Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into FloridaBulldog.org

Fort Lauderdale, Florida | Est. 2009

PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: April 9, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Florida’s Independent Nonprofit Watchdog Newsroom

FLORIDA BULLDOG NEWS SUMMARY — APRIL 2026

A Broward Lawyer’s Plan to Let Trump Seize the Midterm Elections | Sheriff Tony Fires His Undersheriff to Prevent a 2028 Rival | Why South Florida Won’t Push Back Against ICE | The New BSO Undersheriff and the ‘Patty Cake’ Case

Florida Bulldog presents its April 2026 news summary — four original investigations published on FloridaBulldog.org in the past three months, none of which appeared in any previous edition of this news summary series. A Deerfield Beach lawyer with a history of Florida Bar suspensions drafted a 17-page executive order for President Trump to declare a national emergency and seize control of the 2026 midterm elections — based on unverified claims of Chinese election interference. Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony abruptly fired his respected 30-year veteran undersheriff in a 30-second phone call, telling her he would “see her in 2028” — apparently to eliminate a potential political rival before she could announce. A deeply reported examination explores why South Florida, despite being one of the most diverse immigrant regions in America, has mounted strikingly little organized resistance to federal ICE enforcement operations. And the new BSO undersheriff Tony promoted hours after firing the last one walked straight into his own controversy involving a physical altercation in BSO’s Finance Department that insiders are calling the “patty cake” case.

Florida Bulldog is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded entirely by readers and donors. We accept no advertising and answer to no corporate owner or political interest. Every story is freely available at FloridaBulldog.org.

Support Florida Bulldog: FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

Deerfield Beach Lawyer Ticktin’s Plan to Let Trump Seize the 2026 Midterm Elections

By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | March 1, 2026

Widespread reports linked Deerfield Beach lawyer Peter Ticktin to a scheme for President Trump to seize control of the 2026 midterm elections by way of an executive order that Ticktin drafted. Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus went directly to Ticktin and got him on the record — in a revealing interview that exposed the full scope of his role, his long personal history with Donald Trump, and the troubling Florida Bar record that follows him. The supposed emergency behind the executive order: Chinese hackers are allegedly ready to corrupt U.S. voting results in November, just as they supposedly did in 2020. This claim is directly contradicted by every major U.S. intelligence agency, which has consistently debunked 2020 election-interference conspiracy theories including the one involving China. Ticktin told Florida Bulldog he sees himself as “an outside person who’s attempting to influence things.”

Ticktin’s ties to Trump run unusually deep and unusually far back. The two have known each other since their high school days in the early 1960s, when Ticktin served as Trump’s platoon sergeant at the New York Military Academy. Today, Ticktin collaborates with Trump advisors including retired Army lieutenant general Mike Flynn and MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon — who has been explicit about the plan’s ambitions on his War Room podcast. Norman Eisen of the nonprofit State Democracy Defenders Fund told Florida Bulldog flatly: “If Trump tries this we will be in court in the blink of an eye. There’s no constitutional basis for this.”

What makes the Ticktin story especially newsworthy — and what Florida Bulldog’s reporting uniquely documents — is Ticktin’s own Florida Bar history. The Florida Supreme Court ordered Ticktin to briefly close his law practice in 2009 after finding he had shown “poor professional judgment” resulting in “misconduct unbecoming of a member of the Florida Bar.” A second Bar complaint also resulted in a brief license suspension. More recently, West Palm Beach U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks issued sanctions against Ticktin, former Trump lawyer Alina Habba, and Trump himself totaling nearly $1 million for pressing what Middlebrooks called “political grievances masquerading as legal claims.” Middlebrooks also referred Ticktin to his state ethics supervisors. The Florida Bar did not investigate. Ticktin confirmed this to Florida Bulldog and said it was appropriate.

★ SUPPORT FLORIDA BULLDOG — DONATE TODAY ▶ Donate Now at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

In his Florida Bulldog interview, Ticktin described Trump’s motivation as ensuring election transparency “so that whichever party wins, there will be no question as to whether it was fair.” As Florida Bulldog noted, only Trump and his allies have raised questions about election integrity — after the 2020 election they filed 62 legal challenges, nearly all were dismissed, and 30 judges including Trump appointees found them groundless. Trump himself, responding to a PBS reporter the day after Florida Bulldog’s story broke, said he was not considering declaring a national emergency around the midterms. Yet the 17-page draft executive order Ticktin confirms he authored and has been circulating among the president’s allies tells a different story.

Ticktin expressed confidence that any legal challenge to the planned executive order would ultimately fail, predicting the U.S. Supreme Court would weigh in favorably. Whether the Trump executive order Ticktin drafted gets signed, challenged, or quietly shelved, Florida Bulldog’s reporting establishes his central role in the planning and provides the most detailed public account available of what that plan actually contains and who is behind it.

