‘There’s no other state that has been able to do anything approaching what the state of Florida has been able to do,’ DeSantis said.
Florida FHP troopers decrease as DeSantis increases immigration duties, overtime
“Response times are unacceptable. You’ve got the public waiting an hour for a trooper to come to routine accidents. It puts lives in needless danger.”
State officials announced that about 20,000 people were detained in Florida in 2025 and transferred to federal immigration custody.Gov. Ron DeSantis stated that 63% of those detained had previous arrests or convictions.The state plans to open a new immigration detention facility in Northwest Florida and is considering another in South Florida.
About 20,000 people living in Florida in 2025 were detained and transferred to federal immigration custody, state officials said Jan. 5.
Over 10,000 people have been detained in Florida in Operation Tidal Wave, a state-run initiative led by law enforcement agencies, and the rest have been arrested by local law enforcement, Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a press conference in Sanderson.
While standing behind a lectern that said “Florida Leads” in front of Deportation Depot, one of the state’s two state-run immigration detention facilities, DeSantis said 63% of those detained had previous arrests or convictions.
“There’s no other state that has been able to do anything approaching what the state of Florida has been able to do,” DeSantis said.
The press conference was a review and celebration of Florida’s 287(g) task force designations among law enforcement agencies in the state. Every state and local law enforcement agency established a relationship with federal immigration enforcement as mandated by the Florida Legislature and DeSantis in response to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
“Before, there wasn’t much cooperation with state and local law enforcement with the federal government, and over the last nine, 10 months, that’s significantly changed,” said Anthony Coker, the executive director of the State Immigration Enforcement Board.
“The Florida blueprint of immigration enforcement has been widely recognized as being the gold standard of state-level immigration enforcement,” Coker added. “As we begin 2026, we’re excited for the opportunity to partner with other states and have them see as much success as we have.”
DeSantis said the federal government has stationed immigration judges at both Alligator Alcatraz, the state-run immigration detention facility in the Everglades, and Deportation Depot, and 90 percent of those with asylum claims are “bogus.”
He called on Congress to “really clean that up.”
“I don’t know why Congress would allow that to be abused the way it’s been abused, but it’s been abused very, very badly,” DeSantis said.
Over the past year, the the immigration court asylum grant rate has been cut in half, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks immigration data. In August 2025, 19.2 percent of asylum seekers were granted asylum compared to a year earlier in August 2024, when the rate was 38.2 percent.
He also said over 1,000 people have used Florida’s help to self-deport from the state. In July, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said the agency was collaborating with the state to create “Voluntary Departure,” saying the “program offers illegal aliens in custody, who have no prior felony convictions, the opportunity to return to their home countries on direct airline flights,” adding the tickets for the commercial flights are bought by the state.
It is unknown whether taxpayer dollars are being used to buy the tickets and to which countries these flights were headed.
And over the past four months, there have been 93 flights from Deportation Depot, transferring 2,926 detainees into ICE custody. “If other states were doing even a fraction of what Florida was doing, the national efforts would be all that much stronger,” DeSantis said.
The state plans to open another state-run immigration detention facility in Northwest Florida, dubbed “Panhandle Pokey.” DeSantis said the facility would open “relatively soon,” depending on federal approval. The state is also looking at opening another facility in South Florida as well, DeSantis said.
While the feds have approved up to $608 million in reimbursement funds for Florida and its state-level immigration enforcement efforts. But as of mid-December 2025, it hadn’t been officially confirmed whether any of that money has yet been paid to the state.
Ana Goñi-Lessan, government impact reporter for the USA TODAY Network – Florida, can be reached at agonilessan@usatodayco.com.