Protesters outside Orlando City Hall after ICE agents killed Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good (January 2026) Credit: McKenna Schueler
A coalition of local faith, social advocacy and immigrant rights organizations launched an online petition drive Friday to let elected officials know that they don’t want federal immigration enforcement agents roaming heir streets and terrorizing people without accountability.
The petition, organized by the Hope Community Center, Florida Rising and the anti-Trump group Orlando 50501, calls for Florida elected officials to end local law enforcement cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ensure due process rights for those detained by ICE, and to do what’s within their power to require ICE agents to clearly identify themselves, unmasked.
“Our communities are strongest when government power is exercised lawfully and transparently,” the petition reads. “Masked officers, secret policing, and fear-based immigration enforcement undermine trust and make us all less safe.”
According to a campaign organizer, the online petition will be sent to signers’ local, state and federal representatives, based on the address included in filling out the petition.
Local advocates announced their campaign Friday outside the Orange County Jail, a county-operated correctional facility that is serving as a temporary holding center for people arrested by federal officers on charges of being in the country illegally.
Under the county’s agreement with ICE, the jail can hold ICE detainees for up to 72 hours before they must be released. According to the Arroyo Law Firm, however, detainees are, in practice, shuffled in and out of the jail unlawfully. The Orlando Sentinel first reported on this practice — confirmed by corrections officials — last August.
“Orange County is allowing ICE to circumvent the law by removing individuals every 72 hours, then bringing them back, rebooking them under a new booking number, artificially resetting the clock, prolonging detention without due process,” attorney Josephine Arroyo told the board of Orange County Commissioners last week. “I recognize that your jobs are not easy, but history does not judge us on convenience,” she said. “It judges us on courage.”
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings later reportedly announced afterwards that the county’s legal team is considering filing a lawsuit against the federal government for the financial burden the county faces for detaining people who are solely booked into the jail on federal immigration charges.
According to county officials, it costs the county roughly $180 per day to hold a person in the jail overnight. The federal government, however, is only reimbursing the county $88 per day, per person, leaving the county on the hook for the rest. As of last December, the county had booked more than 5,000 people detained by ICE, costing the county (and, in effect, taxpayers) at least $330,000 since last April, according to county officials.
The Sentinel reported over the weekend that the daily average number of people booked into Orange County Jail on ICE charges only (and no other local civil or criminal charge) has spiked since October, from roughly 30 people per day then to over 140 per day in January.
“We’re already at the top of the chimney — we’re over our ceiling,” county public safety director Danny Banks told the Sentinel. “I know Orange County jail can no longer continue to be their dumping port for all of their regional arrests.”
Demings, a Democrat who’s running this year to become Florida’s next governor, wrote a letter to the federal government on Dec. 23, 2025, asking for full reimbursement for incarceration costs. “The burden of the expense related to immigration enforcement activities should be borne by the federal government, not local governments who’ve been forced to follow the law in support of your initiatives,” Demings wrote.
More so than the financial cost, local immigrant rights advocates are concerned about the toll this takes on families, in addition to due process rights violations, rumors of a new ICE detention facility potentially coming to Orlando, and violence from ICE officers.
The petition drive was launched just about a week after ICU nurse Alex Pretti, a U.S. Citizen and VA employee, was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents on the streets of Minneapolis. His killing came less than three weeks after Minneapolis mom Renee Nicole Good was similarly shot dead by an ICE agent as she attempted to flee a group of federal agents in her Honda Pilot.
Democrats in the U.S. Senate last week threatened to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security (which includes ICE) in an effort to push reforms to federal immigration enforcement.
In the face of a potential government shutdown Friday, however, Democrats quickly caved, notably with the blessing of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had only just released a video on social media calling DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and White House advisor Stephen Miller out as “fucking liars.”
The Senate approved a funding deal Friday that would fund DHS for another two weeks, offering lawmakers more time to negotiate, while likely also undermining Democrats’ leverage in such talks. The funding deal must still be approved by the U.S. House, however, and according to Axios, it’s unclear whether enough House Democrats will be willing to support it.
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