Florida Bulldog’s coverage of Ticktin spans years — from his Florida Bar ethics record to his role in the Trump v. Clinton sanctions case to his ongoing representation of Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, serving a nine-year sentence for plotting to tamper with election equipment. Noreen Marcus’s reporting on Ticktin’s latest initiative is the definitive account of how a Deerfield Beach lawyer became a key architect of a plan to give the president emergency powers over American elections.

Sheriff Tony Fires 30-Year BSO Veteran Undersheriff Anderson to Block 2028 Rival

By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | February 25, 2026

Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony sent a shockwave through his agency on a Wednesday evening when word got out that the night before he had suddenly fired his longtime second in command, Undersheriff Nichole Anderson. Also fired were Anderson’s civilian aide Sharon Hayes and her driver, Captain Jamie Smith. By midday Wednesday, Anderson’s photograph and biography had been scrubbed from BSO’s official website. The new undersheriff is Steve Robson, a 29-year BSO veteran. Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen broke the story hours before any other outlet, drawing on ranking police sources inside the agency who described what happened in striking detail.

According to those police sources, Tony became enraged when he learned that Anderson was planning to run against him in 2028. The account of the firing phone call is memorable in its brevity: “She got a call from him. It lasted 30 seconds and it ended with him hanging up and saying I’ll see you in 2028,” a police source told Florida Bulldog. Like everyone who works at BSO, Anderson was an “at will” employee — meaning the sheriff can terminate her for any reason or no reason at all. But the manner of her dismissal and the simultaneous firing of her aide and driver sent an unmistakable signal throughout the 6,000-person agency about how Tony responds to perceived political threats.

Anderson is a pioneering figure in Broward law enforcement by any measure. Tony himself appointed her as BSO’s first African-American woman to serve as undersheriff in September 2019. Before that, she was the first Black woman to head a district command when named to lead the South Broward district in 2011 by then-Sheriff Al Lamberti. She joined BSO as a road patrol deputy in 1996 after two years as a state trooper with the Florida Highway Patrol, holds a graduate degree in organizational management, and graduated from the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia in 2018.

★ SUPPORT FLORIDA BULLDOG — DONATE TODAY ▶ Donate Now at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

The story drew more than 16,000 views within days — one of the most widely read Florida Bulldog investigations of the year. The speed and manner of the firing reflected a pattern Florida Bulldog has documented repeatedly in its coverage of Tony: an inclination to treat perceived threats to his political standing as matters requiring immediate and decisive action, regardless of the collateral impact on agency morale or institutional continuity.

The firing of Anderson is part of a much larger story Florida Bulldog has been telling for years: the ongoing deterioration of the relationship between Sheriff Tony and the county government, the municipalities that contract with BSO, and the command staff that runs the agency day to day. In the same month, Tony also fired Colonel Andrew Dunbar — a 34-year BSO veteran promoted to colonel only a year earlier — along with other personnel changes that left the agency’s leadership structure significantly disrupted.

Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Anderson firing was the starting point for a chain of follow-up reporting that has defined Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Broward Sheriff’s Office in 2026: the “patty cake” case involving her replacement, the April 14 Broward County Commission agenda item to begin taking back fire rescue services, and the ongoing budget dispute between Tony and county officials.

Why South Florida Is Not Pushing Back Against ICE the Way Other Cities Are

By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | February 20, 2026

Protesters in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and cities across the country have flooded streets, emptied shops, and raised national awareness about the human cost of the Trump administration’s intensifying immigration enforcement operations. South Florida, however, has mounted a strikingly different response. Despite being one of the most diverse and heavily immigrant metropolitan regions in the United States — home to vast communities of Haitians, Cubans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Jamaicans, Nicaraguans, and dozens of other nationalities — South Florida’s organized resistance to federal ICE operations has been conspicuously muted. Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus investigated why, producing one of the most significant pieces of community journalism the newsroom has published in 2026.

The insiders, advocates, and community members Marcus interviewed identified multiple reinforcing factors suppressing collective action. Fear is the most immediate: Governor DeSantis’s “Operation Tidal Wave” produced nearly 10,000 “illegal alien” arrests during the second half of 2025 alone — a number that sent a chilling message through communities where nearly every family has undocumented members, friends, or neighbors. The political infrastructure that might channel that fear into organized resistance is itself fractured: in Florida, all 67 counties have signed formal agreements for sheriffs to work with ICE — meaning there is no sanctuary county in the state to serve as a focal point for resistance. The Miami City Commission caved to pressure from DeSantis and pledged police cooperation, while some individual Miami-Dade municipalities refused to do so, creating a contradictory patchwork that makes coordination difficult.

Within South Florida’s immigrant communities themselves, Florida Bulldog’s reporting finds historical ethnic and national divisions that have made cross-community solidarity harder to build than it might appear from the outside. The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal five months ago to order an immediate end to racial profiling in immigration enforcement has encouraged federal agents and their local partners to continue operations that target communities of color with minimal legal constraint. And the vast majority of ICE enforcement targets — as Florida Bulldog’s reporting notes — are people of color, a demographic reality that intersects in painful ways with South Florida’s own internal ethnic politics about who deserves protection and who does not.

