Court Cases

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.

Michael James Jackson was sentenced to death in May 2023. If his resentencing had taken place just one month earlier, before Florida’s capital-sentencing law changed in April 2023, eight votes for death would have meant that he lived. If the trial judge had correctly applied the amended law to apply only prospectively, as the Legislature unambiguously commanded, only a unanimous jury vote could have resulted in death. In either case, the very same eight- to-four jury vote would have saved Mr. Jackson’s life. And even this on-the-cusp vote might have tilted in favor of life if the trial court had not failed to instruct the jury that, under Florida law, a life recommendation would be binding. A continuance would have allowed the court to confirm—with model jury instructions that came out shortly after Mr. Jackson was sentenced—the arguments Mr. Jackson’s attorneys were making all along: that the jury could not be lawfully instructed that its life vote would be a mere recommendation subject to the court’s approval rather than a binding determination that the court could not modify. The ACLU is assisting in the appeal and entered appearances in September 2023. Our briefing contends that the trial court’s improvised and inaccurate jury instructions violated state law and Supreme Court precedent and that Florida’s new statute allowing non-unanimity in capital sentencing violates the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Briefing was complete in September 2024, and oral argument took place December 2024. The court issued its decision in December 2025, and we filed a motion for rehearing in January 2026.

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.

Timothy Burke, an investigative journalist with a history of breaking notable news stories, had his house raided and property confiscated by the FBI in May 2023 following his reporting on an interview between Tucker Carlson, at the time an anchor with Fox News, and Kanye West (Ye). Burke located and distributed an unedited livestream of the interview, in which Ye made antisemitic and racist comments that were previously unaired. Burke claims the livestreams were unencrypted, publicly accessible feeds that anyone who searched for the URL could access, even though they were not published on any search engine. Fox News reported to the FBI that the livestreams had been “hacked,” prompting an investigation. In the FBI search, Burke’s computers, hard drives, and cell phones were seized. Burke was later arrested in February 2024 and charged with one count of conspiracy and several counts of wiretapping. Burke and the Tampa Bay Times requested to unseal the affidavit and search warrant associated with his arrest, to which a district court responded by unsealing redacted versions of the warrant records but denying the motion to unseal the supporting affidavit to protect the details of the government’s investigation. The district court also rejected Burke’s motion for return of his property. Burke filed an interlocutory appeal in the Eleventh Circuit challenging the district court’s decision. The ACLU of Florida and partners filed an amici curiae brief in support of Burke on January 2, 2024 arguing that (1) the First Amendment protects modern journalism through publicly available sources online, including obscure URLs; (2) the breadth and vagueness of the CFAA and Wiretap Act can chill First Amendment protected newsgathering activities; (3) the government should return seized materials not related to the case and allow Burke access to newsgathering materials. In a per curiam opinion, the Eleventh Circuit dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. Back in the lower court, the district court invited amicus briefs concerning the application of the charges brought by the federal government. The ACLU and partners submitted an amicus brief on June 27, 2025, warning against the implications of the government’s legal arguments, which could open the floodgates to frivolous prosecutions that would have widespread chilling effects. On September 25, 2025, the district court dismissed several counts on the grounds that the government failed to plead and prove that any electronic communications that Burke allegedly intercepted were not readily accessible to the general public.

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.