Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings wrote a letter to the U.S. Marshals Service on Monday, asking the feds to fully reimburse the county for the cost of jailing people who have been detained on immigration charges on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency.
According to Mayor Demings, compliance with federal immigration enforcement has already cost county taxpayers more than $333,000 and counting. The county, like other jail operators in Florida, has an agreement with ICE, known as an intergovernmental services agreement, that allows ICE officers to detain federal inmates in Orange County Jail temporarily who are allegedly in the country illegally.
The U.S. Marshals Service, however, is not fully reimbursing the cost for doing so. While the cost of detaining a person is roughly $180 per person, per day, county officials say the feds are only reimbursing the county $88 per person, leaving local taxpayers on the hook for the rest.
“Orange County has done our part to ensure our operations are compliant with both federal and state laws which have mandated our participation in supporting immigration enforcement activities,” Demings’ letter reads. “But I am deeply concerned that the fiscal impact of these legislative mandates is being unfairly shouldered by Orange County, to the tune of over $333,592.”
According to Demings, Orange County Jail has seen a “continually increasing” number of people booked by or on behalf of ICE, with over 5,000 ICE detainees booked into the jail over just the last eight months alone, including those detained in neighboring areas outside Orange County.
Although county officials formally requested a renegotiated reimbursement cost from the federal government for housing ICE detainees in the local jail in August, Demings says the county has not received an updated figure or full reimbursement as requested, to date.
“The burden of the expense related to immigration enforcement activities should be borne by the federal government, not local governments who’ve been forced to follow the law in support of your initiatives,” Demings wrote.
“The burden of the expense related to immigration enforcement activities should be borne by the federal government, not local governments who’ve been forced to follow the law in support of your initiatives.”
It’s the closest thing to a mic-drop that locals are bound to get from Demings, who has faced heat from local immigrant rights advocates this year over his professed sense of helplessness to address concerns about aggressive federal immigration enforcement in Orange County.
“We are seeing people aggressively being taken by masked agents in our communities. Unmarked uniforms, arrests without warrants,” Hope Community Center organizing director Ericka Gomez-Tejeda told Demings and county commissioners last week during a county commissioner board meeting.
Advocates noted that, under separate state agency agreements with ICE, local communities have “incredibly” seen officers not just from ICE, but from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission and state Department of Financial Services “in our streets, at our doors, working for ICE.”
“When an agency meant to protect the environment is instead stopping community members and becoming a pipeline to immigration detention, this kind of enforcement erodes [trust] and pushes the agency far outside their intended role,” said Farmworker Association of Florida organizer Aaron Quen-Perez, speaking at a press conference ahead of the board meeting last week.
Demings, however, dismissed the county’s responsibility for addressing such concerns. “The resolution to this issue is not in these chambers, it is somewhere else,” Demings stated bluntly. “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.”
The Immigrants Are Welcome Here coalition, made up of more than 60 local legal and advocacy groups, including Hope Community Center, has been advocating over the last year for stronger rights for individuals detained by ICE under the Trump administration at the local jail.
According to NPR, more than 1.6 million immigrants in the U.S. lost their legal status in the first 11 months of President Donald Trump’s second term that began in January, including individuals previously accepted to enter the country through temporary protected status or asylum programs.
Calls to oppose or publicly challenge Trump’s mass detention and deportation plans, however, have put Demings in a tough spot. Demings, a former sheriff and police chief, recently launched a bid for Florida governor and is running as a Democrat in a solidly red state that overwhelmingly supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Still, Demings has made it clear he wants the county to, at the very least, be reimbursed for detaining federal inmates on behalf of ICE — even if he’s less interested in investigating the circumstances under which those individuals were brought to the jail in the first place.
“I request the USMS expedite the renegotiation of our IGSA and provide us with a complete reimbursement of Orange County’s expenses related to your immigration enforcement initiatives, such that our local taxpayers no longer bear the costs of your initiative,” Demings’ letter to the USMS reads.
The financial burden, as Demings wrote, amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars so far, in addition to a greater burden on the county’s already understaffed and overburdened corrections system. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, for its part, is now offering unauthorized immigrants an “exit bonus” of $3,000 to “self-deport” and avoid the detention process altogether, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The DHS, a federal agency that includes ICE, has billed the “exit bonus” as a “limited time offer” for the holiday season, according to WSJ. The Trump administration previously offered a $1,000 bonus to migrants to “self-deport,” although the Guardian reports that some have taken up the offer, but never actually received any money.
Beyond the financial burden, of course, local advocates for immigrants in Orange County have also highlighted the emotional and physical toll of the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts. “Our communities are living the nightmares that we and every U.S. American citizen dreads,” Gomez-Tejeda said during a press conference on aggressive ICE enforcement tactics last week.
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