ORLANDO, Fla. — Four Guatemalan siblings, detained as undocumented immigrants after a traffic stop, spent several days last month at the Orange County Jail before being picked up in a van and driven around for hours.

Finally they reached their destination, their attorneys say: Right back at the Orange County Jail.

This directionless odyssey — similar to what some other detainees across Florida have faced in recent months – happened because of rules limiting the number of days an undocumented immigrant can be held in a local facility before federal officials must take custody.

With the Trump administration’s push for “mass deportation” filling federal detention beds, detainees are being transferred from facility to facility because the switch restarts the clock and gives federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents more time to pick them up.

Multiple immigration attorneys described the shuffle to the Orlando Sentinel, and law enforcement leaders in Orange and Pinellas County confirmed the practice.

But the attorneys say it’s a maddening tactic that often leaves them struggling to locate the immigrants, and denies detainees access to family members and due process.

Even though his clients — three brothers and a sister — wound up in the same place they started from, Orlando-based immigration attorney Walker Smith said he couldn’t find the siblings because their previous inmate numbers were changed upon their return, leaving him and their family unsure of their whereabouts. He said the two youngest siblings in the family, 26 and 18, had valid work permits.

“If they’re just holding people indefinitely, holding people by sending them from facility to facility, or worse, sending them out of one facility and back to the same one under a different number … It’s gaming the system at its finest,” Smith said.

The youngest brother has since been moved again — this time to Alligator Alcatraz, the state’s new detention center in the Everglades.

The way a detained immigrant’s custody clock works is complicated.

Under the Intergovernmental Service Agreement, or IGSA, that governs the relationships between ICE and the handful of Florida jails like Orange County’s that temporarily hold detainees, undocumented immigrants without criminal charges can be held up to 72 hours before ICE must come to pick them up. But if the immigrant is arrested for a separate criminal offense, the 72-hour clock may not start until the other offense is charged or dropped — for all arrestees, state law prescribes a two-day time limit for that — or bail is granted and paid.

“After the 72-hour period is up, there’s no more authority for whatever agency or jail or entity to continue to hold those people,” Smith said. “So . . . they should be released.”

And prior to the Trump administration, immigrants with an ICE hold often were released if time expired with no action. Now, some of them are simply relocated, whether to a different jail, or for a brief ride.

It remains unclear how often the scenario occurs.

In a July 15 meeting of the Board of County Commissioners, Orange Corrections Chief Louis Quiñones described a shuffle involving “a large amount of individuals” in early July.

He was responding to questions from Commissioner Maribel Gomez Cordero, who had been told about the practice by advocates pressuring commissioners to terminate the IGSA with ICE.

“Right around the [July 4] holiday, we had a large amount of individuals who were reaching the 72 hours and ICE had to come get those individuals and they were going to attempt to send them to another location,” he said. “That did not go as they had planned, so they brought them back to Orange County Corrections.”

One reason the issue irks some county officials is that it costs about $145 per day to keep somebody in the jail, and the federal government only reimburses Orange County about $88 per day to house detainees. Shuffling people in and out of the jail prolongs their stay and runs up the bill. The county is in the midst of trying to renegotiate its agreement with ICE for a better reimbursement rate, but so far hasn’t come to a deal.

Quiñones didn’t say how many people were impacted by the transfer, and the county didn’t make him available for a requested interview with the Orlando Sentinel.

But Smith said he was skeptical of Quiñones’ description.

“He tried to make it seem like it was a one-off,” Smith said. “So I was very intrigued that the [Guatemalan] guy that I went to go talk to had also encountered the same situation.”

Danny Banks, the county’s Public Safety Director, also said the shuffle has occurred only as “an isolated incident” so far.

“Largely, ICE has been transporting their inmates within the 72-hour timeframe indicated in the IGSA agreement,” he said in a text message.

However, the Orlando Sentinel has been told of multiple other instances. One of the most elaborate involved Cuban native Michael Borrego Fernandez, who was transported to multiple different facilities before ending up at Alligator Alcatraz, where he has been since July 5.

In June, Borrego Fernandez was arrested for violating his release terms after being charged with grand theft for bilking homeowners to pay for swimming pools up front but not finishing the work, which his mother Yaneisy Fernandez Silva said was because he “unwittingly” worked for a businessman operating the scam.

Borrego Fernandez, who lived in South Florida, was taken to the Seminole County Jail to serve ten days in jail, she said.

Following the completion of his sentence, he was taken to Orange County Jail on an ICE hold, then three days later shuttled to Pinellas County Jail. Three days after that, he was again transported back to Orange County Jail, his mother said. Roughly four days later he called his mother saying he had reached Alligator Alcatraz.

Only his calls offered clues that let Fernandez Silva search for her son in jail databases, she said.

“It’s clear what the counties are doing, they’re trying to create a legal loophole to a constitutional obligation to not hold people for more than the 72 hours,” said Mich Gonzalez, a South Florida-based immigration attorney who called the transfers “alarming.”

Gonzalez said conditions for inmates who move around are different than for those housed in a single jail.

“They’re shackled, they’re handcuffed, sometimes they’re also waist-chained,” Gonzalez said. “They’re not provided proper food like when they’re in custody at a county jail, where there are … general rules that you’re going to get three meals a day and access to water. But when you’re being transported and transferred, that goes out the window.”

In June, a Mexican man was arrested while his boss, a U.S. citizen, was driving him and his brother to a construction site. Both were passengers in the car and both had permits to work in the U.S., said the wife of one of the brothers.

She spoke with the Sentinel on the condition of anonymity as she worries her comments could make her a target of immigration authorities.

For weeks after her husband’s arrest she did not know where he was. He would call from an Orange County number but he did not appear in the correction system’s database. He told his wife he was put into a van and taken somewhere, but returned the next day to Orange County Jail.

“I didn’t hear from him for three days … I was so scared,” She said in Spanish. “He spent so much time in Orange County Jail that when he returned he knew it was the same place.”

Advocates for the family met with officials at Orange County Corrections in early July to help find him. Six hours later, he was finally located in a county jail cell, they said. He had been given a different inmate number upon his return, which contributed to the confusion.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri confirmed there has been some shuffling involving his facility but defended it, saying it stems from “a capacity issue” that can prevent detention centers from accepting detainees when their 72-hour clock ticks down.

“If the transportation system is overloaded or there’s no room at Krome … that’s when it backs up and they have to put them into the IGSA jails” such as Orange, Gualtieri said.

Gualtieri serves on Florida’s Immigration Enforcement Council, which has sounded an alarm that federal detention space can’t keep up with the pace at which Florida law enforcement agencies are arresting undocumented immigrants.

The board has called on the federal government to allow more local jails to house detainees, rather than send them to the seven jails in Florida with IGSA agreements while they await ICE detention.

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