Florida GOP chief delays his ‘listening tour’

TALLAHASSEE — After a mass shooting in Texas intensified a partisan divide about immigration, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida has decided to postpone a statewide “listening tour” focused on the topic.

“The rhetoric is so charged across the political spectrum that in order to have a truly productive listening tour we’ve decided to delay to a later date,” state Sen. Joe Gruters, who also serves as chairman of the state GOP, said in a text message Monday.

Gruter’s decision to delay the tour, first reported by Florida Politics, came a week after a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in which 22 people were killed. Authorities said the accused gunman wrote online that the attack was in response to an “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

This spring, Gruters and state Rep. Cord Byrd, RNeptune Beach, sponsored a measure that banned socalled sanctuary cities in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who campaigned on the issue, signed it into law in June.

The Republican legislators had planned to conduct a six-city tour of the state to gather support for other immigration-related legislation, beginning in Venice, St. Petersburg and Altamonte Springs next week.

But Gruters said the debate sparked by the Texas massacre prompted him to put the plans on hold, at least for now.

“With everything going on we felt it would be best to give it a little time,” Gruters said.

Gruters still intends to hold the tour before the start of the 2020 legislative session in January, when he plans to propose bills that would further crack down on illegal immigration.

One of the proposals would require all Florida employers to use E-Verify, a federal electronic system that checks employees’ eligibility to work in the U.S., Gruters said in July. Gruters is also backing a bill that “would enhance penalties for convicted and deported criminals who reenter the United States illegally,” the Sarasota Republican said in a text message last month.

But the measures may also be facing a cooling-off period, he said.

Since planning for the tour began several weeks ago, Democrats and immigrant advocates have slammed the idea, in part because there were no scheduled stops in South Florida, a region of the state which is heavily populated by Hispanics.

“Instead of going into immigrant communities impacted by the nationalism and xenophobia his anti-immigrant bills have inspired — Senator Gruters is holding staged stops in cities and communities that are majority white and majority Republican,” Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Juan Penalosa said in a statement on Aug. 5, two days after the Texas shooting.