Advocates say information about arrested immigrants “disappears” when they’re booked into Orange County jail — and are calling for more transparency so their families can find them.
The problem stems from an increasingly common practice in an era of heightened immigration enforcement: When people are arrested by state and local law enforcement on any charge, including traffic tickets, and authorities find evidence of a federal “detainer” indicating the arrestee is undocumented, they’re taken swiftly to jail.
Once the local charge is settled, that person becomes a federal inmate. And in Orange County, that has meant their name disappears from the local database of people held there – leaving attorneys unaware where their client is being held and families unsure how to find loved ones.
“Immigrants are disappearing from the County jail,” said Ericka Gomez-Tejeda, the organizing director for Hope Community Center. “The moment that person bonds out, they disappear from that jail system and there is no way of knowing if they’re still there, if they’ve been sent to Krome, if they’ve been sent to Texas or they’ve been sent to New Mexico.”
Orange County officials have told the Orlando Sentinel they’re prohibited by agreements with federal authorities from disclosing any information about people they hold on federal detainers. But the Sentinel has been able to obtain significantly more information about federal detainees in jail in Lake, Osceola, and Seminole Counties than Orange is providing.
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Orlando, introduced a bill Wednesday aiming to require authorities to publicly report the names of people who are in federal custody, as well as the circumstances of their arrest, where they’re being held and if they’ve been deported. Frost’s bill aims not just at county jails but also at federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which doesn’t consistently provide information about its detainees.
It’s unclear the appetite for such regulations in Washington, where Republicans control the House and Senate with narrow margins.
“This bill is a step toward pulling back the curtain on our immigration detention system,” Frost said. “The purpose of it is to give tools to the community, to advocates and organizers, and more importantly, families to know what is going on with their loved ones.”
He also called on Orange County to end its Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to house detainees from around the state at the county jail. Orange is one of a handful of counties with such a deal, which dates back to the 1980s, a county official has said.
With increased immigration enforcement in recent months – already surpassing 2024’s totals by early May 2025 – a county official told state leaders recently he feared the jail could run out of capacity.
Frost said he hadn’t spoken to the county about the agreement, but intended to.
“We do want to see the county revoke the IGSA agreement … which is the reason why we’re seeing this influx of people being held at 33rd from across the state on ICE detainers,” he said, referring to the address of the Orange County Jail at 2450 33rd Street.
Frost’s announcement came the day after Immigrants Are Welcome Here — a coalition of immigrant rights, labor and social justice groups — called on the Orange County Commission to pull out of its ICE agreements.
Prominent local immigrant rights activist Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet, executive director of the Hope CommUnity Center, said time was of the essence.
“Even as the county needs time to act, our communities do not have the time to wait,” Sousa-Lazaballet said. “Every day that this is not answered is a family destroyed, is a child without a mother. This is about real people.”
Melissa López Marantes, an immigration attorney and the executive director of the Orlando Center for Justice, said some detainees are not showing up in ICE records like they are supposed to. She and others are advising detainees and their families to not post bail before seeking advice from immigration attorneys, because that could trigger their movement to a different facility, where information would be harder to come by and they would be at higher risk of deportation.
“[We are] upholding the protections that already exist under the law, the protection that should be there for every individual, whether you are a citizen, whether you are a visitor, whatever it is,” Marantes said. “All we’re asking is for the ability to know where people are so we can defend them, so they can present their defense, and they can have their rights protected.”
Speakers also noted that there aren’t enough immigration attorneys available to the immigrant community, and many in the immigrant community cannot afford legal counsel.
Orange County Commissioners Kelly Martinez Semrad and Nicole Wilson also spoke at the conference. Both voted against Orange County signing onto Florida state-required agreements to cooperate with ICE.
Semrad said the county can update and improve its ICE-related policies to make it more transparent.
“There are other systems across the state of Florida that are being able to track people who are detained and being able to know where they end up and share the information with families,” Semrad said. “We need the public pressure to be able to make this come back to the county commission to reconsider the past vote.”
rygillespie@orlandosentinel.com, smorgan@orlandosentinel.com