Appeals court keeps ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ open, rejecting need for federal environmental review

An immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will remain open, an appeals court decided Tuesday, upholding its earlier decision to block a judge’s order for the facility to wind down operations because it didn’t comply with federal environmental law.

A majority on the three-judge panel from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said the Florida-run facility wasn’t under federal control and didn’t need to comply with federal law requiring an environmental impact review.

“Florida, not federal, officials constructed the facility,” a majority of the judges wrote. “They control the land and ‘entirely’ built the facility at state expense.”

At the time of U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ preliminary injunction, Florida had received no federal reimbursement, the appellate majority wrote. Williams concluded that a reimbursement decision already had been made.

The appeals court paused Williams’ order just days after she issued it last August, pending a hearing. The hearing was held earlier this month in Miami.

Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, two of the environmental groups that had brought the lawsuit, said they would continue fighting as the case returns to the district court for further litigation.

“This fight is far from over,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “Alligator Alcatraz was hastily erected in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the country without the most basic environmental review, at immense human and ecological cost.”

State officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer to support President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Earlier this month, a lawyer for two people detained there said in court papers that guards severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees.

In a dissent to the appellate panel’s ruling, Judge Nancy Abudu wrote that immigration is a federal responsibility, and just because Florida built an immigration detention facility, it doesn’t allow the federal government to abdicate its authority.

“The facility would not, and could not, have been built and used as an immigration detention center without the federal defendants’ request,” Abudu said. “The evidence of federal control perhaps is most apparent when we acknowledge that immigration remains uniquely and exclusively within the federal government’s domain.”