Court Cases

This case challenged two Florida Senate districts in the Tampa Bay area—Districts 16 and 18—as racially gerrymandered in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. District 16 stretches across the waters of Tampa Bay to connect disparate and distinct Black communities in Tampa and St. Petersburg, packing more than half of the region’s Black residents into that district. As a result, adjacent District 18 is artificially stripped of Black residents, diminishing their influence and voice in elections there. We filed this case in April 2024. In March 2025, the court permitted our claim concerning District 16 to proceed to trial, which was held in June 2025.

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.

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.  

The Baker County Detention Center (“Baker”) operates in part as an immigration detention center. In September 2022, after the ACLU of Florida and others publicly criticized Baker’s conditions of confinement and treatment of people detained there, Baker denied the ACLU of Florida and the Baker Legal Assistance Program access to previously approved legal visits to meet with current and prospective clients to address their time-sensitive legal matters. Baker also threatened to cancel subsequent scheduled visits. Following this, Baker changed their legal mail and legal phone call policies without notifying the ACLU of Florida or other attorneys, obstructing access to confidential legal mail and legal phone calls. The ACLU of Florida filed a federal lawsuit in September 2022, which was quickly amended, arguing that Baker’s actions violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights to confidential attorney-client communications and right to be free from retaliation.

A 2021 Florida law generally prohibits “social media platforms” from censoring posts by or about political candidates and “journalistic enterprises.” It specifically penalizes any content moderation practices the law classifies as censorship, deplatforming, or shadowbanning of both political candidates and “journalistic enterprises.” Under the guise of “prohibiting censorship,” these laws seek to replace the private entities’ editorial voice with preferences dictated by the government. The ACLU’s position is that the government’s desire to have private speakers distribute more of any viewpoint is not a permissible basis for regulating the editorial decisions of private platforms. Choosing what not to publish and how to prioritize what is published is protected expression. On the very largest platforms, free expression values are best served if companies choose to preserve as much political speech as possible, including the speech of public figures. But, regardless of what platforms ought to permit as a matter of corporate policy, the government can’t constitutionally mandate what they ultimately choose. We filed amicus briefs in the district court (which granted a preliminary injunction on June 30, 2021), in the Eleventh Circuit (which, on May 23, 2022, affirmed in part and reversed in part the injunction), and the Supreme Court, which, on July 1, 2024, asked the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider the case under a particular standard. In August 2024, the Eleventh Circuit sent the case back to the district court, where the case is proceeding again. The plaintiffs filed an amended complaint in November 2024.

Mr. Jones is a Black disabled man who was injured by law-enforcement use of force. On August 8, 2020, Officer Ceinski stopped Mr. Jones for a traffic infraction in Sarasota, Florida. Mr. Jones complied with the officer’s request to exit the vehicle, but had difficulty due to a disability affecting his hands. While offering his documents to the officer, Mr. Jones provided his concealed carry permit and informed the officer there was a weapon in the car. Upon seeing the weapon in the car, the officer violently restrained and choked Mr. Jones despite him standing in front of the vehicle and making no attempt to reach for the weapon. After the incident, Mr. Jones sued Officer Ceinski for violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. The district court granted summary judgment for the officer based on qualified immunity, ruling Officer Ceinski’s conduct did not violate a clearly established federal right. We filed an amicus brief in the Eleventh Circuit in December 2023, asking the court to consider an officer’s knowledge of an individual’s disability as a central aspect of determining, under Graham v. Connor and its progeny, the objective reasonableness of a police officer’s use of force. The brief also contended that the failure to consider disability in the Graham analysis disparately harms Black disabled people because they are disproportionately subjected to police use of force.