By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Protesters in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and many other U.S. cities have flooded streets, emptied shops and raised awareness that most immigrants are hard workers and good neighbors.
They’re parents of kids like Liam Conjeo Ramos, the 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat who was seized along with his father and shipped from their home in a Minneapolis suburb to a Texas detention camp. After 10 days a federal judge freed them, but now immigration officials are challenging the Ecuadorian family’s asylum claim and they’re reportedly in hiding.
Liam’s story evokes the 26-year-old saga of Elian Gonzalez, the 5-year-old boy rescued from the waters off Fort Lauderdale after a boat wreck took the lives of his mother and 10 other Cuban asylum seekers. That family separation provoked an international incident and a thunderous response in Miami that continued long after then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno had Elian returned to his father in Cuba.
And yet today’s ongoing national deportation purge of immigrants that has separated untold numbers of Hispanic families has inspired relatively little pushback from South Florida, one of the most diverse and Hispanic regions in North America.
Why?
Insiders say several factors more basic than MAGA politics, including fear, indifference to the suffering of others, and division among ethnic groups, have tamped down resistance in Florida to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.
It’s lost on no one that the vast majority of targets for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are people of color. The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal five months ago to order an immediate end to racial profiling encouraged more of the same.
In Florida, all 67 counties have signed agreements for sheriffs to work with ICE.The Miami City Commission caved to pressure from Gov. Ron DeSantis and pledged police cooperation, while some other Miami-Dade municipalities refused to do so.
DeSantis cheered his “Operation Tidal Wave” for making almost 10,000 “illegal alien” arrests during the second half of 2025. About 84 percent came from nations with Hispanic majorities.
An estimated 356,000 residents of Miami-Dade and Monroe counties lacked official approval to live there as of 2023, according to the nonprofit Washington, D.C. think tank Migration Policy Institute, and 97 percent came from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America combined.
Immigrants, both with and without legal status, fill the lowest ranks of Florida’s mainstay industries: agriculture, construction, hospitality and healthcare. Hispanic and Caribbean ethnic groups, notably Cubans, Venezuelans and Haitians, have expanded their political clout over generations.
So it’s surprising that the national ICE resistance movement seems anemic in South Florida compared to far less diverse places. Chaotic raids anywhere on homes, schools and church parking lots trigger, in those places, massive demonstrations and prime-time media coverage.
And yet the weekend after ICE agents shot ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — he was the second U.S. citizen agents killed there in January — and ignited enormous, widespread protests, the biggest Florida turnout was upwards of 1,000 attendees at a rally near an Orlando mall, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Just a few dozen protesters gathered Jan. 30 at the Torch of Friendship on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami.
‘NOT JUST FEAR, TERROR’
“For a city full of immigrants, it’s sad that Miami doesn’t show up to protest ICE,” an anonymous poster wrote on Reddit. The comment got at least 646 approving clicks.
Immigrant advocates explained to Florida Bulldog why people don’t attach their names to even innocuous statements such as the Reddit poster’s, let alone to criticizing ICE leadership’s obvious disdain for due process and human rights.
“There’s a lot of fear – not just fear, terror,” said Luis Guerra, a Coral Springs immigration lawyer. “Immigrants are feeling like the Jews in Germany” in the 1930s.
“I’m seeing a lot of people, more people than in my 20 years of practice, they just take a flight and leave,” he said. The U.S. is offering financial assistance and other incentives to leave.
Pre-Trump immigration court practice was to go easy on people who may have overstayed their visas or crossed a border illegally many years ago but who’ve followed the rules and tried to adjust their status ever since, Guerra said. “As long as they had a path to legalize, they were pretty much safe. But now nobody’s safe.”
Immigration judges had discretion to grant bonds to asylum-seekers who aren’t dangerous or flight risks. The judges were stripped of that authority in September, Guerra said.
Now “they can’t even entertain a bond” and they must stand aside while deportation plays out.
Guerra acknowledges the U.S. immigration system is broken – he just doesn’t see the Trump administration doing anything to fix it. “It’s always hard to get immigration reform, we’ve been fighting for many years.” he said. “There’s a lot of laws they need to change, but instead of getting closer to immigration reform, we’re getting farther away.”
After 35-plus years as a Miami immigration lawyer, Juan Carlos Gomez has a theory about why Hispanic immigrants who have the wealth and power to stand up for less fortunate Hispanic newcomers stay seated.
He speculates about self-interest and greed, a sense of personal entitlement and exceptionalism, and a delusionally optimistic view of history and politics.
“I attribute it to a heartbreaking sort of cowardliness of people who are afraid to speak up,” Gomez said. When the topic is ICE excesses, “I’ve had people come to me and say they voted for this but they didn’t vote for this to happen to their relatives, they voted for it to happen to the others.”
A CALL FOR UNITY
Empathy often goes missing. “A lot of Hispanics are very worried about what will other people say. That’s a cultural thing,” Guerra said.
“They think what will my neighbor, my friend, or my employer think if they see me on camera go out and protest,” he said. “They think more about themselves than what is going on with other people.”
“Cubans in South Florida have political clout, Dominicans in New York … They’re all doing their things, looking out for their own communities,” he said.
“Immigrants are not united and that’s a big problem,” he said. “If we were united, we’d have such strength.” Guerra emigrated to the United States from Peru 37 years ago.
Immigration enforcers work strategically to meet deportation quotas, knowledgeable observers say. For example, although ICE has started targeting Cubans despite their long-protected status, rounding up and deporting Miami Cubans doesn’t appear to be a priority, according to The New York Times.
“They have not done heavy-handed enforcement in Miami-Dade County because [Republican U.S. Rep. Maria] Salazar wants to get reelected,” said Greg Schell, the West Palm Beach-based deputy director of Southern Migrant Legal Services. “She has gone out of her way to distance herself from the ICE atrocities.”
“The enforcement is against Mexicans and Guatemalans because who cares about them?” Schell said. “It’s not against Cubans.” Salazar represents District 27, which includes wealthy coastal Miami-Dade County and is considered competitive in this year’s midterm elections.
Some pin their hopes on politics, others on judges and the rule of law. South Florida high school students have been speaking out.
On Feb. 7 a total of 1,000 students walked out of classes at Pembroke Pines Charter High School and West Broward High School to protest ICE operations.
“We’re not going to stand for ICE. We will not let them into our schools, into our homes, and allow them to hurt our friends and family,” charter student Nikhil Karri told CBS News Miami.
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