OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. – Inside the auditorium at Gateway High School Thursday night, Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez addressed a politically fraught topic that is of high interest to the large Hispanic community he serves: illegal immigration.
“I know this is a very large Hispanic community,” he said, speaking from a stage. “And they have a lot of concerns. But unfortunately, there are only certain things we can do, and there are certain things we have to do.”
Lopez said those things amount to complying with the law and enforcing it.
Billed as a “town hall,” the attendees at the event largely consisted of employees with his agency and members of the media.
Lopez spent much of the event walking through provisions of the recently enacted state illegal immigration laws, and his agency’s role in enforcing them.
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“Going forward, the sheriff’s office will respond to calls normally,” Lopez said. “And will simply notify ICE if an immigration issue is discovered during an investigation.”
Lopez said his agency would not be conducting raids focused on determining peoples’ immigration statuses.
“It put me at ease,” Jorge Figueroa, president of the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida said about the event.
Figueroa told reporters that he knows many businesses that employ people of varied immigration statuses — some of whom have been afraid to go to work.
Lopez said that while his agency’s focus is still on the “criminal element,” his deputies will be more “proactive” about addressing immigration issues when a person is arrested.
For example, per the new legislation, his agency would notify the state attorney’s office if a person in his custody is subject to an immigration detainer.
Lopez did stress that victims of a crime or witnesses to a crime will not have their immigration statuses used against them during the course of an investigation.
