Florida moving fast to pass DeSantis-backed bill targeting illegal immigrants

The Florida legislature is taking swift action to curb benefits for illegal immigrants, hoping to make the state less attractive to those who have slipped across the southern border. Republican state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia’s proposal, SB 1718, mirrors a set of policy recommendations put forward by Gov. Ron DeSantis in February. The bill would make Florida dramatically less appealing to immigrants who have come across the southern border illegally and settled in the state.

“Why does anybody want to actually go through the process of actually becoming legal when all of these benefits are out there, which are, I would argue, incentives for people to come over illegally?” Ingoglia said during the legislation’s markup. “We are compassionate here in the United States, but that compassion has created incentives to foster more illegal immigration,” Ingoglia said.

The bill would affect immigrants who walk across the border and evade law enforcement and therefore have no record of arrest or being granted parole to be in the U.S. For example, a U.S. citizen driver pulled over in Florida and found to be transporting multiple noncitizens from the border to within Florida would face criminal charges.

With supermajorities in the House and Senate, the bill will now head to the Senate floor. If passed, it will head back to the House for a final vote. The immigration legislation’s passage would be a major achievement for DeSantis, who has billed the proposal as the nation’s strongest crackdown on illegal immigration any state has ever undertaken.

The bill would unearth a “legal barrier” rather than a physical barrier, according to James Massa, CEO of NumbersUSA, a right-leaning immigration think tank in Washington. The immigration strategy has already drawn the ire of the Left, with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in March calling Ingoglia’s legislation “inhumane and outrageous.”

Under the legislation, businesses and employees that hire anyone without legal status or fake documents would be susceptible to a sliding scale of financial penalties and jail time, with the termination of a business’s license as the final strike if found to hire illegal immigrants repeatedly. Starting July, private sector businesses with 25 or more employees would be required to run applicants through a federally run program to verify a person’s authorization to work in the U.S.

The bill would also make $22 million available for the state to transport illegal immigrants in Florida to other states. Initially, the bill was reported as containing $12 million, but Ingoglia clarified before the committee Tuesday that it included $10 million for 2023 and $12 million next year, for a total of $22 million toward the Unauthorized Alien Transport Program.

Florida made national headlines last summer when it chartered a plane and flew approximately 50 immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The flight fell under the state’s Unauthorized Alien Transport Program and was the kind of deterrence that DeSantis supported more of in the future.

Under the legislation, out-of-state driver’s licenses, including those issued to 1 million illegal immigrants in California, would be invalid in the eyes of Florida police. Florida local governments would be barred from facilitating local IDs to those here unlawfully. Registered voters would also have to check a box affirming they are U.S. citizens.

The bill has drawn criticism from some, including nurse practitioner and advocate Kevin Cho, who posted an informal petition on Twitter that listed dozens of public health workers who did not support the proposal to collect immigration information in hospital settings. Ingoglia defended the hospital bit as meant to “get a handle on how much we are spending on illegal immigrants in our emergency rooms” because hospitals at present do not have a way to know how much money is directed toward this population.

If passed, the bill would be a major achievement for DeSantis, who is expected to announce his 2024 presidential run later this month.