Orange County jail flooded with ICE detainees
County officials say the number of ICE detainees booked into the Orange County Jail without local charges has more than quadrupled in recent months, greatly straining the facility’s staff and creating unsafe conditions.
Many of these inmates went there multiple times, commuting every three days to meet a technical requirement for how long they could be held. When this happens, some inmates become nearly lost in the system and cannot be found easily.
The rapid increase in the number of arrests this month contributed to the rumors Increased US Immigration and Customs Enforcement activities in OrlandoLeading Democratic congressmen Darren Soto and Maxwell Frost to issue legal guidance and advocacy groups ten times the calls for help from the families of detainees.
In October, the Orange County Jail averaged 30 immigration-only detainees per day, but that number rose to more than 140 per day in January. Over the past two weeks the average has risen to 162 per day. As of Thursday, county Public Safety Director Danny Banks said 182 people were being held in jail on immigration charges alone.
“We’re already at the top of the chimney; we’re past our ceiling,” Banks said. “I know that the Orange County jail can no longer continue to be the discharge port for all county arrests.”
Federal officials also tried to exploit a loophole in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s contract with Orange County to keep detainees there longer than the agreement allowed.
Under the agreement, ICE can keep its detainees in jail for up to 72 hours after domestic charges are resolved. If they are not moved by then, these prisoners will be released.
But months ago in a training session It was announced by the Orlando Sentinel, ICE restarts the 72-hour clock by picking up its detainees from jail and bringing them back hours later. Now this practice appears to be one of the main challenges in prison.
Of the 182 ICE-only detainees in the jail Thursday morning, 63 percent (115) were booked more than once, Banks said.
“I know one example that has been with us six times,” he said. “They come and pick them up within 72 hours and then within about a day they bring the same inmate back to us for another 72 hours.”
He said the district attorney is reviewing whether such a maneuver is legal and whether Orange could have taken action to stop it. But state law requires local officials to use “best efforts” to support immigration enforcement.
Orlando immigration attorney Josephine Arroyo said she was unable to locate some of her clients who were being held in jail because some were rebooked with a different identification number.
Arroyo said she and her husband, attorney Phillip Arroyo, visited their client in the inmate section of the prison and found “it was a sea of brown, Latino men.”
“Last Sunday, my office was forced to tell your guards the exact location of our client because your system indicated that he was not there,” Arroyo told commissioners this week. “And guess what? It was on BRC-3-Delta,” he said, revealing the customer’s mobile number.
No one interviewed by the Sentinel knew where the inmates were taken after being briefly released from the prison. Banks said ICE doesn’t need to tell the jail or where someone was first arrested. He guessed that many people in jail were probably arrested out of county or even out of state.
“We don’t really know where they take them, they sit somewhere for about eight hours and then they bring them back,” Arroyo said.
It is unclear why federal authorities did not transfer the immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz or similar facilities. It is also unknown whether considering a new ICE processing center for a warehouse in East Orlando would solve the problem. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
After President Donald Trump took office for a second term and began accelerating his mass deportation agenda, Banks said the county set aside two areas of the jail to house only immigration violations: one area for 65 men and 65 women, or a maximum of 130 beds. The total capacity of the prison is approximately 4,000 people.
However, as is normally the case, there are more men booked than women, which creates problems. For example, if there are 80 men and 20 women in the prison, he said he needs to find more room for 15 men.
“We are completely exhausted in this area, and as their numbers continue to increase, this forces us to constantly move our inmates just to make room for federal civilian inmates,” he said.
Because of the influx of federal inmates, Banks said correctional officers are overworked and overtime costs are too high to provide adequate security for inmates.
The increase comes after the prison struggled to fill open positions and had a 25% vacancy rate early last year. Starting pay has since been increased by about $4 per hour in a new union contract; At the time, that was the highest wage in the area at $27.42 an hour, Banks said.
The feds pay the Orange County government $88 a day to house a federal prisoner, but the county says it’s $180 per person per day. Banks and state leaders have been in talks with the U.S. Marshal Service to increase that reimbursement, but so far no agreement has been reached.
Among the legal issues facing Orange County is a state law requiring cities and counties to use “best efforts” to assist ICE. Last year, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier threatened to fire Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and the Board of County Commissioners if they did not sign an agreement allowing corrections officers to transport inmates on behalf of officials.
Orange County Commissioner Kelly Semrad said the county would need to take legal action and file a lawsuit before a judge can officially define what counts as a “best effort.”
“It’s time for legal action,” he said. “There is no harm or foul in going after a declaratory judgment to ask a judge to define it for us.”
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