Florida is dramatically — but quietly — changing the way immigration enforcement is practiced. The state’s Republican leaders have made it a testing ground for the aggressive immigration enforcement tactics championed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

And although arrests have soared, the heavy-handed approach has had little measurable effect on crime — and is destabilizing communities across the state.

The numbers tell part of the story: ICE agents at the Miami field office, which covers all of Florida, arrested 41,000 people from Jan. 20, 2025 through March 10, 2026, more than any other field office — including Minnesota’s, where the administration’s deadly immigration crackdown received international media attention.

Miami is a logical hot spot. South Florida, and Miami-Dade County in particular, is a community of immigrants. At least 356,000 are undocumented, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

But the primary reason ICE arrests are so high is because Governor Ron DeSantis and the state Legislature passed a law requiring county sheriffs to deputize their officers to enforce immigration law, making Florida the first state to mandate that local law enforcement partner with ICE under what are known as 287(g) agreements.

ICE has a map showing all the participating 287(g) agencies in the country. Every part of Florida’s population is covered — a level of saturation that no other state comes close to having.

The state has also demanded that highway troopers, fish and wildlife officers, and university police work with ICE. That mandate includes a financial incentive: Any law enforcement officer who assists ICE can get a $1,000 bonus.

The Trump administration even sweetened the deal. Using federal funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it set aside another $149 million for stipends and salary reimbursements to cooperating law enforcement agencies in Florida — more than any other state, according to a leaked financial ledger obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.

Now, traffic stops for minor offenses, like tinted windows or failing to use a turn signal, can lead to detention and possible deportation.

“Right now, in Miami and Florida, it doesn’t matter if you have a work permit, or if you have a Social Security card,” Hector Diaz, a Miami-based immigration lawyer, told me — if you’re called undocumented, you can be detained and deported, he said.

Law enforcement puts the license plate numbers of vehicles into its database, and determines if the vehicle is registered to a US citizen, he said. “You could be a lawful permanent resident. You could be a visa holder. But as long as [you’re] not a US citizen, you get pulled over.”

Suspects are then either picked up by ICE immediately or taken to jail by local law enforcement, where hurdles to fair legal representation are embedded into the system, Diaz explained. ICE often limits access to attorneys and transfers detainees quickly out of the state — even if their families have made arrangements for bail, he said.

Florida’s top law enforcement leaders say they support collaborating with ICE because it avoids the sweeping raids seen in Minnesota and other states. But last month the same officials, members of the State Immigration Enforcement Council, also made a remarkable admission. They suggested that rounding up law-abiding parents and innocent children for deportation was going too far and called on President Donald Trump and Congress to create a legal path for law-abiding immigrants.

That would be a good start, but it’s not enough. Florida and other states should abandon their use of 287(g) agreements because they hurt more than help. Research in North Carolina and Arizona found that counties that signed such agreements demonstrated no reduction in crime rates and often led to racial profiling.

Meanwhile, the costs of Florida’s dragnet are starting to emerge. The Florida Highway Patrol, which has trained an estimated 1,800 officers to focus on federal immigration enforcement, is facing staffing shortages and overtime costs as response time to crashes has slowed.

And the mass deportation campaign has put all immigrants in a state of “legal precarity” that’s taking a physical and emotional toll, according to a recent study by the University of South Florida.

In interviews with 53 immigrants, the report described the constant state of fear that disrupted their jobs, their families and their trust in law enforcement. Immigrants, regardless of legal status, were reluctant to go to hospitals, schools and even churches for fear of being apprehended, the study found. The conclusion: Institutions that anchor public life are now “inflicting harm on those with and without legal status and will likely leave scars for generations of immigrants and US citizens to come.”

The question for all of us is: Are these the communities we want to live in? As Americans sort ourselves into states with vastly different approaches to immigration enforcement, Florida remains an outlier even among red states. But while Florida’s mass deportation experiment is playing out like a Stephen Miller fever dream, reality is starting to set in: We can’t rip people out of our communities without tearing the fabric of the community itself.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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