MIAMI (AP) — As Florida law enforcement agencies work with federal immigration officials, family members and immigrants' rights advocates worry that people will disappear into county jail systems despite the state's expansive public record laws.
Miami-Dade officials said during a Thursday commission meeting that they are committed to transparency and will continue to follow state laws regarding the release of information about inmates. But one section of an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement designates all records and information created under the agreement as federal records, and some observers say ICE would have the final say on what information is made public, including whether a person is even in custody.
That could be a huge problem, said William Mann, an attorney with the Community Justice Project.
“I think the concerns that many folks have would be that they (county officials) would use this language that’s in this basic ordering agreement ... to prevent loved ones, family members, friends, advocates and journalists from accessing information,” Mann said. “Meaning that they would disappear into the Miami-Dade system if they were technically an ICE prisoner.”
Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of ICE, told the Associated Press via email that any allegations that detainees do not have due process are false.
“Further, all detainees are provided ample opportunity to communicate with their attorneys and family members,” McLaughlin said.
She said the easiest way to locate someone in custody is through the ICE detainee locator.
Under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, local and state officials must take a much more aggressive role in supporting federal immigration enforcement, which has ramped up since President Donald Trump’s return to office in January.
A law 2022 law expanded the state's ban on so-called sanctuary policies and required agencies that operate county detention facilities to enter into agreements with ICE that empower local officers to identify and process “removable aliens” in their jails.
Another measure signed into law this year requires officials responsible for overseeing local or state law enforcement to use their “best efforts” to support federal immigration enforcement. Upon the request of a federal agency, county detention centers are also required to provide a list of “all inmates” and “any information” about each one's immigration status.
“Today, the Florida Legislature has passed the strongest legislation to combat illegal immigration of any state in the entire country,” DeSantis said earlier this year. “We are ahead of the curve on ending the illegal immigration crisis.”
Local elected officials who initially balked at signing cooperation agreements with ICE have been threatened by the state attorney general with removal from office.
At Thursday's Miami-Dade commission meeting, the board was scheduled to vote on new provisions for the county's existing ICE agreement but ultimately deferred and chose to let Mayor Daniella Levine Cava ratify the deal herself.
Levine Cava told people who attended the hearing that she had no choice in the matter: “This is the law of Florida, and it was required that this agreement be signed.”
She and several commissioners noted that any public records the county has jurisdiction over would continue to be publicly available.
While officials in Miami-Dade have said they are committed to transparency, federal inmates, including people on immigration holds, had not been appearing in Orange County jail records until just last week.
Ericka Gómez-Tejeda, organizing director for Hope Community Center, said officials in the central Florida county took the position that the federal records were not covered by state open records laws, meaning immigrants were effectively disappearing into the system.
Gómez-Tejeda pointed to the case of Esvin Juarez, who was arrested and deported to Guatemala this month before his family and attorney even knew where he was being held. Making it difficult to track detained immigrants is intentional, she said.
“It’s working to the advantage of people’s due process being violated,” Gómez-Tejeda said.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings directed the jail to begin posting information about ICE detainees last week, but Gómez-Tejeda said that might not help inmates were arrested in other counties or states before being taken to Orange County.
“We have people who have been sent to four or five different detention centers,” Gómez-Tejeda said. “And each state that you go into, that family then needs to identify an attorney that will then do their representation and their paperwork. So it puts an onerous responsibility on the families.”
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat who represents the Orlando area, introduced legislation this month aimed at stopping unlawful detention and ending detainee mistreatment. It would require all ICE facilities to publicly report who is being detained, as well as where, when and why.
“This bill won’t fix everything, but if Donald Trump and his allies think these policies are defensible, then they shouldn’t be afraid to tell the public exactly what they’re doing,” Frost said. “If they’re proud of it, they’ll report it. If they’re ashamed, they need to end it.”
Associated Press writer Kate Payne in Tallahassee contributed.
Camila Ramos is forcibly removed from a Miami Dade County Commissions meeting after they deferred a hearing relating to an agreement with ICE that advocacy groups say would make it harder for families to track undocumented immigrants once they are in custody, Thursday, June 26, 2025, in Miami. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)
FILE - The Federal Detention Center stands on Sept. 15, 2022, in Miami. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
