Immigration Deal in Florida Ends DeSantis Feud With Fellow Republicans

Florida lawmakers will vote this week on a revised set of immigration enforcement bills supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis, ending a tense, two-week standoff and allowing both sides to save face in front of voters who consider illegal immigration a top issue.

The rift had exposed an unusual power struggle among the state’s top Republicans and led to frenzied intraparty attacks on social media, which legislative leaders denounced in strong terms on Tuesday.

As part of the compromise, no single elected official — the governor, as Mr. DeSantis wanted, or the agriculture commissioner, as lawmakers preferred — will be Florida’s chief immigration officer. Instead, the governor, the agriculture commissioner, the attorney general and the chief financial officer will all sit on a new state board of immigration enforcement. The board’s decisions will have to be unanimous.

The setup works to Mr. DeSantis’s advantage for now, as he will soon appoint a new attorney general and chief financial officer; both jobs opened up after President Trump took office and named several Florida Republicans to his administration. The governor is expected to pick close allies to fill the roles.

Mr. DeSantis had threatened to veto the immigration bill that the State Legislature passed last month, calling them “weak, weak, weak.”

The rewritten legislation, if passed, “will make Florida the strongest state in the country for combating illegal immigration,” Mr. DeSantis said in a video posted to X late on Monday, after the deal was announced.

Republican legislative leaders can also claim victory: Mr. DeSantis did not get everything he wanted and was forced to negotiate with them, a rare occurrence for a governor who has exercised expansive power despite doing little to nurture legislative relationships within his own party.

“Governor, we’ve gotten to know each other better in the last three weeks than in the last six years,” Daniel Perez, the House speaker, said on Tuesday from the chamber floor, where he opened a new special legislative session to consider the three compromise bills. Mr. Perez said he expected the legislation to pass by Thursday.

The legislation would provide $250 million (down from $500 million in the initial package) for local police departments to help enforce federal immigration efforts. Local jails run by county officials — not just by sheriffs’ departments, as it is now — would have to participate in programs assisting federal agencies with enforcement. The governor could suspend local officials who do not comply.

The legislation would also make it a state crime for unauthorized immigrants to enter Florida. Such immigrants would automatically be denied bail if arrested.

As with the earlier legislation, unauthorized immigrants convicted of a capital offense would automatically be sentenced to death. And Florida would end its policy allowing residents to pay in-state tuition at public universities if they were brought into the country illegally as children.

That policy, in place since 2014, had been championed by Jeanette M. Núñez, a Republican lawmaker from Miami, who later became Mr. DeSantis’s lieutenant governor. She backed the policy’s repeal in a post on X last month; last week, she was named interim president of Florida International University, an appointment that will require her to resign as lieutenant governor and allow Mr. DeSantis to choose her replacement.

Mr. DeSantis did not win lawmakers’ support for a plan to stop unauthorized immigrants from sending money back to their home countries. He also lost control over a state program that in 2022 paid to recruit and fly several dozen undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts.

Mr. Trump did not publicly weigh in on policy specifics during the standoff, despite overtures from Mr. DeSantis and legislative leaders. Both sides claimed their proposals were more aligned with what the president wanted.

Mr. Trump encouraged Mr. DeSantis’s call for a special legislative session on immigration enforcement last month. But he remained silent after lawmakers titled their bill the “Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy Act” — that is, the TRUMP Act — and said they had received “technical assistance from the White House” in drafting it.

Legislative leaders, however, never formally sent Mr. DeSantis the legislation after they passed it. A compromise package emerged only after days of finger-pointing and bickering on social media. As Mr. DeSantis publicly ridiculed the idea of putting the agriculture commissioner, Wilton Simpson, in charge of immigration enforcement, threats against Mr. Simpson emerged, according to Ben Albritton, the Senate president.

“These threats are un-American,” he said in extended remarks from the Senate floor. “They’re just flat wrong.”

He pledged, however, that Republicans would work together moving forward: “A family squabble will not pull us apart.”