New Lawsuit Challenges Florida’s Authority to Detain People at Notorious ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center

FORT MYERS, FL – Immigrants’ rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday evening challenging Florida’s authority to detain people at the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center, a hastily constructed facility in the middle of the Everglades, which is surrounded by alligators, snakes, mosquitos, and swampland at risk of dangerous flooding. The case focuses on the state’s expansive and unlawful use of 287(g) agreements to assert independent state control over immigration detainees, which is still at issue after yesterday’s court ruling ending transfers of people to the facility.

The lack of authority to operate the facility has resulted in unprecedented challenges that people in immigration detention typically do not face, including being held without charge, not receiving initial custody or bond determinations, not appearing in the detainee locator system, and not being able to access their attorneys or immigration court.

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, Community Justice Project, and National Immigrant Justice Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of people detained at the Everglades facility.

The 287(g) program allows individual state and local officers to help with a narrow set of immigration enforcement tasks, subject to rigorous training and close supervision by federal officials. It does not allow them to set up their own independent detention operations. And it does not let state officers sub-delegate immigration authority to private contractors who do not and cannot participate in the 287(g) program. Florida officers are also acting without adequate training in the many complex facets of immigration law. Many are only spending a few hours online, compared to equivalent federal officers who receive multiple weeks of in person training.

These unprecedented violations of the 287(g) statute have immediately led to a host of real-world problems. Physical conditions at the facility are atrocious and dangerous. Detainees are going “off the grid” and being taken out of the normal systems for immigration detention and removal proceedings. Congress required the Department of Homeland Security to maintain custody of immigration detainees, and it imposed tight limits on the 287(g) program, precisely to avoid these kinds of problems.

“This facility has already become a disaster in the first few weeks of its operations, with mounting reports of disease, wrongful removals, and people being denied all kinds of basic rights. This is exactly why Congress did not allow states to set up their own immigration facilities. The government needs to follow the law when people’s lives and liberties are at stake. It’s time for this failed experiment to end,” said Spencer Amdur, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel.

“Florida has wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to unlawfully detain people in this abusive immigration detention center. Not only have the conditions been abhorrent, but the detention itself is unlawful. People are being held without charge, cut off from their attorneys, and made invisible in the immigration system. Families cannot even find out where their loved ones are. This is a crisis created entirely by the state’s reckless decision to ignore federal law and invent its own immigration jail in the middle of the Everglades. The harm being inflicted on our clients is immediate and irreparable, and it underscores why states are not allowed to overstep into federal immigration processes,” said Amy Godshall, legal fellow and immigrants’ rights attorney with the ACLU of Florida.

“Our immigrant communities have always been right about this: We are Floridians, too, and deserve the same respect, compassion and due process as anyone else in this state. Florida’s authoritarian experiment cannot continue unchecked, and we are confident the court will see that there is no lawful authority for Florida to operate this immigration facility,” said Miriam Haskell, senior attorney and director of litigation at Community Justice Project.

“It is truly unprecedented for a state to claim authority to operate its own, independent immigration detention system. The lack of accountability and resulting deprivation at this remote and inhumane detention camp in the Florida Everglades is exactly why Congress has made it unlawful and directed only the federal government to have custody over noncitizens as they go through the immigration system,” said Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center.

The complaint is below.