As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers opening a detention and processing facility on Orlando’s eastern edge, city attorney Mayanne Downs said the U.S. Constitution prevents city officials from blocking it.
Her conclusion comes even as Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said the county’s attorneys were still reviewing their own options Tuesday in response to an outpouring from residents at a Tuesday county commission meeting] seeking to stop the potential facility.
Downs, the founding partner of the DownsAaron firm and Orlando’s longtime city attorney, wrote to Mayor Buddy Dyer and city commissioners with her conclusion.
“As an agency of our federal government, ICE is immune from any local regulation that interferes in any way with its federal mandate,” she wrote. “This is so because the Federal Supremacy Clause establishes that federal laws are ‘the supreme Law of the Land,’ and override – and preempt – any conflicting state or local constitutions, charters, laws or regulations.”
Downs noted that a similar situation had occurred when the City of Hollywood in Broward County tried to get the U.S. Postal Service to follow its local zoning and building codes when building a post office. A 1997 federal court ruling barred the city from imposing its codes on a federal post office.
“We are duty bound to follow the law, even when we don’t approve of it,” she wrote. “Each and all of us have sworn to uphold and defend the law of this land, you by your oath when you took office, and those of us who are lawyers, by the oath we took when admitted to the bar to practice in the State of Florida.”
In a statement, Dyer echoed Downs’ conclusions, though he added, “We remain committed to being a city that treats every person with dignity and respect.”
Rumors swirled earlier this month that ICE was eyeing a warehouse on Transport Drive in east Orlando to open a new processing center, as part of the Trump Administration’s nationwide effort to convert such industrial facilities into hubs to speed up the president’s mass deportation agenda.
Television news crews captured an ICE official leaving the warehouse on Jan. 16, and he stated no contracts had been signed and the visit was “exploratory.”
An ICE spokesperson hasn’t responded to questions about whether paperwork had been signed since the visit. It appears that the 439,000-foot building south of State Road 528 near Sunbridge Parkway has been eyed by federal authorities for months as a potential option to process detainees, similar to other planned warehouses in places like Kansas City, Mo.
Kansas City signed off on a 5-year moratorium on detention facilities in an effort to block such a facility there.
County Commissioner Nicole Wilson proposed a similar moratorium in a memo last week, though it’s unclear if the county could regulate a facility within Orlando’s city limits. Also, Florida also has state laws that seem to ban similar moratoriums, as well as others that require local governments to cooperate with ICE.
At the Board of County Commissioners meeting Tuesday, Demings told attorneys and advocates urging intervention that “from an Orange County perspective … we will do what is necessary to protect our community. We will explore what our lawful options are.”