A caravan of immigrants is making a trek across Florida and coming to the Florida Capitol as this year’s legislative session winds down to a close.
A caravan organized by the We Are Florida! campaign, consisting of immigrant workers, voters and community leaders will be heading to Tallahassee to make sure bills they see as unfriendly to immigrants are not only dead, but also buried.
Members of the campaign plan to hold a wake and a funeral for the bills that were killed off during this year’s session.
The caravan is set to depart from Miami Tuesday and will make several stops across the state throughout the week. The caravan will make stops in Bonita Springs, Tampa, Apopka, picking up new members to add to the caravan along the way.
The group will make its final stop in Tallahassee Thursday morning.
This year the Florida Legislature saw a slew of immigrant-focused legislation. One of the primary proposals would have penalized Florida’s “sanctuary cities” for not complying with federal immigration laws.
HB 675, sponsored by Rep. Larry Metz, R-Yalaha, would have punish sanctuary cities or counties which didn’t cooperate with federal immigration laws. Local law enforcement officers would be required to detain illegal immigrants for the federal government, a provision federal courts say violates the 10th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Counties not cooperating with the laws would have faced civil actions from the attorney general. Those citations could have cost counties a pretty penny -- to the tune of up to $5,000 per day.
The bill passed through the Florida House, but didn’t fare as well in the Florida Senate.
That bill was axed by Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, who said he wouldn’t hear the Senate companion bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning the bill was effectively dead for the remainder of the session.
Another bill the caravan is seeking to ensure is dead and gone is HB 563, sponsored by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fort Walton Beach, would have cracked down on the amount of cash assistance immigrant families could qualify for, a worrying prospect for immigrant families.
To be eligible for the Temporary Cash Assistance program, a family’s income must be less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level. When proposing the bill, Gaetz explained if someone in a household is an undocumented immigrant, that person’s earnings don’t count in determining eligibility, giving the family an advantage over a family which earns the same amount but reports all of its income.
That bill was also killed off by Sen. Diaz de la Portilla when he refused to schedule it on the committee calendar.
“Florida’s Republican-led legislature gave into the Trump-effect currently sweeping the nation, and proposed a total of nine bills that would criminalize immigrant communities and continuing separating families,” wrote We Are Florida! in a press release.
“Just like we promised, we will be present until the last minute of the legislative session to make sure the bills are dead and that our message is heard loud and clear: we will not forget, and will not allow anymore anti-immigrant policies or politics in Florida,” said Elizabeth Garcia, caravanner from Hope Community Center.
After the group comes to Tallahassee, they’ll move onto the general elections, organizing their communities to head to the polls and remember what happened on election day.
“During this session we demonstrated that immigrants in Florida work to sustain Florida’s economy and that we count in our communities. Now, we are getting ready to show that we also vote,” said Francesca Menes, Policy Director for the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “This caravan is the beginning of our civic engagement efforts in which several pro-immigrant rights groups will hit the road to talk to immigrant voters in our communities and remind them about the importance of their vote in November so we don’t have to continue fighting bad anti-immigrant laws every year.”