★ SUPPORT FLORIDA BULLDOG — DONATE TODAY ▶ Donate Now at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

Marcus’s reporting connects the South Florida story to the national context through the image of Liam Conjeo Ramos — a 5-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat seized alongside his father and shipped to a Texas detention camp — which evokes the 26-year-old saga of Elian Gonzalez, the 5-year-old rescued from the waters off Fort Lauderdale after a deadly boat wreck. That history has not produced unified resistance; it has produced a community fractured by its own political divisions.

Florida Bulldog’s examination of South Florida’s muted ICE resistance comes at a moment when the consequences of that silence are becoming impossible to ignore. Families are being separated. Children are being left behind when parents are detained. Communities that have built lives and businesses in South Florida for decades are living under sustained uncertainty. Marcus’s reporting does not editorialize about what South Florida communities should do — it documents with clarity what is happening, why, and what the structural obstacles to a different response actually are.

The ICE resistance story drew thousands of views in its first days of publication and generated significant response from South Florida readers who recognized their own community’s experience in the reporting. Florida Bulldog will continue to cover the ongoing impact of federal immigration enforcement across Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties — tracking both the enforcement statistics and the human stories behind them.

New Broward Undersheriff Robson and the ‘Patty Cake’ Confrontation in the Finance Department

By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | February 27, 2026

Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony has a new undersheriff and a new headache. Less than 48 hours after Tony promoted 29-year BSO veteran Steve Robson to replace the abruptly fired Nichole Anderson, Robson became the center of his own controversy — one that insiders at the Broward Sheriff’s Office are already calling the “patty cake” case. Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen obtained details of a physical confrontation that occurred inside BSO’s Finance Department, in which Robson was involved with a suspect and then positioned himself in the aftermath as the victim of that confrontation, raising immediate questions inside the agency about how the new undersheriff handles a physical altercation in an administrative setting — and about how such a confrontation gets characterized after the fact.

The physical altercation in the Finance Department is an inherently unusual event. Finance departments at law enforcement agencies are administrative offices handling accounting, payroll, and budgetary functions — not operational environments where violent suspects are expected to appear. The fact that a violent felon turned up in BSO’s Finance Department is notable; the fact that the new undersheriff became physically involved in the confrontation is more notable still; and the fact that Robson subsequently positioned himself as a victim deserving recognition — rather than as a command officer who handled an administrative security incident — generated the skepticism and dark humor within the agency that produced the “patty cake” label. The suspect was ultimately arrested by another officer, BSO Sergeant Webb.

Police sources inside BSO described varying perspectives on what actually occurred and on how Robson’s account of events compares to what the Finance Department’s security cameras would show. Florida Bulldog’s reporting documents a new undersheriff whose first days in the second-most-powerful position at BSO produced not the quiet consolidation of authority that typically follows a leadership transition, but a physical confrontation, a contested narrative about what happened, and the kind of nickname that tends to stick inside a law enforcement culture that runs on reputation and gossip.

★ SUPPORT FLORIDA BULLDOG — DONATE TODAY ▶ Donate Now at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

The “patty cake” story arrives in the context of profound disruption at BSO’s leadership. In the same week Tony fired Anderson and her staff, he also terminated Colonel Andrew Dunbar — a 34-year BSO veteran elevated to colonel only a year earlier. The simultaneous loss of Anderson, Dunbar, and the civilian and command staff around them left significant institutional gaps at the top of an agency that employs more than 6,000 people and serves over two million Broward County residents. Robson’s rapid elevation filled one of those gaps immediately. The “patty cake” incident, emerging within days of that elevation, suggested that the transition at the top of BSO was going to be anything but smooth.

Florida Bulldog has been the only South Florida news outlet covering the full arc of the Broward Sheriff’s Office under Gregory Tony with the depth, consistency, and source access that the story demands. The “patty cake” story is one data point in a larger picture: a sheriff who fired his most experienced second-in-command to prevent a political challenge, promoted a replacement who walked straight into controversy, presented a budget appeal to Tallahassee built on numbers that don’t add up, and now faces a Broward County Commission actively considering whether to dismantle large portions of his agency’s operational empire.

For the deputies, firefighters, civilian staff, and command officers of the Broward Sheriff’s Office who are living through this period of leadership turbulence, Florida Bulldog’s reporting offers something no official BSO press release will provide: an honest account of what is happening and why. And for the Broward County residents who depend on BSO for their public safety — who pay its bills, fund its contracts, and rely on its performance — Florida Bulldog’s reporting ensures they are not kept in the dark about the internal dynamics of the most powerful law enforcement agency in their county.

ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG

Florida Bulldog is Florida’s independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan statewide investigative newsroom, founded in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen. A federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization and proud member of the Investigative News Network, Florida Bulldog covers government, politics, law enforcement, the courts, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety across Broward County, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and all of Florida. No advertisers. No corporate owners. No political agenda. Nonprofit, independent, nonpartisan. No fake news.

Visit: www.FloridaBulldog.org Donate: FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog — All Donations Tax-Deductible