“THIS IS A ONCE-IN-A-GENERATION OPPORTUNITY”: FL. Gov. Ron DeSantis Rips FL Legislature, Pushes Need for Strong Immigration Legislation

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joined the Guy Benson Show today and emphasized the urgent need for immigration reform and enforcement following Trump’s commanding November victory. DeSantis shared why he’s advocating for cooperation with the Trump administration on these efforts by passing strong immigration legislation, and he then addressed resistance from members of Florida’s own Republican-led state legislature to DeSantis’ efforts for cooperation with the Trump administration. DeSantis also called out Gavin Newsom’s disastrous leadership in California, particularly the lack of preparation that worsened the ongoing wildfires. Listen to the full interview below.

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GUY BENSON, HOST, “THE GUY BENSON SHOW”: So, let’s begin with the governor of the great state of Florida. Ron DeSantis joins us.

Governor, great to have you back on the show.

GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL): Yes, thanks for having me.

Last week at this time, we were preparing for a snowstorm in Northern Florida, and we ended up getting — our previous record for a state was four inches, and we had parts of the Panhandle that got 10 inches of snow. So I think, Milton, Florida, has had more snow in January than Anchorage, Alaska. Imagine that.

BENSON: That’s wild.

And I saw a photo. I think the first lady put it out, Casey DeSantis, of your family making a snowman in the front yard of the mansion. Is that something you ever imagined you would be doing in Tallahassee?

DESANTIS: No.

They always have stories about, oh, it snowed here or there, but even when it gets really cold, you don’t necessarily have the precipitation. So we got a few inches, but I will tell you, the further west you go from here in the Florida Panhandle, you had Pensacola Beach just layered in snow. It was really incredible to see.

But we are — we’re getting out of that. The weather is good. So, all you tourists, still come down here.

(LAUGHTER)

DESANTIS: Don’t worry. That was just an aberration. We got — we needed global warming, and we didn’t get it.

(LAUGHTER)

BENSON: Governor, I want to ask you just on this front, since I’m thinking of it.

You have been watching, I’m sure, with great concern, as all Americans have, what happened in Los Angeles with those fires. And one of the points that I made here on the show, and some people took offense to it, I was saying that there was a failure of leadership in California.

And a juxtaposition that I offered was your state, Florida, the hurricanes, the preparedness, the competence that you showed with your leadership and also just statewide as well. And people said, well, it’s completely different. You can predict a hurricane. These fires sort of came out of nowhere. It’s an unfair point to make.

I know the governor out there has been very critical of you and the way that you run the state of Florida. I think people are voting with their feet on that question. You debated him, I remember, last year one-on-one, and that was fascinating.

But as you watch what’s happened out there, and you think about disaster preparation and accountability, what comes to mind?

DESANTIS: Well, I do think there’s one difference between hurricanes and fires, is that they have had deliberate policies which hamstring their ability to mitigate the effects of these fires.

They cite environmental concerns. But President Trump’s been on them for a long time. His first term, he was talking about that they needed to be doing more. We do controlled burns in Florida routinely. They don’t let the water flow.

So, I think they have made deliberate choices to increase the risk of fires. Obviously, we can’t do a policy in Florida that would mean we get more or less hurricanes. I mean, it just is what it is.

But I do think, on the preparation, it’s not true they don’t know they’re going to get them. They have certain policies in place that they know increases their risk. And they could do more for preparation. Of course they could.

For us, when we see these things develop during hurricane season, we preplan, we pre-stage, and our view is, time is of the essence, no bureaucracy, no red tape, just get it done. So we take it very, very seriously. We try to respond overwhelmingly and very quickly.

And we have done that. I think we did the most recent hurricane, Milton, knocked out 4.2 million from power and we had a record power restoration, because we had 35,000, 40,000 trucks — or utility linemen with their trucks waiting to descend on doing it.

So I do think our preparation is different. We’re proud. We put a lot of emphasis on it. But I think they have had decades of bad policy that has made these types of fires more likely.

BENSON: One other question this front.

If you had warnings about a hurricane that was brewing, potentially a serious one, would you under any circumstances leave the country?

(LAUGHTER)

DESANTIS: Not only that.

So I got invited by the prime minister of Italy this year. She wanted me to come in September last year, ’24. And I said, I cannot plan a foreign trip during hurricane season. You just can’t do it, because you may have to pull it down.

And so, since I have been governor, the number of things I have had to cancel, not out of the country, but around the state, out of state, when these things come on the horizon, I mean, once these things are on the horizon, we pretty much get in lockdown and we do it.

