Florida Freeway Patrol and different native police companies all through the Sunshine State are efficiently making use of immigration regulation enforcement to routine visitors stops. And there lies the controversy. To the horror of leftist moneyed organizations and their big-box media allies, unlawful aliens who’ve dedicated no “violent” crimes are being rounded up as they go about their day-to-day affairs. However amid high-profile instances of street carnage involving illegals, it can show a tough promote to persuade People that that is the civil rights trauma of our time.
In Could, a Fox Information reporter rode together with Florida Freeway Patrol (FHP) officers as they carried out “Operation 9.” “After three days, 249 unlawful [aliens] had been captured, processed and handed over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the community reported Could 29.
‘Ghosts’ on the Florida Blacktop
There’s a very spooky facet to those operations. The shadow neighborhood – work, housing, and so on. – unlawful aliens inhabit contained in the US is so deeply submerged that taking to the nation’s roads is among the only a few methods they ever get on the radar.
These individuals are “ghosts,” Lt. Ramin Sulaiman, assistant commander of the FHP Immigration Enforcement Part, informed Fox Information. “We now have no information for them, no accountability of who they’re.”
Florida regulation enforcement officers have nabbed over 10,000 illegals for the reason that effort – dubbed the 287 (g) program in a nod to the federal settlement that authorizes native police to work with federal brokers to assist implement US immigration regulation – was renewed in early 2025. Cue the “American Motor Automobile Gestapo” narrative from the political left and an aligned dominant media edifice.
Hispanics usually tend to be arrested for driving within the Sunshine State and not using a legitimate license than whites, the ACLU breathlessly exclaims. The one logical clarification: systemic racism. By no means thoughts that an estimated 80% of unlawful aliens in Florida are of Hispanic descent.
“The truth that officers selected to arrest Hispanic drivers for license violations at almost double the speed of different drivers, regardless of all drivers being equally topic to arrest for this offense, demonstrates differential enforcement that can’t be defined by authorized necessities and suggests bias in arrest decision-making,” an April 23 ACLU report duly cited by NPR, aka the media outlet previously funded by US taxpayers, states.
The Miami Herald drew the open scorn of the Trump administration with its makes an attempt at loaded “journalism” on the topic. “Caught within the Crackdown” is the lurid headline to the paper’s shiny March 3 long-form characteristic article.
An precise have a look at how these visitors interactions work is much extra informative. In July 2025, Washington Examiner reporter Anna Giaritelli went on a ride-along with the Florida Freeway Patrol. She described how one automobile managed to draw police consideration.
“The officer had noticed that the dump truck’s again doorways have been open and swinging backwards and forwards whereas the truck was happening the street,” Giaritelli detailed.
“Think about us proper now driving in a pickup truck, and that factor swings open,” Officer Kingery mentioned. “It’s going to hit the automotive proper within the driver compartment. In order that’s tremendous, tremendous harmful, and that’s why he stopped them.”
That is the racial “discrimination” in motion that the ACLU and Miami Herald so vociferously decry.
“The driving force possessed solely a Florida learner’s allow, which requires a licensed driver over the age of 21 to oversee. On this case, the passenger was a girl with a learner’s allow. The dump truck additionally had a damaged brake gentle,” Giaritelli continued.
The College Sociology Division Involves the Protection
Such is the routine actuality behind the progressive outrage. Tragically, unlawful aliens behind the wheel too usually result in the deaths of People. Final August 12, unlawful alien Harjinder Singh, who had been issued a business driver’s license within the state of California, made a wildly unlawful U-turn along with his large rig on a Florida street. Three US residents in one other automobile died in a ensuing crash.
The incident sparked nationwide outrage that has not abated. That is what the pro-illegal immigration progressive narrative now finds itself up towards. Sadly, the cultural shift has been a very long time coming.
On December 29, 2018, Pierce Corcoran, a 22-year-old American with a vivid future forward of him, was killed in Knoxville, Tennessee, when an unlawful alien in one other automobile veered into his lane and crashed into him. The native big-box media newspaper dutifully supplied house to platform the totally callous regard credentialed pro-illegal immigration advocates have for harmless residents when the standing of unlawful aliens is threatened.
Meghan Conley, a College of Tennessee sociology professor who co-founded a gaggle known as Allies of Knoxville’s Immigrant Neighbors, authored an op-ed revealed within the Knoxville Information Sentinel urging Tennesseans to not “politicize the deaths of residents by non-citizens.”
“As a neighborhood, I hope that we might mourn the lack of Corcoran with out concurrently rejecting the civil and human rights of all individuals, no matter their nation of origin and immigration standing,” Conley wrote.
Conley on the time was a strident opponent of a 287 (g) program for native law enforcement officials in Tennessee. In 2019, a mere months after Corcoran’s demise, she sued the Knox County Sheriff’s Workplace over its participation. On the time, Knox County was one in every of solely two counties within the state participating in this system. Pierce Corcoran may nonetheless be alive right now if 287 (g) native regulation enforcement had been working way more vigorously in 2018. He could be turning 30 on August 4.
What number of Floridians stay alive as a result of some 10,000 unlicensed unlawful aliens are now not barreling down the state’s highways and aspect roads?












