U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said that the defendants were unlikely to succeed in their appeals process.
A federal judge has denied the federal government’s request to delay the significant dismantling of the South Florida detention facility—also known as Alligator Alcatraz—at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.
In a previous order, the judge had halted the transfer of detainees to the center, stopped new construction, and ordered the removal of some aspects of the facility.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida released her decision on Aug. 27, after attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security and the Florida Division of Emergency Management submitted a motion to stay her preliminary injunction because of their pending appeal.
The defendants were tasked with demonstrating a variety of factors, including whether they were likely to succeed in their appeal on the merits, whether they would incur irreparable injury if the stay were denied, and how it was in the public interest to issue a stay.
Williams found that the arguments made in the motion were the same as those made in opposition to the preliminary injunction, which, she said, “do not establish a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits of their appeal.”
Regarding public interest, she reiterated her findings from the previous hearing, which stood with the plaintiffs who sued to close the facility because of decisions made by the federal government to forgo an environmental review before establishing the temporary facility, calling it a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
“The Court found Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their NEPA claim because the project was adversely impacting the environment and was controlled in large part by the federal government, and Defendants had done no environmental analysis at all before building and commencing operations of the facility,” Williams said.
The judge also found that “no new evidence or argument about the particular dangerousness of the detainee population” at Alligator Alcatraz was presented, nor did attorneys provide evidence for the need for the detention facility at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the middle of the Everglades.
She further noted that defendants continued to emphasize the temporary nature of the facility. She said that “evidence that the detainee population was dwindling at the site even before the preliminary injunction was entered” and the fact that ICE had need “for only 72-hour holds” are “signs that Defendants’ immigration enforcement goals will not be thwarted.”
Alligator Alcatraz was declared open for business at the start of July. By July 25, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that several hundred illegal immigrants had already been flown out of the state and 100 had been deported out of the country.
However, on June 27, environmental groups filed a lawsuit against local, state, and federal officials responsible for the new construction. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida joined the suit on July 14.
The judge initially ordered a halt to all new development of the area on Aug. 7.
On Aug. 21, the judge ordered the state and federal government to stop sending new detainees there and to further dismantle the facility, removing “all generators, gas, sewage, and other waste and waste receptacles that were installed to support [the] project,” within 60 days.
“This is a judge that was not going to give us a fair shake. This was preordained,” DeSantis said on Aug. 22 in response to the judge’s ruling.
“This is not going to deter us. We’re going to continue working on the deportations, advancing that mission.”
Florida has already begun preparations to open a second illegal immigration detention center—dubbed the “Deportation Depot”—at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, an unincorporated community in Baker County off Interstate 10, less than an hour’s drive west of Jacksonville.
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