How Florida Systematized Its Cooperation With ICE

Gaming control commissions and departments of lottery services often conjure images of slot machines, casinos and sports betting.

In Florida, they are part of a patchwork system of departments and local agencies now working with the Trump administration to target undocumented immigrants across the state.

Those partnerships illustrate how expansive the Trump administration wants to be in growing its ranks of immigration enforcement. More than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have signed 287(g) agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They include wildlife and fishery departments, attorneys general offices, police departments and university public safety departments.

These partnerships allow them to take actions, such as identifying and detaining who they suspect to be undocumented immigrants, effectively serving as what ICE has called “force multiplier[s].”

“They’re not leaving any stone unturned here,” Adriel Orozco, a senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit legal, research and advocacy organization, told NOTUS. “[They are] really trying to get whatever sort of law enforcement-focused components of other departments and agencies to support immigration enforcement.”

It’s a matter of pride for the Trump administration.

“287(g) is critical to having the enforcement we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” a spokesperson for ICE said in a statement to NOTUS. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement work with us including 40,000 arrests in Florida.”

Florida has more 287(g) agreements than any other state, according to the latest publicly available data compiled by ICE posted on Feb. 13. Its detainment rates are some of the highest.

The Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability states that the purpose of the state’s Department of the Lottery is to “operate the state lottery in order to maximize revenues in a manner consistent with the dignity of the state and the welfare of its citizens.” The intention is to generate money from the lottery to support public education.

As of April 2025, when the department signed a memorandum of agreement with ICE, it added a mission: to help ICE detain undocumented immigrants across the state. As of Feb. 17, the department has recorded 14 “encounters” with undocumented immigrants in the Florida “Suspected Unauthorized Aliens Encounters” dashboard.

The Department of the Lottery did not respond to a request for comment.

Florida Rep. Randy Fine, who as a state senator helped pass Florida’s legislation that mandates that county sheriffs with jails participate in 287(g) partnerships, told NOTUS that “while you wouldn’t expect the Department of Lottery to detain someone,” the point of the partnerships is that “when you come across illegal immigrants, you should be turning them over to ICE.”

“There’s nothing more important than securing our country from foreign invaders,” Fine said when asked if the partnerships were consistent with the department’s mission statements.

The Florida Gaming Control Commission did not respond to NOTUS’ inquiries about how immigration enforcement fit into its mission of “exercising all regulatory and executive powers of the state with respect to gambling.” The state dashboard doesn’t record any “encounters” between the commission and undocumented immigrants.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed these types of partnerships, and touted the wide-ranging involvement across the state. In a January press conference, he said more than 63% of immigration detainments in Florida were due to the state’s 287(g) agreements.

“We also have had people in more non-law enforcement agencies, like the Department of Lottery — they have 287(g) agreements,” DeSantis said. “I mean, it’s pretty incredible that we’ve really gone that extensive and that deep.”

Molly Best, press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement to NOTUS that any Florida agency with “a signed 287(g) agreement with our federal partners ensures that such individuals will be turned over to ICE and subject to deportation.”

“Any Florida agency with a law enforcement arm, such as the Florida Gaming Commission and the Florida Lottery, comes into contact with individuals during their normal duties who may be illegally in the country,” Best said.

She did not answer NOTUS’ questions about the amount of federal funds received by the state and local agencies as part of the partnerships, or the metrics by which the partnerships are evaluated.

DeSantis has fully backed the state Legislature’s push to make partnerships with ICE mandatory for county law enforcement agencies that operate jails in Florida. It is not mandatory for other agencies to enter into these agreements.

The highest number of arrests in the state has been a result of an ICE partnership with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, with more than 8,819 arrests made through a 287(g) partnership since August 2025, according to data published by the state of Florida.

Most Florida state and local agencies in 287(g) agreements, per the data, have had no recorded “encounters” with undocumented immigrants, according to the state database. But the agencies could still be sharing information with ICE, and could still have trained officers.

Louisiana Republican Rep. Clay Higgins, chair of the House Oversight subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement, told NOTUS that the number of arrests an agency or department records could be an undercount of its involvement with ICE because ICE might ultimately make the arrest but use information provided by their partners.

“It’s mostly intel and taskforce type operations, but the warrant is from ICE, so the arrest can be from ICE, so you may see zero arrests by, say, the local sheriff’s office and you’re wondering, ‘well what about this agreement?’ But the arrest[s], just by design, are going to be accredited to ICE,” Higgins said.

Critics of the 287(g) agreements said these partnerships are a powerful, if lower profile, tool in the Trump administration’s arsenal to quickly accomplish its immigration agenda. In other parts of the country, masked federal immigration agents have been dispatched in the thousands to look for and detain undocumented immigrants.

But Thomas Kennedy, a policy consultant with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, told NOTUS that Florida is an example of how states have systemized immigration enforcement under the Trump administration by embedding immigration enforcement into more parts of daily life.

“Instead of having these highly publicized raids and operations that are terrible, here it’s just constant,” Kennedy said. “It’s all the time. They’re churning the numbers, they’re turning police into show me your paper patrols. It’s normalizing a sense of authoritarianism and pervasiveness of immigration enforcement.”

In Washington, these developments have been welcomed by Republicans, who played a key role in expanding the number of 287(g) partnerships through the passage of their reconciliation package last summer. The legislation allocated additional money for training, salary, benefits and “monetary performance awards” for officers in agencies registered under an agreement.

House Democrats whom NOTUS spoke to expressed concern over the partnerships, and what it might mean for state and local agencies relationships’ with community members.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, told NOTUS that the partnerships are worrying because they are “pulling law enforcement officers off their normal responsibilities.”

“Often in communities, where it’s not like they have hundreds of law enforcement officers, they’re pulling them off their normal responsibilities and thinning out their ability to be able to go after crime in their own communities and also to do things like community policing,” Schultz said. “It’s not necessary or helpful.”