Court 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 February and August 2024, the ACLU of Florida submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to ICE seeking information related to individuals’ detention in ICE custody at the Baker County Detention Center in Macclenny, Florida. These records have been sought as part of our efforts to monitor conditions at Baker and similar facilities and provide advocacy surrounding such conditions, given that, through various investigations, we have discovered that Baker has consistently failed to ensure the safety and well-being of people in ICE detention, in violation of the 2019 National Detention Standards. The records sought will significantly contribute to the public’s understanding of Baker’s use of solitary confinement and use of force against individuals detained there, as well as Baker’s provision of mental health care for individuals detained there. After ICE failed to timely produce the requested records, we filed the lawsuit on October 24, 2024.

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.