File photo of an ICE protest at the Torch of Friendship monument at 401 Biscayne Blvd, in downtown Miami on Jan. 7, 2026.
SAM NAVARRO
Special for the Miami Herald
The reality of President Trump’s campaign promise to carry out “mass deportations” has taken shape — and it’s ugly, even for some of the people who supported his return to the White House. His chaotic and cruel immigration enforcement tactics should weigh the heaviest on Miami-Dade, a Hispanic-majority county built largely by immigrants that Trump flipped in 2024.
Florida now has the distinction of leading the nation for Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, according to an analysis by the New York Times published Friday. The state outpaces places like Minnesota, which had widely announced surges in enforcement. ICE’s Miami field office — which covers the state, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands — made 41,310 arrests since Trump returned to the White House last January, the most of any office. Florida also had one of the highest numbers of arrests per capita — ahead of New York and California, which also have large immigrant populations — but lower than Texas’ border towns, the Times found.
Is this what Miami voted for? When voters heard “mass deportations,” did they envision undocumented migrants without criminal records who had been in the U.S. for decades being deported? What about the people — some married to U.S. citizens — arrested during their immigration hearings? Or Trump’s efforts to bypass due process?
The Trump administration, many voters assumed, would go after the “worst of the worst” — immigrants with serious criminal records. But many people who have not been accused or convicted of crimes have been caught up, too.
The number of people held by ICE increased nearly 75% in 2025 — but there was a 2,450% increase in arrests of people with no criminal record, according to the nonprofit American Immigration Council. The percentage of migrants held in detention with no criminal record rose from 6% in January 2025 to 41% by December.
How did ICE achieve these lamentable numbers? Through tactics like “at-large” arrests, worksite raids and the “re-arrests of people attending immigration court hearings or ICE check-ins,” according to the organization.
Certainly, some immigration hardliners will say that every migrant here illegally should be deported. As Gov. Ron DeSantis said recently, “This idea that unless you’re an axe murderer you should be allowed to stay, that is not consistent with our laws, and it’s also not good policy.”
But presidents don’t win elections simply by energizing their most ardent ideological supporters. Trump won because he brought new voters to his coalition, notably Latinos who were concerned about the cost of living. Trump’s approval erosion among this particular group of voters suggests that many people gave Trump a chance to prove he would ease inflation and bring more order to an immigration system that he convinced them was erratic under Democrats. Instead, in electing Trump they chose someone who would allow the pendulum to swing too far the other way, creating more chaos and, above all, unnecessary suffering.
Republicans are starting to acknowledge this reality. Last week, a group of conservative Florida sheriffs criticized mass deportations of undocumented migrants who haven’t committed crimes. The White House has told U.S. House Republicans to avoid mentioning mass deportations ahead of the midterms and focus only on deportations of violent criminals, the Washington Post reported.
“This is not what we voted for,” Miami Republican state Sen. Ileana Garcia, co-founder of Latinas for Trump, said in a statement last June in which she called the administration’s mass-deportation campaign “inhumane.”
Understandably, her words were met with derision by critics: This is exactly what she and others voted for. How can we forget Trump accusing undocumented immigrants of invading the U.S. during the presidential campaign, or standing on the debate stage and accusing Haitians in Ohio of eating people’s pets? What did people assume “mass deportations” would entail?
Perhaps what Garcia and millions of others thought they voted for was a sense of security and order — with the details arranged later. We’re over a year into Trump’s second term and Miami is witnessing, in real time, that Trump has given us exactly the opposite.
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