Gov. Ron DeSantis keeps floating proposals to do more in the fight against illegal immigration.
Accompanied by local and federal officials in Miramar, he discussed Operation Tidal Wave, a 287(g) operation which has led to the arrest of 1,100 illegal immigrants in collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local and state authorities.
Bolstered by that success, he says he wants to expand the state role beyond arrests and toward adjudication by using members of the National Guard as immigration Judges if the Donald Trump administration permits it.
“We’re ready, willing and able to take it to the next level. We have submitted plans to DHS to say if this is approved, we will go off to the races. And we will be able to do really from soup to nuts, from apprehension to detention, even putting some of our people in the National Guard in line to serve as immigration Judges to process this. We can do it,” DeSantis said.
“Rhese are not Article 3 judges. They are executive branch employees, basically. We can absolutely deputize judge advocates from our National Guard units to serve as immigration judges,” he added.
The Governor dismissed “due process” concerns, saying there are “tens of thousands of illegal aliens in Florida at a minimum that have already been issued final orders of removal, and there’s hundreds of thousands of them throughout the United States of America.”
“So they’ve had a lot of process. They’ve been ordered to be removed,” DeSantis said. “They have not complied with those removal orders, and that’s a very, very high priority for our state efforts to continue to identify those individuals and make sure that they return to their country of origin.”
He rejected the idea that they need “some O.J. Simpson type trial before they can be deported,” saying President Trump has statutory and constitutional authority to remove people. DeSantis also dismissed a reporter’s concern that some are being removed even though they are American citizens, by pointing out criminal violations by illegal immigrants as showing “a lot of people have been harmed.”
“The notion that this is America, therefore, we should have an open border,” DeSantis said, is not “responsible” and is an example of a “fake” narrative.
DeSantis also is willing to expand detention if the feds call for it.
“f we get the sign off from DHS, we can expand detention space very quickly in Florida. I mean, just think about it. I mean, you guys who are Florida based, you know when we have hurricanes, we end up setting up locations for tens of thousands of linemen, right? Do that very, very quickly. So we have the capacity to set it up quickly, but we’re not going to do that without the approval of the Department of Homeland Security.”
The Governor suggested during a Fox News interview Wednesday that state assets could be used for transportation to El Salvador, if the Trump administration gave that scheme a “greenlight.”
He repeated that offer Thursday, saying “we can even help on the transport piece. I know that they were talking about GITMO. I don’t know that they’ve used that, but we can help with that as well.”
There is no indication that’s imminent, but what’s clear is the Governor wants to be front and center in the illegal immigration fight, and he’s willing to use state resources to do whatever he can.
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