who call ICE over immigration warrants are already going above and beyond what’s required of them. “Nothing in Florida or federal law requires police to call ICE on our neighbors,” Greer said. “Prolonging a stop for this purpose violates the 4th Amendment and further degrades public safety.”
Last March, Holloway told WTSP that officers in St. Pete would hold an individual for up to an hour while waiting for ICE to arrive. Greer said that, since non-DIOs don’t have the power to enforce immigration law, this hold is unconstitutional.
“Prolonging a stop, even if only for a few minutes, without suspicion of a crime in order to buy time for immigration agents to arrive is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment,” Greer told CL. Immigration violations are generally civil matters, not criminal.
Gualtieri keeps pushing for local cops to act as feds
At last week’s meeting, Gualtieri asked the immigration enforcement council what they thought was an appropriate response to the lack of DIOs in departments with 287(g) agreements.
“Do we do anything with this? Does the council do anything, or recommend anything, or does Director Coker do anything?” Gualtieri said at the meeting. “And what I mean, by that, is does somebody send a letter or some sort of communication to these agencies and say: ‘You have these agreements, but you don’t have anybody, and there’s nothing in the system. So, you know, what are you going to do?’”
Two departments in Gualtieri’s own county would be on the receiving end of any such communication.
Clearwater and St. Petersburg have the two largest municipal police departments in Pinellas, and neither has any DIOs, according to data provided at the immigration enforcement council meeting. Gualtieri declined to comment on this matter or answer any of Creative Loafing Tampa Bay’s other questions.
A representative for St. Petersburg Police told CL that the department is “compliant with all state and federal requirements.” The Clearwater Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | BlueSky
This article appears in July 02 – 08, 2026.
