ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida Department of Law Enforcement took to social media this week to tout the arrests of “two criminal aliens in Osceola and Orange County,” one a suspected member of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua.

“No Sunday Funday for these two!” FDLE wrote on X on Feb. 11.

The arrests look to be part of President Donald Trump’s ramped up immigration enforcement efforts, coming after his campaign call for the “mass deportation” of all undocumented migrants in the country. But in Florida, and across the nation, most of the operations are shrouded in mystery, providing no clear account of how many migrants have been detained and whether the focus is on those with criminal records or more broadly on anyone in the country without permission.

Immigration officers, for example, raided an apartment complex in Sanford on Jan. 29, a fact confirmed by the local police department, but Immigrations and Customs Enforcement declined to answer questions about who might have been arrested and why.

Most law enforcement social media posts and press releases since Trump’s inauguration cite the migrants’ crimes. Local police say they continue, as they have for years, alerting federal officials whenever they make an arrest and discover the person is not lawfully in the United States.

But there have been some reports of non-citizens whose only infraction is their immigration status — including a Miami-Dade County teacher — being detained, too.

“Their focus has been on those that have committed crimes while in the U.S.,” said Ediberto Roman, director of Immigration and Citizenship Initiatives at Florida International University. “But it hasn’t been limited to it, and that’s the point.”

And in the void, where there is limited information, rumors spread, especially in the Hispanic community that feels targeted, he said.

“I’m in the process of picking up my daughter from school, and she said she had a classmate who was 14 years old who was deported for smoking in the boys bathroom,” he said, sharing a rumor spreading around that campus.

The X account for the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Miami has posted nearly daily reports of operations throughout Florida, with a clear focus on the arrests of undocumented residents who have criminal records or are accused of other serious crimes.

On Jan. 28, it said its Orlando sub-office had arrested a man from Cuba with possible gang ties who had been previously arrested in Orange County on a charge of grand theft.

ICE also has announced recently that it conducted immigration operations in Trump’s home county of Palm Beach, arrested 27 “criminal illegal aliens” in Stuart, and detained people in Jacksonville, Tampa and the Panhandle, among other cases.

In Central Florida, most local law enforcement agencies said they were not participating in such raids. Instead, they were detaining and transferring to ICE those migrants who had been arrested and charged with a crime. But that may change, as both the Trump and DeSantis administrations have emphasized the need for local police and sheriffs to become involved.

For now, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said it is often not given a heads up about immigration enforcement actions. “We don’t have any information about whether federal or other agencies have conducted those kinds of things in our jurisdiction,” its media relations team stated.

Sheriff John Mina and his office have been vocal that immigration enforcement is not their primary mission. Its media relations team said it was “imperative to the safety of the entire community that people can come forward as victims of or witnesses to crime, regardless of immigration status.”

Mina told Fox 35 last week that immigration “is the job of the federal government. I know many sheriffs share that same sentiment.”

In Seminole County, spokesperson Kim Cannaday said the sheriff’s office has “not been actively involved in federal or state raids or arrests of people specifically because of their immigration status.”

Still, it has detained undocumented immigrants arrested on other charges, as it has done in the past. So far this year, the Seminole office said it transferred 13 people to immigration authorities who had been arrested on charges ranging from DUI to traffic violations to arson.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office said it has transferred eight people to immigration authorities so far this year, arrested on local charges ranging from meth possession to driving without a license.

But office spokesman John Herrell added, “To be clear, we don’t go out and randomly ‘raid’ migrant villages, just randomly looking to see if we can find illegal immigrants.”

Trump had said during the 2024 campaign he would “start with the criminals,” leading many in the immigrant community to believe their loved ones here would be safe from arrests, at least for a time.

But NBC News, which obtained ICE raid details from Jan. 26, reported that nearly half of the 1,179 immigrants arrested that day appeared to have no prior criminal record besides entering the country illegally.

Asked about those numbers, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that no undocumented immigrant was “off the table.”

“If you are an individual, a foreign national, who illegally enters the United States of America, you are, by definition, a criminal,” Leavitt said.

A Miami man said his Venezuelan wife, who had an upcoming immigration court date and has lived in the U.S. for years, was detained in an ICE raid on Jan. 26, the day NBC News reported about. “They just came and they snatched her,” he told CBS News.

A Miami-Dade County Public Schools teacher was deported to his native Honduras, NBC Miami reported, after he was detained by ICE during a routine immigration appointment.

There has been particular concern about the fate of Venezuelans in Florida who entered the country legally with temporary protected status, or TPS, since many are fearful of returning to their strife-torn homeland. The Trump administration has revoked TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans, including about 80,000 in Central Florida, leaving them open to deportation in two phases by September.

William Diaz, a journalist and founder of Casa de Venezuela, a community organization in Orlando, said he is not sure if Venezuelans in Central Florida who do not have criminal records have been detained so far.

Any Venezuelan with temporary protected status, or TPS, has undergone a background check that includes biometrics and fingerprints, Diaz said. “No one, not a single one of them, has any criminal record,” he added.

New Florida legislation gives authorities even more power to target non-criminal aliens.

A bill passed by the state Legislature in a compromise with Gov. Ron DeSantis would create state-level crimes for undocumented immigrants who enter Florida. The bill signed by DeSantis on Thursday makes it a misdemeanor to knowingly enter or reenter the state as an unauthorized immigrant and enhances criminal penalties for unauthorized aliens.

State law enforcement is already involved in that work, with the Florida Highway Patrol saying it was “proud to participate in immigration enforcement efforts this morning in Fort Myers” along with “federal partners,” in a Feb. 2 X post.

“It’s going to be heightened pressure for a host of groups that thought they were safe, and are soon going to find out they’re not safe,” Roman said. “And it’s only going to get worse over time, unless, unless the administration blinks. But I don’t foresee them blinking anytime soon.”

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