Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier commends Jacksonville's City Council for passing an immigration enforcement bill. Uthmeier spoke Thursday, March 27, 2025, in St. Johns County. | Noah Hertz, Jacksonville Today
Published on February 15, 2026 at 12:47 pm
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Every election cycle is about something, and often it’s not about the matchup on the ballot.
The 2023 contest between Democrat Donna Deegan and Republican Daniel Davis was nominally a matchup between the former newscaster and the Chamber CEO. But for many voters, it was actually a referendum on outgoing Mayor Lenny Curry and perceived excesses in his second term, including the attempted sale of JEA.
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It worked out well for Deegan, who promised a new era of transparency and love in City Hall. Good vibes only.
Soon enough, though, the aspirational vision became more bleary. Battles cropped up between the Democratic chief executive and many on the supermajority Republican City Council, as Deegan opted to deviate from the non-partisan posture of the last D mayor, Alvin Brown, and actually act like the standard bearer of her party.
And, you may ask, what’s wrong with that, given that all of Brown’s face time with Republicans like Rick Scott didn’t help him against Curry … especially given Scott and many other Republicans fell in behind the former chair of the Florida GOP.
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Deegan, like most people who have occupied the office, has embraced the concept of the strong mayor and the prerogatives that come with it. Sometimes it’s worked out. But there are questions about whether the strategy that lacked consequences for the last 2 ½ years is completely sustainable now that the 2027 Jacksonville mayor’s race is nearly upon us.
For starters, there is the entirely avoidable mess created for the mayor’s office by Yanira Cardona, who decided to Instagram from her office in City Hall and warn locals where immigration stakeouts were “targeting” them.
“ICE is out and about,” Cardona said on the video. “They are doing speed traps. They are, they’ve been seen on Emerson, on Beach Boulevard, on Atlantic and on the highway. They are targeting, literally, they’re targeting any lawn care companies, any AC company construction vans. They’re literally stopping them just to make sure that they have their paperwork.”
Sure, she said to “comply.” But she also said the midterm elections would offer an opportunity to weigh in on policy issues, arguably electioneering in the building. And beyond the specifics of her comments, the spirit was clearly intended to distance her publicly-funded post from federal and state immigration enforcement.
That’s enough for people who aren’t enamored with Deegan’s brand of government, including the state’s leading legal mind.
Attorney General James Uthmeier’s Office of Statewide Prosecution has sent a subpoena seeking to probe whether there was, in his words, a “coordinated effort amongst officials … to thwart investigative efforts.”
The subpoena seeks all records produced by or sent to Cardona between Jan. 2 and Jan. 16, including those on city-provided devices and personal devices used to conduct city business. Cardona, the city’s director of hispanic outreach, has conflated the two at times, featuring her business card on her personal Instagram.
“Local officials, they do not have discretion. There is an obligation to use best efforts to facilitate, help the federal government carry out their law enforcement efforts,” Uthmeier said. He went on to argue that efforts to “flag personal information, locations, details about law enforcement officers” is to try to harass them, scare them, threaten them or impede law enforcement operations
The city’s custodian of records is set to be deposed at Uthmeier’s Jacksonville office, raising the stakes.
Questions could be raised, of course, about why Cardona is sticking around, given that she has become a distraction. About why the mayor’s office doesn’t just put her on leave and on the campaign, which is standard operating procedure in Tallahassee. Of course they weren’t going to fire her, but maybe they should have, given we’re almost a month after the video and we’re still talking about a mid-level staffer’s misadventure.
Deegan has sounded like Richard Nixon in Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days here, bristling at these probes as pure politics. She complained that Cardona’s video was “grist for the political mill” because her comments were used as a “political whipping post.”
“Instead of addressing the pocketbook concerns of Floridians — including property insurance, housing costs, and healthcare — the Attorney General is once again on a hyper-partisan fishing expedition as we enter election season,” Deegan’s office commented last week.
The city’s General Counsel Michael Fackler says everything the mayor’s office has done is legal, of course, which comes as no surprise to those who believe Fackler is essentially Deegan’s lawyer.
For those watching legal fights between the mayor’s office and the attorney general, this is just history repeating. Recall that Uthmeier says his office is still probing the city’s gun registry – a list of people who wanted to carry guns into City Hall and the Yates Building, a practice began after permitless carry was made legal in 2023. Fackler says the city is in the clear there too.
These issues won’t necessarily win or lose an election. But they do look like sharks in the water circling Deegan’s ship of state.
Add to that preemption bills moving in Tallahassee, like the Sen. Clay Yarborough (SB 1134) and Rep. Dean Black (HB 1001) bill that looks to gut local DEI – which could, ironically enough, include initiatives like the Office of Hispanic Outreach.
Gov. Ron DeSantis loves this legislation even if you or the mayor don’t.
It’s got to be said: Deegan hasn’t even filed yet, and neither has anyone with a chance to defeat her.
We hear Republican Jerry Holland, a longtime public servant, will be running, and it remains to be seen if he’s willing to go in on these issues.
But Holland is not the establishment candidate. Assuming one emerges, he or she is being handed a wagon full of weapons to use against this administration. Whether they’ll be enough to overcome a mayor with strong name identification and a high approval rating is an open question, with a year to go before the first election.
