ST PETERSBURG — A crowd of around 75 people gathered here on Saturday to strategize ways to persuade the police chiefs of Tampa and St. Petersburg to void partnership agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that they entered into earlier this year.
Legislation signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis requires that sheriffs or chief correctional officers operating a county detention facility must enter into a 287(g) agreement with ICE. That means that every county sheriff in the state needed to sign such an agreement this year, which they all have.
There is no requirement for municipalities to do the same, yet hundreds of police departments throughout the state have done so anyway. In the cases of Tampa and St. Petersburg, two of the largest cities in the state, those agreements were reached quietly earlier this year, without fanfare…