Environmental groups told the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday that Florida should not keep operating its Everglades immigration detention center while its closure order sits blocked by a temporary pause. The groups asked the three-judge panel to lift the halt, arguing that federal environmental-review requirements apply to the “Alligator Alcatraz” site.
The dispute centers on the conditions under which federal law requires an environmental review for the detention center located in the Florida Everglades. The temporary halt has kept the facility open and still holding detainees, even though a federal district judge ordered in August that operations should wind down.
In a Miami courtroom, the panel’s questions focused on how much control the federal government had over the state-built facility and what level of federal involvement triggers compliance with federal environmental law. The judges did not signal when they would rule on whether the halt should be lifted.
Jesse Panuccio, an attorney for the Florida Department of Emergency Management, told the judges that federal funding and federal control were the two criteria for deciding whether federal environmental law applies. Panuccio said the federal agencies had no control over the state-run detention center, and he argued that “You need both,” adding that even with funding, it would not follow because “they don’t have federal control.”
An attorney for the environmental groups said the review law applied because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had authorized the funding and because immigration is a federal responsibility rather than a state one. Paul Schwiep, representing Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, said the case required only “substantial federal control,” not complete control.
Chief Judge William Pryor responded from the bench that the facility was not “federally controlled” if the state retained authority to make decisions. Judge Nancy Abudu asked the attorney for the federal government whether states can be in charge of immigration matters, and Adam Gustafson responded that the federal government can delegate certain responsibilities to states. Abudu then pressed on whether delegated authority would mean the responsibility would operate without federal limits, asking whether it would amount to a “Wild, Wild West.”
The district court’s order that the appeals court paused was issued in mid-August. The judge found that officials had failed to conduct an environmental-impact review of the detention center under federal law and ordered the facility to wind down operations over two months. The district judge also concluded that a reimbursement decision already had been made, and the appellate court halted that wind-down order during an appeal.
The underlying environmental lawsuit was one of three federal court challenges to the Everglades facility since it opened. In the other two cases, litigation focused on federal authority and access for detainees. One challenge ended after the immigrant detainee who filed the suit agreed to be removed from the United States.
In the third lawsuit, a federal judge in Fort Myers ruled that the Everglades facility must provide detainees with better access to their attorneys and allow confidential, unmonitored and unrecorded outgoing legal calls.
The appeals-court halt, first put in place after early September proceedings, relied on arguments that the state had not yet applied for federal reimbursement at the time and therefore was not required to follow federal environmental law. The record described in Tuesday’s arguments also included that Florida was notified in late September that FEMA had approved $608 million in federal funding to support the center’s construction and operation.