Florida Scrubs Arrests of U.S. Citizens From Immigration Enforcement Data

A Florida immigration enforcement dashboard was quietly edited to remove evidence of arrests of U.S. citizens after a local media outlet asked about the arrests.

The Miami New Times reported on October 15 that data showing the arrests of nearly two dozen U.S. citizens disappeared from Florida’s Suspected Unauthorized Alien Encounters dashboard, a database maintained by the Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement.

The dashboard lists state and local police encounters with 5,966 suspected illegal immigrants since August 1. Of those, 3,052 were arrested on federal immigration charges by Florida state agencies. Another 1,753 people were arrested on local and state charges.

However, the New Times reported that the database used to show 21 U.S. citizens were arrested and charged. Additionally, nine other U.S. citizens had encounters with law enforcement but were not arrested.

“The New Times emailed the Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement, DeSantis’ office, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for an explanation,” the publication wrote. “While we did not receive a response, the dashboard figures for U.S. citizen encounters and arrests changed significantly by the time of this reporting. The dashboard now shows there have been only two reported encounters with U.S. citizens, and only one citizen was arrested on local or state charges.”

An October 10 Tampa Bay Times story also reported that the dashboard showed “at least two dozen” encounters with U.S. citizens.

As of today, October 24, the dashboard shows one encounter with a U.S. citizen and zero arrests.

The Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment.

Transparency advocates say Florida has cloaked its immigration enforcement operations in an unprecedented and sometimes illegal level of secrecy. For example, state contracts for Florida’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp were removed from a public database and replaced with far less detailed documents after media outlets began writing about them this summer.

Records showing immigration stops and arrests of U.S. citizens are both a legal and public relations headache for the federal government and the State of Florida.

As President Donald Trump’s mass deportation program has continued, more and more evidence of U.S. citizens being harassed, assaulted, and arrested during immigration enforcement operations has accumulated around the country. And despite the Trump administration’s vehement denials that it is racially profiling suspects during immigration sweeps, ProPublica recently reported that it had tallied 170 cases of citizens being detained, almost all of them Latino. Lawsuits are piling up accordingly.

Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst and consultant at the Florida Immigration Coalition, points to cases such as Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen who was arrested in April under a Florida law that had been blocked by a federal judge earlier that month. He was then held in a county jail under a federal immigration detainer, despite his mother providing his birth certificate and a judge dismissing the charge against him—and despite Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having no authority to detain a U.S. citizen.

“He was arrested doubly wrong,” Kennedy says. “He was arrested under an immigration law that was not supposed to be enforced and that was not even applicable to him because he’s a U.S. citizen.”

“We know that U.S. citizens are being arrested in Florida right now because we see stories like this one that are super-suspect and a civil rights nightmare,” Kennedy continues. “Then we see a dashboard put out by the state of Florida where they had like 30 arrests, and when the press gets a hold of it, that number drops to zero and there’s no explanation given. I think that’s weird.”