Jacksonville City Council members Nick Howland, left, and Jimmy Peluso discuss a local immigration law on The Florida Roundup on Friday, April 4, 2025. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on April 4, 2025 at 5:32 pm
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Jacksonville’s new immigration law could lead to lawsuits. Even one supporter on City Council realizes it. But it’s worth it to ensure the public is safe, he says.
A council member on the other side, though, says the law is akin to Jim Crow laws and will land people in jail unfairly.
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The two council members — Republican Nick Howland and Democrat Jimmy Peluso — squared off over the law Friday during an appearance on The Florida Roundup at WJCT Studios in Jacksonville.
The new law, Ordinance 2025-0147, makes it a local crime for undocumented persons to enter or reside in Duval County. Repeat offenders can receive up to 60 days incarceration in the Duval County jail.
The ordinance also provided the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office with $76,250 for additional mobile fingerprint scanners to identify undocumented immigrants on site.
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Howland, an at-large councilman, acknowledged that the law could bring constitutional challenges.
“The constitutionality of these kinds of laws is up to the courts to decide,” he said. “But as a legislative body, the City Council, we can’t fear what might be deemed unconstitutional by a court. We need to enact the laws that we believe are right by the [city] charter, by the state Constitution and by the U.S. Constitution to keep our streets and our communities safe.”
Peluso, who represents Downtown, Riverside and Avondale, compared the ordinance to Jim Crow laws and added, “This feels very much like a sundown law to me.”
“So now we’re saying people aren’t allowed to be walking on our streets? It’s despicable and a disgusting stain on our city,” Peluso said. “It spits in the face of what America represents. It spits in the face of the massive population of Jacksonville which are non-white.”
Host Tom Hudson asked Howland about the impetus for localizing immigration law, historically the purview of the federal government, and how he expects the Sheriff’s Office to enforce the new law.
Howland said illegal immigration has been a problem in Jacksonville as it has statewide and at the U.S. borders.
He quoted statistics from the Sheriff’s Office indicating that Jacksonville’s law enforcement detained 602 undocumented immigrants in 2024, with 334 taken into custody by federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement.
Howland disputed that innocent people will be stopped on the street. The law “does not implement stop and frisk” and “the only people that this law discriminates against are people who’ve broken the law” by entering the U.S. without legal status.
“What’s great about this law is it doesn’t change anything about the fact that JSO has to do lawful detention with reasonable cause,” Howland said. “But what it does do that’s different from state and federal law is it makes it a crime to reside within the county [for undocumented immigrants].
“The state law only makes it a crime to enter in the county. So now JSO can use this law to detain folks until they can get them to ICE, and it keeps dangerous criminals, people who have already broken the law, off the streets.”
Peluso criticized his colleagues for taking a federal civil violation and codifying it as a local crime. He argued that adding to the population of the aging Duval County Jail, which he called “a civil rights nightmare,” will strain JSO’s resources.
“If we’re going to put people in there who are just trying to walk our streets, just trying to live in our city, get a job, maybe drive their kid to school, what we’re doing is we are putting our JSO officers in a position now where they’re not going to get called to go into certain communities,” Peluso said. “Because people are afraid that they might show up at their door and put them in jail. And if we’re putting our officers at risk like that, it’s a total misuse of our of our ability to create good policy.”
Deegan’s decision
Mayor Donna Deegan said this week that she would let the law take effect without signing it. She suggested that a veto would prolong the debate, but she said she could not sign a law she found objectionable.
The law will go into effect Tuesday.
Hudson asked Peluso if he thought Deegan could have been suspended from office if she had issued a veto.
He was referring to recent comments from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeir warning that city leaders who prevent police from enforcing immigration laws could face penalties including suspension.
“We’ve seen the [Gov. Ron] DeSantis administration, and we’ve obviously seen a lot of rhetoric come out of the attorney general’s office that, to me, makes me really believe that they would have removed not only the mayor, but other council members — duly elected individuals,” Peluso said. “This is what we see in third world countries, right? And this governor has done that time and time again. He’s removed two attorney generals, he’s removed members from school boards. He’s removed people that he believes have broken the law. And, you know, many cases they haven’t.”
Peluso said the mayor’s move to let the law take effect was an acknowledgment that it will be challenged in court and be invalidated.
“She knew that by dragging this on even longer, having to go back to City Council to do X, Y and Z, we’re just adding more fuel to the fire. This is a mayor who cares about the citizens of Jacksonville and making sure that she’s doing things that she knows can affect our lives,” Peluso said. “And so, I believe her administration was saying the other day, ‘We know this is going to go through the courts. We know what’s going to be invalidated. We know this is just a lot of noise rather than addressing the real problems facing our city.’”
