ICE detentions in Central Florida are spiking

Ryan Gillespie and Stephen Hudak, Orlando Sentinel on Apr 27, 2025

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The number of people booked into the Orange County jail on immigration detainers four months into the year nearly eclipses last year’s total and looks likely to keep rising as the Trump administration cracks down on people without legal authority to remain in the country.

From Jan. 1 to April 15, 800 people were booked into the Orange County Jail with a detainer by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, jail data shows. About 1,000 people were booked into the jail on ICE detainers all of last year.

Orange County’s jail chief, Louis Quiñones, told county commissioners this week that federal agents booked 20 migrants into the jail on Monday, and he was expecting at least that many each day for the rest of the week.

Their stay on 33rd Street has been short, he said. By Tuesday morning, 17 of them had been transported to ICE facilities in Miami or elsewhere.

“What that suggests to me is that ICE is very active in Central Florida,” said Mayor Jerry Demings, a former Orange County Sheriff.

The Department of Homeland Security, in tandem with state law enforcement, kicked off “Operation Tidal Wave,” this week in which they intended to detain 800 undocumented immigrants in cities across Florida, including Orlando, through Saturday, the Miami Herald reported Thursday.

Though jail data shows a spike in immigration cases, it doesn’t fully capture all of the ways migrants are being forced to leave the country.

For instance, at a prayer service outside of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office building in an industrial part of Orange County on Thursday, a woman from Botswana approached a handful of faith leaders who gathered to protest deportations.

She came to the United States about 20 years ago as part of a Disney work program and stayed ever since, working as a waitress. Each year immigration officials renewed her visa, she said, until this year.

“This year, I came in and they didn’t want to,” she said. “I have to be out by May 14.”

The woman, who declined to identify herself, said she visited the ICE office this week to show she purchased a ticket back to Botswana.

“It’s still hard to digest it,” she said. “It’s shocking.”

Some of those picked up in Central Florida on ICE detainers and processed through the Orange County Jail may have been sent to the Krome Detention Center in Miami.

Alvaro Perpuly, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Fredrica Wilson, a Miami Democrat, said he accompanied Wilson on a visit to the detention center, after receiving reports of overcrowded, dangerous, unsanitary and inhumane conditions in the wake of the mass detentions.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s a good amount of people from Central Florida there,” he said.

Wilson told the Washington Post this week that a giant tent was stood up at Krome to house up to 400 detained migrants, as federal officials struggle to house about 50,000 people detained nationwide.

A detainer doesn’t require probable cause to believe someone has committed a crime but is based on ICE’s suspicion that a person has violated immigration rules. Of the 800 people with such detainers processed at the Orange County jail this year, 259 weren’t booked on additional local charges.

In Orange County it costs $145 per day to incarcerate an inmate, of which federal authorities reimburse the county for $88 per day, Quinonez said. He’s seeking to negotiate a more favorable deal with ICE, he told commissioners.

Under a new Florida law, each county was required to sign an agreement with ICE, in which local law enforcement can be deputized by the agency to help with immigration enforcement. Numerous cities across Florida – including Orlando and Tampa – have signed similar agreements.

The agreements have sparked backlash from advocates, who have called on cities to cancel their agreements altogether — they contend state law doesn’t require them — and pushed Orange County to offer migrants more information on legal resources available to them.

“People are being disappeared every single day,” Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet, executive director of Hope CommUnity Center in Apopka, an immigrant advocacy group, said at Tuesday’s Board of County Commission hearing. “As a matter of fact, every day I go to work, I have to work on five to six cases.”

Last month, Demings said that the county had received word of at least 10,000 deportation orders of its residents, and that the number could soon double.

In Lake County, 82 people have been arrested so far this year with ICE detainers, jail data shows. In Seminole, 50 people with detainers have been placed at the county jail through March, with 38 released to ICE.

Data from Osceola County wasn’t available before publication.

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