TALLAHASSEE — Calling it "exactly the kind of disaster that Congress took pains to avoid," attorneys for immigrants held at a detention center in the Everglades filed a lawsuit alleging Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration lacks the authority to run the facility.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the federal court’s Middle District of Florida in Fort Myers, is the third major legal challenge to the detention center, erected by the DeSantis’ administration as part of the state’s support of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
DeSantis and state officials maintain that they are operating the facility through what are known as 287(g) agreements, which local governments can enter with the federal government to provide training and authority to local police to help enforce immigration laws.
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But the lawsuit filed Friday contends that the agreements do not give authority to state agencies or their contractors to run detention centers and that the officers who are working at the Everglades facility lack federally required training to participate in immigration-enforcement efforts.
“The lack of authority to operate the facility has resulted in unprecedented challenges that people in immigration detention typically do not face, including being held without charge, not receiving initial custody or bond determinations, not appearing in the detainee locator system, and not being able to access their attorneys or immigration court,” the lawsuit said.
Operations at the Everglades center, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" by state officials, “are in stark contrast to typical ICE (federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement) operations,” the lawyers argued.
The 287(g) agreements are part of a federal law known as 1357(g) that allows states to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts.
“This is an unprecedented attempt to use Section 1357(g) as authority for an independent state-run detention facility,” the lawsuit said. “In the thirty years since the statute was enacted, state officers have never claimed the authority to detain people under this statute, other than the short period after an arrest during transport to an ICE facility.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, Community Justice Project, and National Immigrant Justice Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of a detainee identified as “M.A.” and also are seeking class-action certification in the challenge.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to bar the state from detaining people at the facility and to declare that the state lacks the authority to operate the Everglades detention center.
The federal law “does not provide authority for state agencies to hold immigration detainees during the removal process. And it certainly does not let them place detention in the hands of untrained, unsupervised private contractors who are not and cannot be deputized to perform immigration functions. By ignoring these standards, Florida has created exactly the kind of disaster that Congress took pains to avoid,” the lawsuit said.
Questions about the state’s authority to run the facility also have been raised in two other legal challenges.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams on Thursday sided with environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida in a lawsuit alleging that state and federal officials failed to comply with a federal law requiring an environmental-impact study be conducted before the detention center was erected.
Williams’ order gave the state 60 days to begin winding down the facility. Lawyers for DeSantis quickly asked the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. District Court of Appeals to put her ruling on hold while the state's appeal proceeds.
Lawyers for DeSantis have argued, in part, in that case that the federal environmental law did not apply because the state is operating the facility.
Speaking to reporters Friday morning, the governor — who has fiercely defended the state’s immigrant-detention efforts — shrugged off Williams’ decision.
“We knew the minute this judge got the case, we knew exactly what she was going to do. This is not anything that was unexpected, but we will make sure to get the job done in the end,” he said.
In a separate lawsuit, attorneys representing detainees allege that people being held at the center have inadequate access to legal representation and confidential meetings with their attorneys.
The latest legal challenge said that court records in the other cases show the facility is “Florida-owned and Florida-operated.”
“State and federal officials have stated in court filings that Florida exercises ‘complete discretion’ over operations and over who is detained at the facility,” Thursday’s lawsuit said.
Numerous state agencies have 287(g) agreements allowing their law-enforcement officers to participate in immigration efforts, the lawsuit noted.
“But those agreements do not give any authority to the state agencies themselves — only to those individual employees who have been fully trained and certified by DHS (Department of Homeland Security),” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also said it is unknown how many state officers working at the facility have completed federally required training, which can take months.
DeSantis earlier this month announced that the state plans to convert a shuttered state prison in Baker County into a second immigrant-detention center. That facility will be staffed by members of Florida’s National Guard.
The Florida Department of Emergency Management is set to receive $605 million from the Trump administration for the state’s immigrant-detention efforts. The department hired contractors to help build and operate the Everglades facility, which can hold up to 4,000 people and is estimated to cost roughly $450 million per year.
The lawsuit alleges that federal law does not allow the private contractors to be “deputized to perform any immigration functions.”
The lawsuit also alleges that workers at the facility are pressuring detainees to sign voluntary deportation orders.
"This is something that ICE protocol forbids," lawyers for the detainees wrote.