The Sheriff’s Office seems eager to cooperate in the nationwide anti-immigrant push.
By Alice Herman/Suncoast Searchlight
Original Air Date: October 24, 2025
Host: As the federal government intensifies its immigration crackdown, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office has emerged as one of the Suncoast’s most active partners with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Alice Herman with Suncoast Searchlight reports.
Alice Herman: In recent months, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman’s deputies have patrolled the Everglades immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
They’ve also shuttled immigrants between detention facilities in Florida.
At the same time, the number of people in the county jail on ICE detainers has quadrupled this year. Those detainers allow the sheriff to keep people locked up for up to 48 hours beyond their scheduled release, giving ICE time to take them into custody.
Sarasota Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. Photo courtesy of the Sarasota Co. Sheriff’s Department via Suncoast Searchlight
To do that work, Hoffman’s office has earned more than $280,000 in special grant funding from the state.
Individual officers have benefited, too, with $1,000 bonuses for ICE training and extra pay for immigration operations.
This comes at a time that the sheriff’s office has ramped up its street-level immigration enforcement, allowing deputies to make immigration arrests during traffic stops.
And the sheriff’s office here is far from alone.
Across the state of Florida, law enforcement agencies have signed onto special agreements with ICE that authorize them to do that kind of in-the-field work. The federal government calls it a “force multiplier” for law enforcement.
The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office has emerged as one of the Suncoast’s most active partners with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Photo by Alice Herman via Suncoast Searchlight
Kristi Noem: It’s been fantastic to see the partnerships that we’ve had here in Florida, in this community but also across the entire state. We have a program called 287(g), which allows local law enforcement agencies to partner with us on enforcement activities, and that has been very beneficial to making sure that we’re out there working together, cooperatively bringing people to justice.
AH: That was Kristi Noem, the US secretary of Homeland Security, speaking in Bradenton this week.
She’s talking about the program that allows cops and sheriffs to make immigration arrests in the streets. It’s called the 287(g) task force model, and is named after a section of federal immigration law.
Civil rights advocates say the program risks racial profiling and hurts community trust, and they point to its fraught history to explain that.
Years before Trump’s second term, ICE had abandoned the task force program. The agency was concerned there wasn’t enough oversight for regular police officers to make immigration arrests.
The Sarasota County Jail is overcrowded, prompting county commissioners to consider a costly addition. Photo by Michael Barfield of The Florida Trident via Suncoast Searchlight
In Maricopa County, Arizona, the Department of Justice found the Sheriff’s office had abused the program and had systematically discriminated against Latinos in the community regardless of their citizenship status.
Now, Florida has more of those task force agreements than any other state in the nation, with every sheriff’s office and more than 150 police departments on board.
I’m Alice Herman with Suncoast Searchlight. For more information, read the story at suncoastsearchlight.org/sarasota-sheriff-ice-immigration-cash.
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