Court Cases

Immigrants’ rights advocates sued the Trump administration over lack of access to legal counsel and violations of due process for people detained at Florida’s new, notorious Everglades immigration center, a hastily constructed facility on an abandoned airstrip in the middle of the wetlands in Ochopee. The facility, cruelly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is built out of temporary tents, trailers, and chain-link fences with barbed wire. It is surrounded by alligators, pythons, mosquitos, and swampland, and is at risk of dangerous flooding. Around the time of our filing, approximately 700 people were detained there, and the facility has the capacity to detain at least 3,000. No protocols existed at this facility for providing basic, confidential attorney-client communication. Detainees only had access to infrequent pay phone calls that were timed, monitored, and recorded. Additionally, many detainees were eligible for release on bond but had no access to bond hearings. This class-action case was brought by detainees held at the facility and legal service providers and law firms with clients held at the site, including Sanctuary of the South and Bilbao Law, LLC. They are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, and Americans for Immigrant Justice.

Our client, a 24-year-old man originally from El Salvador, was detained at the Baker County Detention Center (which in part operates as an immigration detention facility) without a criminal record, solely based on ICE suspicions that he had gang affiliations. He has suffered from a psychotic disorder and speaks little English. While in detention, ICE and Baker County officers threw him in solitary confinement for 88 days to pressure him to sign his deportation papers. His mental-health condition worsened during his confinement, and he was violently assaulted by a corrections officer because he was singing too loudly. His eardrum was damaged by the assault. These actions violated ICE policies and Florida law and illustrate broader conditions issues at the Baker County Detention Center. We filed a Federal Tort Claims Act administrative complaint on December 19, 2023, and then filed a federal lawsuit on November 22, 2024.

Immigrants’ rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit challenging Florida’s authority to detain people at the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center, a hastily constructed immigration detention 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 unprecedented assertion of authority to operate an immigration detention center pursuant to several 287(g) agreements, despite how 287(g) agreements do not confer such authority. The state’s chaotic and cruel operations, void of federal oversight, have 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. 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. The 287(g) program allows certain 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. This class-action case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, Community Justice Project, and National Immigrant Justice Center on behalf of people detained at the Everglades facility.

We and our partners are challenging Section 10 of SB 1718 (2023), which unconstitutionally criminalizes the act of transporting into Florida any immigrant who state and local officials with no competence in immigration law arbitrarily tag as having not been properly “inspected” by the federal government. This law threatens Floridians with up to fifteen years in jail just for traveling with family members, coworkers, and others–without exception. We filed our complaint in July 2023 and sought a preliminary injunction. On December 21, 2023, the court dismissed Governor DeSantis from the case, which left the attorney general and state prosecutors as the remaining defendants. The court granted our motion for a preliminary injunction in May 2024 and applied the injunction statewide, but the court then asked for briefing on the scope of the remedy and ultimately (on March 11, 2025) narrowed the injunction to just include our clients.

In 2023, the Florida Legislature passed SB 264, which unfairly restricts most Chinese citizens—and most citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea—from purchasing homes in the state. The law bars people who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and whose “domicile,” or permanent home, is in China, from purchasing property in Florida altogether. A similar but less restrictive rule would apply to citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, and other “countries of concern.” This law recalls similar efforts over the past century to weaponize false claims of “national security” against Asian immigrants and other marginalized communities. In the early 1900s, states across the country used similar justifications to pass “alien land laws” designed to prohibit Chinese and Japanese immigrants from becoming landowners. We and our partners filed a federal lawsuit on May 22, 2023, representing an Orlando-based real estate firm and four Chinese citizens who live, work, study, and raise families in Florida. The district court denied a preliminary injunction, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial in November 2025. The case was then voluntarily dismissed.

This case was brought by the ACLU and partners against the Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay on behalf of Peter Brown, a U.S. citizen, who was unlawfully detained by the county at ICE’s request. Brown’s repeated pleas that he was a U.S. citizen and could not be held on immigration charges went ignored. Brown suffered severe emotional trauma because of this experience. He languished in detention and would have been deported to Jamaica—a country to which he has no ties whatsoever—if not for the last-minute intervention of a friend who sent a copy of Brown’s birth certificate to an ICE agent. We filed suit in December 2018, and our motion for summary judgment was filed in February 2020. Five years later, on May 30, 2025, the court granted partial summary judgment in our client’s favor.

This case challenges 2023’s SB 846, which presumptively prohibits the academic employment in Florida public universities and colleges of international students domiciled in seven foreign countries, including most prominently China, and accordingly also injures professors established in Florida who need to hire these students to succeed in their professorial careers. We filed suit on March 25, 2024, and filed a motion for preliminary injunction on April 29, 2024. On March 30, 2025, we obtained a statewide injunction against the law “to the extent that it prohibits student employment at Florida’s state universities and colleges already authorized by F-1 visas issued by the federal government.” The Eleventh Circuit later narrowed that injunction to apply just to our clients.

In August and September 2022, we sent the Florida Department of Law Enforcement requests for records related to Executive Order 21-223 and 2022’s Senate Bill 1808 (seeking information regarding enforcement efforts against undocumented immigrants who the state claims have traveled to Florida from the U.S.-Mexico border). We filed a public-records complaint on July 19, 2023. The FDLE filed their response on September 5, 2023, saying they were understaffed. At a hearing in October 2023, the court ordered the FDLE to produce the records within 45 days. The FDLE encountered a delay after producing just two records. Due to internal turmoil at FDLE caused by the Governor’s office in connection with a separate public-records lawsuit, FDLE counsel in the case resigned. Subsequently, FDLE made successive productions of records revealing that state and local officers had initiated stops and made dozens of immigration-related arrests without federal authority, as part of a border strike force at the direction of Governor DeSantis, since October 2021.

The ACLU of Florida submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS) in August 2024 concerning changes to an asylum application processing policy. In 2023, over one million applications were pending with USCIS. This includes hundreds of thousands of affirmative asylum cases pending over two years, with several thousand pending for over a decade. This effectively leaves affirmative asylum seekers in limbo, unable to progress in their education, find a job, or live a secure life. USCIS has been known to operate under a “last in, first out” system that leaves those who have been waiting the longest left to wait and wonder even more while new applications are prioritized. In response to this unacceptable lack of transparency, the ACLU of Florida inquired to USCIS about their process for scheduling interviews, prioritizing cases, and addressing delays. Because the government failed to produce the documents, we filed a lawsuit on December 16, 2024, seeking to compel USCIS to immediately release internal communications regarding its systems to adjudicate affirmative asylum applications and address the critical backlog of cases.