Ron DeSantis’ Immigration Playbook Is All About Big Government

Five years ago, Ron DeSantis was laying out his border policy bona fides on his living room floor. “Build the wall!” he encouraged his young daughter as the two stacked colorful cardboard blocks in a campaign ad. At that point, DeSantis was Florida’s top candidate for the GOP gubernatorial nomination (and then-President Donald Trump’s man in the race).

These days, his tone is less playful. “You have a total disaster that’s unfolded on that border for over two years,” DeSantis said in a February press conference. “They could easily institute different policies. They could finish building the border wall.”

DeSantis has taken many notes on the Trump playbook as he prepares for a likely presidential bid. The border wall is a fitting physical analog for the governor’s approach to immigration: showy, ineffective, and needlessly cruel. Once you scratch away the rhetoric of fiscal conservatism that surrounds DeSantis’ immigration policies, you’re left with a dramatic expansion of government power and spending—the sort of thing the governor wastes no time in criticizing when the other side does it. His approach harms immigrants and Floridians alike.

In his new book, The Courage To Be Free, DeSantis blasts Republicans for being too soft on immigration during his congressional tenure, claiming that they “ignored their voters…more consistently and more flagrantly” on that issue than any other. Rep. DeSantis himself co-sponsored a batch of immigration bills that would have increased penalties for first-time illegal entry into the U.S., enhanced penalties and fines for businesses that hired undocumented workers, and directed the secretary of homeland security to build or acquire more migrant detention facilities. In 2015, he introduced a bill that would’ve barred the U.S. from accepting refugees who were from or had “habitually resided in…any country containing terrorist-controlled territory,” with few exceptions. In 2017, DeSantis defended Trump’s authority to institute his so-called Muslim ban, saying that he himself would “err on the side of caution because nobody has a right to come here.”

After he became governor, DeSantis followed through on a campaign promise to ban sanctuary cities in the state, even though Florida didn’t have a single sanctuary city. In 2020, he signed legislation expanding the use of the federal E-Verify system, which checks the immigration status of hired workers; compliance costs employers a significant number of man-hours without yielding much clear benefit. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm reported in January, DeSantis’ administration has already cracked down on businesses that failed to comply with E-Verify requirements, directing state agencies to revoke their licenses. That move—which singled out a property management company and an online portal that serves nurses—will affect native-born Floridians as well as undocumented immigrants.

That isn’t the only time DeSantis has overridden local decision making in the name of immigration enforcement. Last June, he signed legislation that would force every law enforcement agency in Florida that operates a county detention facility to enter into a so-called 287(g) partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While most Florida counties were already in the 287(g) program, communities have valid reasons not to participate—including the huge cost. Some counties have had to raise property taxes or endure budget deficits to afford 287(g) costs. What’s more, research from the Cato Institute has indicated that 287(g) agreements don’t reduce