So, yes, I don’t know why. I mean, I guess there were some serious warnings, and she kind of blew that off. And so I think the voters there are very upset about that. These things just require — we prepare very early. I declare emergency. If I think it’s going to happen, we just do it. We don’t wait until it’s 48 hours out.

A lot of times, we will be four, five, six days in advance where we’re declaring a state of emergency and mobilizing the resources.

BENSON: Yes, and the she in that answer is Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.

Governor, turning to internal politics within Florida, I’m admittedly flabbergasted. Like, I have come back from this vacation all excited to get back on the air, thrilled to have you on the show. Less thrilled that we’re talking about a big fight that you’re having with your Republican-led legislature over immigration.

It feels like, if there was one message, maybe a top one or two message, from voters in November in your state and everywhere, it was about illegal immigration and the urgent priority of cleaning it up. And you said, OK, we are very much going to be a part of that in the state of Florida. We are going to lead. This is part of your style in Florida.

And yet you are having a battle with people within your own party in Tallahassee, who are giving you all sorts of grief on a special session, on priorities, on legislation. I just can’t really fathom why this is a conversation that we have to have at all. What’s going on?

DESANTIS: Well, the mandate is clear. And I would say I have a mandate from ’22, because I was very strong on immigration and I got a big victory.

BENSON: That’s a good point.

DESANTIS: Donald Trump, this was the centerpiece of his election in ’24, and deservedly so, because of how bad Biden did. People cared about the issue.

So he won the mandate to come in. And we also knew — because we had been working with their folks about what they were going to do, and we knew the executive orders were coming. So I called a special session for a week after the inauguration to capitalize off this.

And they’re very bold executive orders, but this is the time to seize the moment. Now, in those executive orders, they are providing a pathway for police departments, sheriff’s department, state agencies to actively participate in immigration enforcement efforts in the interior, in particular.

You’re going to have California is going to be sanctuary. Chicago is going to be sanctuary. They’re going to actively try to sabotage Trump’s immigration agenda. Most non-liberal states will likely just shrug their shoulders. They’re not going to try to sabotage Trump, but they are not going to actively assist in the ways that are going to be effective.

And so what I have called for the legislature to do is to require by law all police departments, sheriff’s departments, state agencies to positively participate to the maximum extent under regulation and law with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.

The reason this is important, if you look at what they have done, they came out of the gate, you’re hearing a lot of stories about ICE raids and all these other things. They have probably averaged between 700 and 800 arrests a day. I think, sometimes, they have gotten over 1,000. The other day, I think, was 900.

So let’s just say it’s 1,000 a day. Well, that’s 365,000 a year multiplied by four. Biden had 10 million people come in.

BENSON: Right.

DESANTIS: Now, I do think they’re going to ramp up. I do think they’re going to increase those numbers.

But here’s the thing. State and local have interactions with these people way more frequent than federal immigration agents. And so, for example, if you’re a police officer, you get called out to go to like an apartment complex for like a domestic dispute, and then you notice, down the hall, you have got the Venezuelan gang there, you have a responsibility to help police that and get ICE involved and get those people out of there.

In Florida, we want our people deputized, both the police officers, the sheriff’s deputies and my guys, that if, like, a Haitian — a boat of Haitians lands in South Florida, they can exercise the same authorities that an ICE agent would do or Border Patrol and just immediately remove them back.

So it’s very, very important that we do this and do it robustly. Now, I called for this. The legislative leaders, when I did it a few weeks ago, they rejected it. They said that this was not urgent, that I was being premature, and that this could wait many months down the road.

Well, they did not get a good reaction from Republican voters in Florida about that. So they came into special session yesterday and they gaveled out mine and called their own, which was just typical petty stuff. But then they dropped this bill that guts all the immigration enforcement and actually takes away the current enforcement I’m doing and gives it to the commissioner of agriculture.

So, right now, I have got Highway Patrol working with ICE. I have got National Guard. We’re working with ICE. And ICE — the ICE agents, by the way, hate what the legislature is trying to do. They want to support our stuff. So we’re doing that. They would take that away and put it in the Department of Agriculture, who doesn’t have nearly the amount of resources that we do.

So, clearly — but they labeled it the Trump Act. And so I think what they’re doing is just — Obama labeled Obamacare the Affordable Care Act, when it was anything but. Biden labeled his spending boondoggle the Inflation Reduction Act, when it was anything but. They’re labeling it the Trump Act, when this is a weak bill.

And Trump has come out of the gate very, very strong. But I think what these guys think they can do, if you just — they’re trying to leverage Trump’s popularity. If you just slap Trump’s name on something, then somehow everyone’s going to say, oh, we’re for it. I can tell you, that is not how it worked in Florida yesterday.

