Court Cases

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.

The ACLU of Florida and partners filed a lawsuit on April 2, 2025, challenging Florida’s new anti-immigrant law, Senate Bill 4C (SB 4C), which authorizes state and local law enforcement to imprison people based on their manner of entering the country — powers the Constitution reserves exclusively to the federal government. The district court granted a temporary restraining order against the law on April 4. Certain individuals were arrested after the issuance of the TRO, and on April 18, the district court extended the TRO, explicitly including within its scope law enforcement that had the power to enforce SB 4C, and directed the Attorney General to notify those entities of the injunction. On April 29, the court granted a preliminary injunction and certified a class. Both the Eleventh Circuit and Supreme Court denied the state’s request to put the injunction on hold. Oral argument in the Eleventh Circuit is set for the week of October 6 in Atlanta. On June 17, the district court entered an order holding Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier in civil contempt for violating a notification requirement of the April 18 order. Uthmeier has appealed the order finding him in contempt.  

In 2017, Miami-Dade County’s then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez issued an order for county jails to comply with federal immigration detention requests. He was bending to pressure from the first Trump administration. That same year, the County then held our client on an ICE detainer. Our client is a U.S. citizen born in Honduras who can not be deported. This case shows how easily foreign born U.S. citizens (who comprise a significant portion of the population in South Florida) can get caught in ICE’s dragnet. The ACLU of Florida and partners filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the county lacked the legal authority to comply with detainers and that the detainer issued against our client lacked probable cause. The defendants motions to dismiss were in large part denied. The case was stayed in March 2020 pending resolution of a related class action.