Florida Roads Become a Battleground for Illegal Immigration

Florida Highway Patrol and other local police agencies throughout the Sunshine State are successfully applying immigration law enforcement to routine traffic stops. And there lies the controversy. To the horror of leftist moneyed organizations and their big-box media allies, illegal aliens who have committed no “violent” crimes are being rounded up as they go about their day-to-day affairs. But amid high-profile cases of road carnage involving illegals, it will prove a hard sell to convince Americans that this is the civil rights trauma of our time.

In May, a Fox News reporter rode along with Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) officers as they conducted “Operation 9.” “After three days, 249 illegal [aliens] had been captured, processed and handed over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the network reported May 29.

‘Ghosts’ on the Florida Blacktop

There’s a particularly spooky aspect to these operations. The shadow community – work, housing, etc. – illegal aliens inhabit inside the US is so deeply submerged that taking to the nation’s roads is one of the very few ways they ever get on the radar.

These people are “ghosts,” Lt. Ramin Sulaiman, assistant commander of the FHP Immigration Enforcement Section, told Fox News. “We have no records for them, no accountability of who they are.”

Florida law enforcement officers have nabbed over 10,000 illegals since the effort – dubbed the 287 (g) program in a nod to the federal agreement that authorizes local police to work with federal agents to help enforce US immigration law – was renewed in early 2025. Cue the “American Motor Vehicle Gestapo” narrative from the political left and an aligned dominant media edifice.

Hispanics are more likely to be arrested for driving in the Sunshine State without a valid license than whites, the ACLU breathlessly exclaims. The only logical explanation: systemic racism. Never mind that an estimated 80% of illegal aliens in Florida are of Hispanic descent.

“The fact that officers chose to arrest Hispanic drivers for license violations at nearly double the rate of other drivers, despite all drivers being equally subject to arrest for this offense, demonstrates differential enforcement that cannot be explained by legal requirements and suggests bias in arrest decision-making,” an April 23 ACLU report duly cited by NPR, aka the media outlet formerly funded by US taxpayers, states.

The Miami Herald drew the open scorn of the Trump administration with its attempts at loaded “journalism” on the subject. “Caught in the Crackdown” is the lurid headline to the paper’s glossy March 3 long-form feature article.

An actual look at how these traffic interactions work is far more informative. In July 2025, Washington Examiner reporter Anna Giaritelli went on a ride-along with the Florida Highway Patrol. She described how one vehicle managed to attract police attention.

“The officer had observed that the dump truck’s back doors were open and swinging back and forth while the truck was going down the road,” Giaritelli detailed.

“Imagine us right now driving in a pickup truck, and that thing swings open,” Officer Kingery said. “It’s going to hit the car right in the driver compartment. So that’s super, super dangerous, and that’s why he stopped them.”

This is the racial “discrimination” in action that the ACLU and Miami Herald so vociferously decry.

“The driver possessed only a Florida learner’s permit, which requires a licensed driver over the age of 21 to supervise. In this case, the passenger was a woman with a learner’s permit. The dump truck also had a broken brake light,” Giaritelli continued.

The University Sociology Department Comes to the Defense

Such is the routine reality behind the progressive outrage. Tragically, illegal aliens behind the wheel too often lead to the deaths of Americans. Last August 12, illegal alien Harjinder Singh, who had been issued a commercial driver’s license in the state of California, made a wildly illegal U-turn with his big rig on a Florida road. Three US citizens in another vehicle died in a resulting crash.

The incident sparked national outrage that has not abated. This is what the pro-illegal immigration progressive narrative now finds itself up against. Sadly, the cultural shift has been a long time coming.

On December 29, 2018, Pierce Corcoran, a 22-year-old American with a bright future ahead of him, was killed in Knoxville, Tennessee, when an illegal alien in another vehicle veered into his lane and crashed into him. The local big-box media newspaper dutifully provided space to platform the utterly callous regard credentialed pro-illegal immigration advocates have for innocent citizens when the status of illegal aliens is threatened.

Meghan Conley, a University of Tennessee sociology professor who co-founded a group called Allies of Knoxville’s Immigrant Neighbors, authored an op-ed published in the Knoxville News Sentinel urging Tennesseans not to “politicize the deaths of citizens by non-citizens.”

“As a community, I hope that we may mourn the loss of Corcoran without simultaneously rejecting the civil and human rights of all people, regardless of their country of origin and immigration status,” Conley wrote.

Conley at the time was a strident opponent of a 287 (g) program for local police officers in Tennessee. In 2019, a mere months after Corcoran’s death, she sued the Knox County Sheriff’s Office over its participation. At the time, Knox County was one of only two counties in the state taking part in the program. Pierce Corcoran might still be alive today if 287 (g) local law enforcement had been operating much more vigorously in 2018. He would be turning 30 on August 4.

How many Floridians remain alive because some 10,000 unlicensed illegal aliens are no longer barreling down the state’s highways and side roads?