Eight days before the Gainesville City Commission is set to review a proposal denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity, a letter from the region's lead homelessness agency suggests passing it could jeopardize the city and county’s access to federal housing funds.
According to a statement obtained by WCJB on July 8 and related letters sent by Jacob Torner, the vice president for programs at the TaskForce for Ending Homelessness to Gainesville and Alachua County staff members who serve on the Continuum of Care Leadership Council, a group that oversees the region's federal homelessness funding.
The TaskForce’s message, published days before a July 16 Gainesville City Commission meeting, could affect a proposal the Gainesville Immigrant Neighbor Inclusion Initiative has spent three months trying to get in front of commissioners.
GINI, a coalition of local advocacy groups encouraging a more immigrant-inclusive community, first brought a five-point petition to the Alachua County Commission April 28, asking local governments to publicly oppose ICE operations in the county, reaffirm commitments to immigrant safety and keep local police out of 287(g) agreements. The state-federal partnerships allow local law enforcement to carry out immigration enforcement.
After GINI brought the petition to the Gainesville commission June 18, the city agreed to formally hear it at its July 16 meeting. The county is scheduled to take it up again Aug. 11.
Torner said a resolution "consistent with what has been requested at recent public meetings regarding generally lawful immigration enforcement" could lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to view Gainesville and Alachua County "less favorably" when awarding grants. This funding, Torner wrote, exceeds $11 million. It supports homeless services, domestic violence programs and sexual assault services across Alachua County and the surrounding region.
County spokesperson Mark Sexton confirmed to WCJB that commissioners are scheduled to review and discuss a sample resolution at the Aug. 11 meeting. He said it's being drafted to address immigration while staying within the bounds of the law.
The city's own July 16 vote is less than a week out.
Meaningful action or a symbolic gesture?
Before Torner's letter entered the picture, the resolution was already dividing local policymakers. The central question isn't whether officials support GINI's goals but whether a resolution can accomplish anything beyond making a statement — and whether that statement is worth the attention it draws.
For Katy Burnett, the strategic projects manager for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office, the answer leans toward risk without reward. She said her office is legally required to maintain its 287(g) agreement no matter what the county decides, meaning the resolution can't touch this piece of the fight.
Florida Highway Patrol enforcement activity simultaneously shifted once the proposal became public, she added.
“That is the biggest conversation that we are having with commissioners; you're bringing a lot of negative attention,” Burnett said. “It's just anxiety-inducing.”
She said public attention on this proposal negatively impacts those it aims to protect, taking away time from the commission to rally for tangible issues and solutions.
“People need to be paying more attention to the costs,” she said. “The people we need to go yell at [are] our state legislators and our state senators, and they are getting almost no pushback, especially locally. And that's frustrating.”
County Commissioner Mary Alford raised a similar concern in an email statement to The Alligator. The public attention itself carries a cost, she said.
"I fear that bringing media attention to these sentiments increases the impacts to vulnerable individuals and families in Alachua County," Alford wrote.
She said local immigration-related detentions have "increased significantly" since the debate began, and they shed a negative light on the community as a whole.
“The resolution changes nothing, unfortunately, and it is just a public statement, and that statement increases scrutiny of our county,” she wrote.
City commissioners describe a more open, if uncertain, posture. City Commissioner James Ingle said sunshine laws, which are in place to ensure government transparency with the public by documenting procedures, prevent commissioners from discussing the resolution with each other outside public meetings, so no one — including the commission itself — knows exactly where the vote stands.
Ingle said the board is broadly supportive in principle, but he's wary of the state response a purely symbolic vote could invite. A state response, he said, would land not on the commission but on "the very immigrant families that we are doing this to express solidarity with."
City Commissioner Ed Book said a resolution carries no binding weight on its own, but it becomes real only if a commissioner moves it forward once public comment closes. That outcome is still unwritten as of this week, he added.
Advocates argue the stakes are higher than a symbolic vote suggests.
GINI representative Ethan Maia de Needell said the delay follows "over a year of silence from our local elected leaders."
Regardless of what the resolution can technically enforce, he said, the 287(g) agreements held by both the Alachua County Sheriff's Office and UF Police Department are reasons the city and county need to act.
"The resolution is necessary to draw a line in the sand between right and wrong," he said.
Jacob Friedman, a UF history and sociology senior and the president of UF's Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, said the organization has several active members who attend commission meetings and support GINI’s cause. Friedman said the group wants commissioners to go beyond language and implement policy that actually confronts the 287(g) agreements.
“We need to organize within our local communities and toward more radical, social politics that can provide the programs and redistribution and control of the economy that could actually, truly and consistently benefit not just our immigrant neighbors, but everyone,” he said.
But that was the debate as it stood entering July — before the TaskForce for Ending Homelessness' letters gave the vote a new, more concrete cost to weigh.
What’s next?
Mayor Harvey Ward echoed sentiments expressed by county and city officials. Not only is there no tangible solution to the petition, he said, but even media coverage of a potential statement to GINI from the city and county negatively affects all stakeholders.
“It is another way that [an] indication of potential harm could come to the community by doing something that, again, has no force of law,” he said. “But there were already lots of potential harms on the table, and this is just one more thing.”
Contact Aaron Zagal Yaji at azagal@alligator.org. Follow him on X @azagalyaji.
Aaron Zagal Yaji is a Public Relations and Economics freshman in his first semester at The Alligator. He covers El Caimán's metro beat. In his free time, he enjoys going to the beach (or reminiscing about it), cooking Peruvian food, and squandering his money on golden shiny things.
