Doral Council Member Calls ICE Crackdown a Tragic Moment for Venezuelans

Immigration arrests have been climbing steadily in Doral, a city where roughly 40% of residents trace their roots to Venezuela, and one of the only Venezuelan-American voices on the city council says the pace and scope of the enforcement has gone too far. Councilman Rafael Pineyro described the moment as tragic, saying families in the community had not previously experienced detentions like the ones now unfolding around them.

Doral is home to the largest Venezuelan-American community in the United States, according to the Miami Herald, with about 70% of residents born outside the country per U.S. Census figures cited in the report. The city also includes sizable populations from Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua and other Latin American nations, even as arrests tied to immigration enforcement have surged. The Herald's tally shows the numbers climbing nearly every month this year: three arrests in December, 16 in March, eight in April, seven in May, 12 in June, and 17 in July.

Much of that activity has clustered around specific corridors, with reported encounters concentrated near Northwest 87th Avenue, 107th Avenue, 36th Street and 41st Street, according to the same reporting. Residents have told the community platform iceout.org that they have regularly spotted ICE and Border Patrol vehicles in Doral over the past two months. Some of the reported stops involved agents asking people for proof of residency or U.S. citizenship, while others led to the detention of individuals with ongoing immigration cases.

A Council Vote That Formalized Local-Federal Cooperation

The Doral City Council voted unanimously on April 16, 2025, to approve a 287(g) partnership with ICE, with city officials saying at the time they had been legally advised that Florida rules required the municipality to sign the agreement, according to Local 10 News. Under a 287(g) agreement, participating local law-enforcement agencies can perform certain immigration-related functions under federal supervision. Doral's move came as Florida led the nation in these partnerships, with more than 200 state and municipal agencies signed on as of last April compared to 73 in second-place Texas, per the same station's reporting.

Doral was hardly alone. The City of Miami Commission voted 3-2 on June 17, 2025, to join the 287(g) program as well, joining neighboring Hialeah, Coral Gables and Homestead in expanding local police deputization, as reported by CBS News. That decision followed Hoodline's own coverage of the debate, in a story headlined Miami Commissioners Weigh ICE Deal, which tracked the same regional trend as it reached Doral's neighbors.

Yet even as the city signed on, city manager John de la Vega said during a livestream that the Doral Police Department is collaborating with ICE — a characterization Pineyro has disputed. Pineyro has rejected the claim that Doral police collaborate with ICE and noted that department officers have not received the training required to make immigration arrests themselves, per the Herald's reporting. The gap between those two accounts remains unresolved.

Families With Pending Cases Caught In The Sweep

Pineyro, a Republican who supported the Trump administration and is the only Venezuelan-American member of the Doral City Council, has drawn a distinction between deporting criminals — which he supports — and detaining people who are simply waiting on the immigration system to work. He said hardworking people and professionals with pending immigration cases are being detained, some of whom have had pending asylum cases for 15 or 20 years. He is concerned about people being targeted while their political asylum cases remain pending and has said families should be differentiated from criminals in enforcement decisions.

Yeraldine Pineyro said families with pending cases are paying taxes and paying for work permits even as they live with escalating anxiety. She described families as increasingly afraid to leave their homes, and the Herald reports that many are now limiting their activities to grocery shopping, work and taking children to school. Some Doral families have sought financial assistance for immigration bonds and attorneys, and others have created GoFundMe campaigns after relatives were arrested.

That fear has translated into an economic toll beyond individual households. Foot traffic at iconic Venezuelan businesses such as Doral's El Arepazo café dropped by nearly 50% by late 2025 as residents restricted their public outings out of fear of federal patrols, according to Iowa Public Radio. By August 2026, advocacy organizations reported that former Venezuelan Temporary Protected Status holders in Miami-Dade County had begun selling homes and businesses, giving up formal employment, and living in hiding with relatives after losing work permits and driver's licenses, according to Axios.

The Roots Of A Political Reversal

The crackdown's local impact has sharpened a political irony. Doral voted heavily for Donald Trump in November 2024, with the president winning roughly 62% of the vote there — a 25-point margin over Vice President Kamala Harris — in a city he had lost in 2016, according to Axios. That shift came even as the Trump administration went on to revoke the temporary protected status that had been granted to Venezuelans under the Biden administration, stripping protections from more than 650,000 Venezuelans nationwide and from another 700,000 people from countries including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti.

Pineyro, whose term overlaps with Mayor Christi Fraga's, which runs through 2028, has said the immigration system has failed and that its failures cannot be blamed solely on one political party. He has called for comprehensive immigration reform and has urged President Trump directly to find a solution for law-abiding Venezuelans. He has also urged Doral residents to participate in the political process, including voting in November, and has said he plans to run for mayor in 2028.

National Numbers Behind The Local Fear

The concerns raised by Pineyro and Doral families echo broader data on who is actually being held in ICE custody nationwide. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data updated through July 11, 2026 found that 70.6% of the 65,765 people held in ICE detention nationally had no criminal convictions, a figure that undercuts the notion that enforcement is narrowly targeting criminals. The Deportation Data Project, a University of California-Berkeley and UCLA effort that uses public-records litigation to obtain and analyze immigration-enforcement data, has helped surface figures like these.

Overcrowding has followed the surge in detentions. A Human Rights Watch report published in July 2025 found that the detainee population at Miami's Krome North Service Processing Center jumped 249% between January and March 2025, leaving the facility holding more than three times its operational capacity during peak periods. Meanwhile, Florida immigration courts issued 78,882 deportation orders in June 2026 alone, with formal removal decisions accounting for 78% of all closed cases that month, according to News4JAX.

A Legislative Push For Permanent Relief

Some in Congress are attempting to offer a longer-term fix. U.S. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Republican representing South Florida, signed a bipartisan discharge petition in August 2026 aiming to force a House vote on the American Dream and Promise Act, which would grant permanent legal residency to eligible TPS holders who have lived in the U.S. for at least three years, per Axios.

The case echoes other recent Hoodline reporting on the toll of the enforcement surge, including a Doral dad detained by ICE story and coverage of a journalist detained by Border Patrol. Federal officials have noted that ICE does not need permission from any city, municipality or county to carry out immigration enforcement — a reminder that even if Doral's own police involvement remains disputed, the federal presence in the city is unlikely to recede on its own.