U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams has refused to pause her order requiring state and federal officials to wind down operations at an immigrant-detention center in the Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Williams issued a preliminary injunction last week in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe, finding state and federal officials failed to comply with a federal law requiring an environmental impact study be conducted before the remote facility was constructed.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and President Donald Trump’s administration asked Williams to put her preliminary injunction on hold while appeals of her decision play out.
But in an order issued Wednesday, Williams said the state and federal defendants’ arguments seeking a stay of her order “do not establish a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits of their appeal.”
Williams’ preliminary injunction prohibited state and federal officials from sending additional detainees to the facility, which has the capacity to house 2,000 people, and gave 60 days for detention operations to wind down. Williams’ order Wednesday pointed to court documents saying that the center housed about 300 detainees last week.
Evidence “that the detainee population was dwindling at the site even before the preliminary injunction was entered and that ICE (U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) now has need for only 72-hour holds are signs that Defendants’ immigration enforcement goals will not be thwarted by a pause in operations” at the Everglades site, the judge wrote.
Meanwhile, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also is considering state and federal requests to put the preliminary injunction on hold. Both the DeSantis and Trump administrations filed motions Tuesday at the Atlanta-based court for stays of the injunction — which, if granted, would put the injunction on hold amid litigation over the underlying appeals of Williams’ ruling.
When asked Wednesday about recent reports that the facility would soon be empty, DeSantis said federal immigration officials are deporting detainees “very quickly” from the facility.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is responsible for deciding “where they want to process and stage detainees, and it’s their decision about when they want to bring them out,” the governor told reporters. “But I think they’ve been having rapid removals from Alligator Alcatraz and I think that’s caused the census to go down,” he added.