In Florida, illegal aliens who commit crimes aren’t deported — they’re put to death

The state of Florida has been dogged in its determination to become the death penalty capital of the nation. It allows non-unanimous juries to impose death sentences . It allows prosecutors to seek such sentences for people convicted of sexual battery against children under age 12. And in 2025, it passed a law making the death penalty mandatory for any illegal alien convicted of first-degree murder.

Last month, a prosecutor in Lake County became the first to use that law as the basis of a capital prosecution. State Attorney Bill Gladson is seeking the death penalty for Shahidul Islam, a Bangladeshi national. He is an illegal alien, who was deported but returned to the U.S. While here, he allegedly shot and killed his sister-in-law.

If Gladson succeeds in getting a death sentence, he will have pulled off a MAGA double-header, combining the movement’s embrace of capital punishment and its hostility toward people who enter the country illegally.

Recall that in October 2024, President Trump made that connection when he said, “I’m hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”

And on the first day of his second term, he issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “seek the death penalty regardless of other factors for every federal capital crime … committed by an alien illegally present in this country.” His order also encouraged states to adopt similar policies.

That is why you can be sure that Trump administration officials will be following Islam’s prosecution closely.

It is no coincidence that the law under which he is being charged is called the TRUMP Act , and that it cites several of the president’s anti-immigration initiatives in the law itself. In the words of the law , “the Legislature finds it necessary to rigorously implement both the letter and spirit of Trump’s plan to secure our border, protect our state and national sovereignty, support Florida law enforcement, and affirm the federal government’s responsibility over immigration.”

In addition, if Gladson succeeds in securing a mandatory death sentence for Shahidul Islam, it will tee up a challenge for the Supreme Court. Fifty years ago, the court held that the death penalty could never be made mandatory or imposed automatically .

The law’s supporters knew what they were doing. As one of them put it , “We have cho­sen to pass things that we knew were uncon­sti­tu­tion­al at the time we passed them, because we believed the Supreme Court would change their minds.” That is not how the Supreme Court has ever understood what the Constitution requires in capital cases. If the Islam case ever reaches the court, it should not change its stance.

In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a statute that made the death penalty mandatory for specified crimes. Writing for the majority, Justice Potter Stewart explained : “In capital cases the fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment requires consideration of the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense as a constitutionally indispensable part of the process of inflicting the penalty of death.”

He added that manda­to­ry death sentences treat defendants as “a faceless, undifferentiated mass.”

That is exactly what Gladson is trying to do with Islam. He made that clear during a press conference announcing the prosecution, calling the crime “ completely preventable ” and laying the blame on the Biden administration’s open border policy.

Gladson praised the state’s illegal alien law and its mandatory death penalty provision. He said that it gives notice to people who are in this country illegally that if they commit a capital crime, they will not be deported. Instead, he said, “they will face the trial of their life.”

The state attorney and his colleagues made clear that they care little about why Islam may have committed the crime with which he is charged, or about the circumstances that may have contributed to it. For them, he is a stand-in for, and symbol of, a nation allegedly overrun by illegal immigrants.

It seems not to matter to them that, in fact, illegal immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes and homicides than people born in the U.S. And it is ironic that in a state so devoted to enforcing the law, Islam is being prosecuted under a law that is itself of questionable legality.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.