Earlier this month, former Pasco County Sheriff Bob White spoke to the Greater Brooksville Republican Club about illegal immigration and the second Trump administration. The Wednesday morning meeting, which was hosted by the Bistro in downtown Brooksville, was being held as part of the club’s “Trump Policy Series.”
In addition to his 29 years of experience in law enforcement which started with the Brooksville Police Department, the retired sheriff served as a Special Agent Supervisor and Special Agent with the Florida Division of Alcohol and Tobacco. His resume included 1,300 employees and an $85 million budget managed as Pasco’s sheriff. He has decades of leadership experience in law enforcement as well as business acumen as the President of Lonestar Strategies LLC.
In his short time back in the Oval Office, President Trump has certainly moved quickly on a myriad of campaign promises, from tariffs to government fraud. A hot-button issue that America struggled with under the previous administration, immigration was one of the first on his radar.
During his first term, President Trump had taken steps to address the concern. Since being back in office, he has more doggedly sought to quell the influx of illegal immigrants and subsequently deport them.
White noted that the new administration’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has taken up the task of rescinding green cards and student visas for those who support terrorism. The White House website stated that ICE arrests of illegal immigrants had ballooned to 627 percent as of March 4, 2025.
The progress in this area has been significant, with the White House adding that illegal border crossings were down 94 percent from February 2024 to the time of the early March posting. There is still much to be done. As Sheriff White shared with the local Republican Club, 2.2 million “got aways” have been recorded on drones and other such cameras, according to the border sheriffs.
A sizeable part of this issue involves cartels, the retired sheriff said, who made $13 billion in human trafficking and drugs in 2024 alone. He feels that poor past political leadership led to the rise of various terrorist groups and “bad actors” operating on American soil and around the world. “That is why we have to have strong law enforcement in America, and we have to have strong leaders in America that aren’t cowards…” White said. “It was a political problem, and if we had strong leadership, we could have stopped a lot of this from happening.”
The former law enforcement officer opines that correcting all of the problems plaguing the United States concerning illegal immigration and crime will require at least a decade of concerted effort “if we use force and if we go after them as hard as they have come after us.”
Despite some lawmakers on the left and right sides of the aisle resisting key tenets of the new/old Trump administration, the President is pushing ahead with his plan to address illegal immigration.
Recently, White asked Keith Pearson, former Florida sheriff and Senior Advisor to Kristi Noem, for the current administration’s immigration policy. Pearson chuckled and said, “There isn’t one. We are arresting the worst of the worst. Then we are going to arrest the worst… Our work is cut out for us for a long time doing that.”
Further statistics on the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration can be found on the White House’s website at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/president-trump-is-securing-our-homeland/
