DeSantis Orders Special Session To Enact Trump Agenda Immediately
On Monday, Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis announced he would call a special session of the Florida state legislature starting the week of January 27 so that the state can help the Trump administration enforce the nation’s immigration laws by implementing legislation that would impose additional duties on local officials, hold people accountable who are violating Florida’s anti-sanctuary policies, and eliminate any incentives for illegal immigrants to travel to Florida.
“We have worked very hard over the last four years to overcome a lot of obstacles that the federal government has put in our way across a wide variety of issues as they’ve borrowed and spent and driven costs up higher,” DeSantis began. “We’ve acted to reduce burdens on Floridians. whether it’s tax relief, toll relief, you name it, as they tried to throw roadblocks into education freedom; we worked hard and overcame it.”
He immediately turned to illegal immigration, stating, “And of course, the issue that was maybe the most significant over the last four years, the fight against illegal immigration.”
“When President Trump takes office again on January 20 we are going to see a sea change in policies, particularly with respect to the border and illegal immigration. And this is an issue that has been festering in this country for many, many decades although the first Trump administration was much more successful than others have been,” he declared. “This is the time to get it right once and for all. … We’ve been working with the transition team; I’ve been speaking with the president. We had the governors down in Mar-a-Lago. There’s going to be some ambitious policy changes that are going to be instituted on day one, particularly with respect to illegal immigration and major, major executive orders that are going to unwind the bad policies of the Biden administration.”
“We are not a state sanctuary state; we banned sanctuary cities my first year as governor,” he noted, “but we have a responsibility to be in this fight. State and local officials in Florida must help the Trump administration enforce our nations’ immigration laws, and we are going to need, in order to do that effectively… legislation to impose additional duties on local officials and provide funding for those local officials. There also need to be measures to hold people accountable who are violating our anti-sanctuary policies and then Florida needs to make sure that we don’t have any lingering incentives for people to come into our state illegally.”
“Therefore I’m going to call the legislature into special session starting the week of January 27,” he announced. “We have the next president taking office January 20. We anticipate executive orders to be issued immediately after the swearing in, in the inaugural address; we’re gonna have some time to process to make sure we’re doing what we need to do, but then we need to act and we need to act quickly. We don’t have time to waste.”
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“So it will require new legislation in Florida to ensure that the duties of both state and local officials are very clear and that those duties require them to be assisting the federal government in this regard,” he said. “We’re going to do it because I’m going to order that the state does it. Local, I think you’re going to have some different views on that and we’re not a sanctuary state, we banned sanctuary cities, but you have to have effective accountability to hold those folks accountable if they choose to go in a different direction … I have a lot of sheriffs out there that are chomping at the bit; they want to be able to help and they just need a little bit of funding so we have responsibility to provide that funding and we’re going to be calling upon the legislature to do that.”
“If you think back to the hurricanes we just had, they had looters in Pinellas county; I think it was like 45 of them that were arrested over a period of time, and I think 40 of them were in this country illegally,” he recalled. “I’m just thinking to myself, how the hell is this happening here on the head of a natural disaster? You’ve got people that come here without authorization and they go out and try to loot the place? Give me a break. Those people need to be sent back immediately.”
“If those duties are clear in law, I have the authority with respect to certain officials to suspend them from their office if they are neglecting their duties,” he asserted. “That is an authority that I have invoked when it’s been appropriate in the past. We also need to make sure that we don’t have incentives for people to come illegally… We really did probably the strongest legislation in the country in 2023, so I think Florida has really done a great job — with one lingering exception.”
“Back in 2014 the legislature enacted and the then-Governor signed legislation providing preferential tuition for illegal immigrants, in-state tuition. … You were rewarding somebody for being here illegally; that in-state tuition has been on the books now for over a decade. We’ve tried to work with the legislature to get that repealed in the past. It’s something that always seems to fall out of the bill. No more excuses on this.”
“We need to remove all incentive to come to the state of Florida illegally, and that is one of them,” he concluded.