I have never seen Republican voters more angry at the legislature than what I saw yesterday in the response to what they were trying to do. So, my message is, like, I don’t care about pride of ownership. I think some of it is they don’t want me to get the win for whatever reason.

Come up with proposals that are as good or stronger than mine, pass them, and we will get cooking on this. But they have not been willing to do it.

BENSON: Why?

DESANTIS: And I think part of the reason is because they don’t ultimately believe in robust interior enforcement.

The reality is, before I became governor in Florida, we were weak on illegal immigration. These guys in the legislature, they voted to give driver’s licenses to illegals. They voted for in-state tuition. They did all this stuff. I came in, I said, we got to ban sanctuary cities. Oh, you can’t do that.

And I think part of it was, they thought it would be bad for Hispanic voters. And yet I was the strongest governor we have had on this, and I got a record Hispanic vote in 2020.

BENSON: Yes, you won by 20 points.

DESANTIS: And I won by Hispanics over 60 percent.

BENSON: Right.

DESANTIS: And Trump got great Hispanic running.

So that whole thing that Hispanics don’t want immigration enforced is a total lie. But I do think you have…

BENSON: Well, like, just to jump in — sorry to interrupt, but I’m — again — and I’m not trying to throw any of them under the bus, and I’m sure they would have some counterpoints.

But, overall, this just seems unfathomably weak to me. And to cling to this old paradigm, where it could not be any clearer what time it is, what the voters want, what Republican voters want, what Republican voters in Florida specifically want, it is crystal clear, not just — you pointed out correctly — from the last election, but the previous one as well.

The big red waves that have crashed over your state and made this a deep red state, the people who made that happen, following in many cases your leadership, they are not ambiguous on this question. They are 100 percent in favor of robust, aggressive enforcement.

And I just cannot imagine any leader with their head screwed on right with a political survival instinct in Florida, Democrat or Republican, but especially Republican, Governor, standing in the way of this. It is actually pretty shocking.

DESANTIS: Well, here’s the thing, though. Here’s the thing.

Everything you just said unites our voter base. No question, the grassroots, they’re 100 percent with what I’m proposing, what you just said. But we do have business — certain business interests that have wanted to employ cheap labor, right?

And, now, I did E-Verify for private employers in 2023. The media said our economy was going to crash. It hasn’t. But I do recognize that, I mean, there’s ways some of these guys can get around it. So I do think that’s part of this, that they don’t actually want to see the enforcement the way we would want to.

And it’s not just about aliens that are committing serious felonies. We have costs that are imposed by illegal immigration. We want to remove the incentives to do illegal immigration. One of the things I’m proposing is imposing E-Verify on the remittances that the illegals send home to their foreign country, to the foreign countries, because, if you’re here legally, then, fine, send the remittance.

If you’re not, then we’re not going to let you send the remittances to them. They do not want to do that, because that would be a disincentive for people to come here and work illegally. So, the legislature, I don’t think they’re on board with true America-first policy when it comes to this.

And the proofs and the pudding on this, Guy, because they rejected my call from a special session. They did not want to do this at all. Then they got pressure. So then they dropped this bill. They said, hey, if we put Trump’s name on it, it’s going to be fine. They got huge blowback.

So now they’re saying they’re making changes. And they’re cosmetic. They’re not ultimately answering the serious questions. And so, look, they could have led on this. I didn’t need to call the special session. They should have called it. They should have been champing at the bit to get in there and get this done, but they weren’t.

And they wanted to wait months. And here’s what happened. If I hadn’t had done this, nothing would be happening on this. We get in a regular session. There’s all these different things that happen. And this would all fall out. We get nothing done. So we have got to get it done.

And this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to actually capitalize on a major mandate.

BENSON: Yes.

DESANTIS: Donald Trump’s mandate is not going to be fulfilled unless we have all the local law enforcement and state law enforcement actively supporting the efforts.

Florida, we want to do that. We have a mandate to do that. We just need to get the legislation across the finish line, so that we can do the people’s will.

BENSON: Well, over these last couple of years, you guys have worked together very well on a lot of things. And you have made so much work in the state of Florida, and they are to be commended for that. But it really sounds like they needed a kick in the rear end on this and maybe need another one via voters, with you at the helm leading this thing.

And I wanted to bring you on the show right out of the gate here today to talk about it, because I think it’s really important, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida here on “The Guy Benson Show.”

Governor, thanks so much for your time.

DESANTIS: Thank you. Take care.