In a sort of “Al Capone goes down for tax evasion” moment, a federal judge has ordered Alligator Alcatraz, the hastily constructed immigrant detention center in the Everglades, shut down. It wasn’t shuttered for its gruesome conditions, but because in their zeal to build a wetland black site as quickly as possible, Florida officials and the federal government skipped out on the required environmental review. Hey, we’ll take it.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued an 82-page decision barring both the state and federal governments from sending any new detainees to the center and giving them 60 days to relocate existing detainees and begin removing things like fencing and generators. The decision also bans any new construction at the site.
The Trump administration tried to get around the requirement for environmental review by saying that since Florida, not the federal government, runs the detention center, no environmental review was required. This is a familiar move from the administration—a cutesy little game where they try to obscure who is really in charge of things in order to avoid consequences, like telling courts that Elon Musk was not in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency even as President Donald Trump ran around insisting he was.
Related | Florida built a black site and other red states are sure to follow
This didn’t really fly with Judge Williams, who wrote that the project was requested by the federal government, constructed with the promise it would be fully federally funded, built to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standards, run by deputized ICE officers, and existed only to house federal immigration detainees.
Since the federal government’s defense was to fob everything off on Florida, the state apparently made a very weak attempt to pretend it had totally considered the environmental impacts and everything was just dandy. So they offered an affidavit from Keith Pruett, the deputy executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, where Pruett said that the environmental impacts of the project would be minimal because the site was already an active airfield with two buildings on it.
Yeah, Judge Williams didn’t find that terribly convincing.
“Director Pruett’s declaration provided no background regarding his education, prior work experience, or familiarity with environmental sciences, the Everglades ecosystem, or NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act],” her ruling read. “It is entirely unclear in what capacity Director Pruett purports to possess the knowledge required to determine the likely environmental impacts of a detention center on the Everglades.”
Williams also noted that while both Florida and federal government officials repeatedly talked about how important immigration enforcement is, they offered “little to no evidence why this detention camp, in this particular location, is uniquely suited and critical to that mission.” At best, Florida coughed up a state law enforcement official who said that his troopers have apprehended people with warrants for murder in other countries and maybe those people were detained in the Everglades, but that vagueness didn’t fly.
“He could not directly testify that even one of the detainees had a criminal record, much less a record of violent crimes necessitating their seclusion from society in the Everglades,” Williams noted
Weird that the judge didn’t see making sick racist jokes about alligators eating immigrants as a compelling reason to put the facility in the Everglades and wreck the environment. How dare she thwart Trump’s longtime fantasy of an inhumane prison where the incarcerated could be eaten by predators.
The state of Florida has already appealed, of course, with a spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis literally saying, in response to the court’s decision, that “The deportations will continue until morale improves.”
If the federal government wasn’t busy pretending Florida is running things, you could expect Trump to make his typical beeline for the Supreme Court to ask him to pretty please let him wreck the Everglades because it is unconstitutional to stop him from wrecking the Everglades if he wants to.
However, it might be a little tougher for Florida to get the warm reception Trump always gets. The Supreme Court already declined to stay a lower court decision blocking parts of Florida’s immigration law, but maybe the high court’s conservatives will figure out a way to let this monstrosity of a prison continue—since their best pal Trump really wants it.