At a recent mayoral debate hosted by the St. Petersburg NAACP, Mayor Ken Welch was asked whether he would direct Police Chief Anthony Holloway to end the department’s 287(g) partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“It was an order from the governor,” Welch replied. “It was not a choice at the local level whether to comply with that or not.”
That answer was not merely an inaccurate description of what the law expressly says. It revealed something deeper about how political power works: It teaches us to describe our surrender as inevitable.
The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls this totalism. Totalism insists that its power is ultimate, its demands are unavoidable, and no genuine alternative can be imagined.
Florida Statute §908.104 requires state and local law-enforcement agencies to use “best efforts to support the enforcement of federal immigration law.” But §908.104 never expressly commands municipal police departments to sign a 287(g) agreement. It does not even mention 287(g).
When the Legislature wanted to mandate a 287(g) agreement, it knew how to say so. Section 908.11 specifically requires “the sheriff or the chief correctional officer operating a county detention facility” to enter one. The St. Petersburg Police Department is not a sheriff’s office and does not operate the Pinellas County Jail.
The St. Petersburg Departments has said that Chief Holloway signed the agreement on Feb. 25, 2025, “as required by 908.104.” Yet when asked what part of that statute specifically makes a 287(g) agreement mandatory, the department’s legal adviser declined to identify any language.
An honest statement would be: Florida law contains a broad “best efforts” requirement, and we decided that signing 287(g) was the least risky way to satisfy it.
That is very different from saying, “We had no choice.”
Mayor Welch has said that St. Petersburg police are not conducting immigration arrests. Yet state data lists SPPD as the contacting agency in 26 immigration-related encounters. More fundamentally, St. Petersburg must consider what this partnership does to the relationship between police and the people they are supposed to protect. Police cannot keep a community safe when members of that community are afraid to call them.
My job as a pastor is to offer prophetic imagination. It begins with lament: refusing to normalize the grief of children separated from parents, workers taken from communities, and families living in terror of a knock at the door. Lament is not passive sadness. It is the public declaration that what is happening is neither normal nor acceptable. It asks why our own city is participating in doing harm.
Prophetic imagination does not pretend resistance is free. Ending the agreement could provoke threats or litigation from the state. It might require St. Petersburg to defend its reading of the law in court. But leadership is not the elimination of all institutional risk. Leadership is the willingness to accept risk when human dignity and public trust are at stake.
Mayor Welch should begin by correcting his statement. He should acknowledge that §908.104 contains a broad and disputed “best efforts” obligation — not an explicit command that every municipal police department sign a 287(g) agreement. Then Mayor Welch and Chief Holloway should end St. Petersburg’s participation in 287(g) and be prepared to defend that decision.
Prophetic imagination is a contest between two visions. One insists that the present arrangement is permanent and that resistance is futile. The other announces that another way is possible — a community organized not around fear, coercion and disposable people, but around dignity, courage and shared safety.
St. Petersburg must decide which imagination will govern us.
Reverend Andy Oliver is the pastor at Allendale United Methodist Church in St. Petersburg.