'Over our ceiling': Orange County jail flooded with ICE detainees

The number of ICE detainees booked into the Orange County Jail without any local criminal charges has surged more than fourfold in recent months, massively straining facility staff and creating unsafe conditions, county officials say.

Many of those inmates have been there multiple times, shuffling out and back every three days in order to satisfy a technical requirement for how long they may be held. Once that happens, some inmates virtually disappear into the system and can’t easily be found.

The skyrocketing number of detentions contributed to rumors this month of an escalation in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Orlando, leading Democratic congressmen Darren Soto and Maxwell Frost to issue legal guidance and advocacy groups receiving ten times the number of calls for help from families of detainees.

In October, the Orange County Jail had a daily average of 30 immigration-only detainees, but the figure has surged to more than 140 per day in January. Over the past two weeks, the average spiked to 162 per day. On Thursday, county Public Safety Director Danny Banks said 182 people were housed in the jail solely on immigration charges.

“We’re already at the top of the chimney – we’re over our ceiling,” Banks said. “I know Orange County jail can no longer continue to be their dumping port for all of their regional arrests.”

Federal authorities have also capitalized on a loophole in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract with Orange County to keep detainees there longer than the agreement was meant to allow.

Under the deal, ICE can house its detainees at the jail for up to 72 hours after any local charges are settled. If they don’t move them before then, those inmates are to be released.

But for months, in a practice first disclosed by the Orlando Sentinel, ICE has picked up its detainees at the jail and brought them back hours later, restarting the 72-hour clock. Now, that practice appears to be one of the primary strains on the jail.

Of the 182 ICE-only inmates at the jail on Thursday morning, 63%, or 115 of them, had been booked more than once, Banks said.

“I know of one example who was with us six times,” he said. “They are coming and getting them at 72 hours, and then within a day or so, they’re bringing that same inmate back to us for another 72-hour stint.”

He said the county attorney is reviewing whether such a maneuver is legal and if Orange could take action to stop it. But state law requires local officials to give their “best effort” to support immigration enforcement.

Josephine Arroyo, an Orlando immigration attorney, said she’s been unable to find some of her clients who had been booked at the jail, due to some of them being rebooked under a different identification number.

Arroyo said she and her husband attorney Phillip Arroyo have visited their clients in the portion the jail set aside for the detainees, finding “it’s a sea of brown, Latino men.”

“This past Sunday, my office had to tell your guards the exact location of our client because your system showed she was not there,” Arroyo told commissioners this week. “And guess what? She was in BRC-3-Delta,” she said, describing the client’s cell number.

Nobody interviewed by the Sentinel knows where inmates are taken when they’re briefly removed from the jail. ICE isn’t required to tell the jail that, nor where someone was originally arrested, Banks said. He surmised that many in the jail were likely arrested outside of the county, or possibly even the state.

“We don’t really know where they’re taking them, they sit somewhere for like eight hours, and then they bring them back,” Arroyo said.

It is not clear why federal authorities don’t simply transport immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz or similar facilities. Nor is it known whether a new ICE processing center being considered for a warehouse in east Orlando might rectify the problem. ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.

After President Donald Trump took office for his second term and began ramping up his mass deportation agenda, Banks said the county set aside two areas of the jail to house those with immigration-only violations: a space for 65 men and a space for 65 women, or a maximum of 130 beds. The jail’s total capacity is roughly 4,000.

But if more men – as is typical – are booked than women, it creates a problem. If the jail has 80 men and 20 women, for example, it needs to find more space for the 15 men, he said.

“We’re completely tapped out at that space, and because their numbers keep increasing, it’s forcing us to constantly move our inmates around to accommodate the federal civil-only inmates,” he said.

Because of the rush of federal inmates, Banks said corrections officers are overworked and overtime costs are way up in order to provide adequate security for inmates.

The surge comes after the jail has struggled to fill open positions and had a 25% vacancy rate early last year. Since then, starting pay has been boosted nearly $4 per hour in a new union contract, which Banks said at the time was the highest in the area at $27.42 per hour.

The feds reimburse Orange County government $88 per day to house a federal inmate, even though the county says it costs $180 per day per person to do so. Banks and county leaders have been in negotiations with the U.S. Marshal’s Service to increase that reimbursement, but so far haven’t struck a deal.

Among the legal issues facing Orange County is the state law which requires cities and counties to provide their “best efforts” to assist ICE. Last year, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier threatened Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and the Board of County Commisisoners with removal from their posts if they didn’t sign onto an agreement allowing their corrections officers to transport inmates on behalf of authorities.

Orange County Commissioner Kelly Semrad said the county should take legal action and file a lawsuit so a judge can formally define what counts as their “best efforts.”

“It’s been time for legal action,” she said. “There’s no harm and no foul to go after a declaratory action judgment to ask a judge to define it for us.”

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