An immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will remain open after a federal appeals court rejected a challenge that sought to force the facility to shut down over alleged compliance failures with federal environmental law, according to a decision issued by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday.
In upholding an earlier ruling that blocked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ order to wind down operations, the majority of the three-judge panel said the facility is not under federal control, and it therefore does not trigger the federal environmental impact review requirements at issue in the case. The judges wrote that “Florida, not federal, officials constructed the facility,” and that state officials control both the land and “entirely” built the detention site at state expense.
At the time Williams issued her preliminary injunction last August, the appellate majority said Florida had received no federal reimbursement. The appeals court said that Williams concluded that a reimbursement decision already had been made, and the appellate panel paused her order just days after it was issued, setting the case for further proceedings.
Those proceedings were held earlier this month in Miami, the appeals court decision said. Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity—two environmental groups that brought the lawsuit—said after Tuesday’s ruling that they would continue litigation as the case returns to the district court.
“This fight is far from over,” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said in response to the appeals court’s decision. She said Alligator Alcatraz was “hastily erected in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the country without the most basic environmental review,” and that it has imposed “immense human and ecological cost.”
State officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer as part of support for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to the report. Earlier this month, a lawyer for two people detained there said in court papers that guards “severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees,” according to the same account.
In a dissent, Judge Nancy Abudu argued that immigration is a federal responsibility and that the federal government cannot avoid its role simply because Florida built an immigration detention facility. Abudu wrote, “The facility would not, and could not, have been built and used as an immigration detention center without the federal defendants’ request,” adding that “the evidence of federal control perhaps is most apparent” when the court recognizes that “immigration remains uniquely and exclusively within the federal government’s domain.”
The appellate ruling means the injunction’s path to ending the facility has been blocked for now, with further legal action likely to focus on how responsibilities are divided between state and federal authorities and what environmental review obligations apply.