ORLANDO, Fla. — Nearly 170 Central Florida sheriff’s deputies have completed training allowing them for the first time to arrest people for immigration violations, as local authorities move to execute a critical piece of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Under a Florida law passed earlier this year, city and county law enforcement agencies are required to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sign so-called 287(g) agreements. Those documents enable local law enforcement to conduct limited federal immigration enforcement under ICE supervision, but their impact had been stalled while waiting for training.

Prior to the agreements, local agencies turned over to ICE people they arrested for other crimes who also had so-called “detainers” indicating issues with their immigration status. But local law enforcement has not been allowed to arrest individuals solely for violating immigration law, until now.

Local agencies are developing their own policies on how to carry out their new responsibilities, and the scope of their immigration enforcement activities remains to be seen. One agency told the Orlando Sentinel explicitly it won’t participate in raids.

Larry Keefe, the executive director of Florida’s State Board of Immigration Enforcement, told Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida cabinet members last week that 500 deputies statewide have recently completed the training, which state leaders hope leads to more arrests for immigration violations.

“They’ll be right out there like Florida Highway Patrol has been for many months actually making independent arrests out in the field,” he said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and ICE didn’t answer questions about which agencies those deputies represented, and how many had been trained.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office confirmed this week that 110 of its deputies would receive the training, with nearly all of them having completed it already and received their credentials.

Twenty-eight deputy sheriffs in Osceola and 30 in Lake have completed their training so far, the agencies said. In Seminole, 32 deputies will do in-person training, as opposed to the traditional online course, to allow deputies “the opportunity to ask questions and ensure they understand all the requirements and processes,” the department said.

FHP and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement already have immigration enforcement credentials and have been arresting undocumented immigrants for months. That’s a sharp departure from the practice prior to the second Trump administration, when such enforcement was the exclusive purview of the federal government and agencies such as ICE and Customs and Border Patrol.

But now, if an ICE-trained deputy – for example – conducts a traffic stop and passengers in the vehicle are undocumented, the deputy could pursue detaining those passengers for immigration violations.

Prior to the training, traffic stops were used as a net to bring people into jails where such warrants were served. An Orlando Sentinel report earlier this month found that traffic stops have been the key source for local immigration arrests, with the majority of those being detained by ICE facing just minor traffic violations.

Even proponents of aggressive immigration enforcement are anxious about the impacts of the new rules. With more cops available to make arrests, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd fears it will further stress the federal detention system, which is already struggling to keep up with the surge in immigration arrests.

“My biggest fear is we train up these different police departments and sheriff’s offices and they’re all eager and excited to go out here and detain these folks, and it’s quite frankly like shooting fish in a barrel, there’s that many of them out here,” he said. “There’s not going to be any place to put them.”

Doris Marie Provine, professor emeritus at Arizona State University and lead author of the book “Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines,” was skeptical that 287(g) agreements would prove successful in Florida.

“These have been tried over and over … it never works, because it really is an unfunded mandate and it really does conflict with how some officers see their jobs,” she said. “There’s huge discretion on who you stop and what you say to them when you stop them.”

Training is ongoing for city and county police officers across the state – an Orlando Police spokesperson said none of its officers have finished it so far – and agencies are creating policies to govern their new obligations.

For instance, Orange County deputies without ICE training can tell jail officials when they arrest someone on state charges who has an ICE warrant issued against them, but those deputies don’t “have the legal authority to arrest and transport” them to jail solely based on that warrant.

That’s according to a policy in place since June 20 and shared with the Orlando Sentinel despite it not being published on the agency’s website as of Monday.

Arresting authority would lie with deputies who have received formal ICE training, called designated immigration officers, or DIO, who would be called to the scene to take over that investigation.

If none are available, the Orange policy requires deputies to contact FHP or “the closest municipality” to request a DIO takeover. If still none are available, an ICE agent would have to respond to the scene.

In-house DIOs, however, can’t make an immigration arrest “without being explicitly told to do so by an ICE representative” or perform “immigration officer functions except when working under the supervision or direction of ICE.”

As for undocumented victims or witnesses, deputies and DIOs are not required to provide their immigration status to federal authorities if they cooperate with an investigation and are “necessary to the investigation or prosecution of a crime,” the Orange policy says.

A spokesperson did not make Orange County Sheriff John Mina available for an interview.

Seminole County’s policy allows supervisors to review arrest reports and refer all immigration warrants to the agency’s Civil Section, which handles non-criminal cases. DIOs, meanwhile, are considered to be conducting immigration enforcement as “an extra-duty assignment” and can be taken off at any time.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office does not have any new policies in place. Rather, “we have a continuation of our long-standing partnership with ICE,” spokesperson Stephanie Earley said in an email.

Staff for Osceola County Sheriff Christopher Blackmon are reviewing agency policies, Capt. Kim Montes told the Sentinel. But Montes stressed that deputies “will not participate in ICE raids.”

A spokesperson in Orange said deputies have not been asked to participate in such raids.

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