A Florida city welcomed President Donald Trump to the state Tuesday by making life harder for his ICE goons.
Hours before Trump touched down at Florida’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” city commissioners in Key West voted 6-1 in favor of scrapping an agreement requiring local police to coordinate with federal immigration officials.
The vote “basically invalidated the city’s most recent agreement with ICE,” which was reached in March, reported Local 10.
“People who are seeking political asylum are important members of our community,” Commissioner Samuel Kaufman said, according to WLRN. “We have thousands of them here, by the way. And they deserve the respect that anybody else does.”
Florida’s southernmost city, less than 100 miles from the Cuban coast, is also among its most progressive. Commissioner Donald Lee said that the city’s police chief, Sean Brandenburg, signed the deal to cooperate with ICE because he had a proverbial “gun” to his head from both federal and state officials. The Florida city of Fort Myers has refused to sign an agreement, and its leaders have been threatened with removal from office.
Key West residents went into uproar last month when a beloved local hairstylist, who a city cop stopped as he rode his e-bike to work, was placed in ICE custody and detained for weeks.
Lee Stinton, a Northern Ireland national, holds an employment authorization card and has applied for a green card, according to Keys Weekly. Still, his traffic infraction reportedly warranted the involvement of ICE agents, who allegedly harassed him and tossed him in a detention center in Miami, where a Canadian citizen, 49, and a Cuban national, 75, died in custody within the last week.
Stinton’s partner, DeVaun Davis, said he was going through the proper processes to become a U.S. citizen one day.
“Lee was going through all the right processes and filing all the documentation,” he told Keys Weekly. “He had a VAWA protection and an employment authorization card. I had just taken him to Miami for an immigration hearing in the past few months. Things were proceeding.”
Davis, who is American, said ICE agents chillingly suggested to his partner that they might arrest him, too.
“The ICE agent that got involved in his traffic stop—and I’m still not sure how that happened, whether he was riding with the police officer or showed up separately—saw the photo of the two of us on Lee’s phone’s lock screen, and assumed I was Haitian,” Davis said. “He asked Lee, ‘Is that your boyfriend? We’ll go find him as well and get two for one.’”
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis often touts how many Florida law enforcement agencies—more than any other state—signed an agreement to cooperate with ICE and hand over undocumented detainees, no matter their alleged crime. DeSantis personally welcomed Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday morning to the state’s newest detention center, which is situated within the often muggy and miserable Everglades.
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