Court Cases

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.

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.