Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center can stay open and is not subject to an environmental review, an appellate court has ruled.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld on Tuesday its prior decision reversing a federal judge’s August order to phase out the facility. Alligator Alcatraz can now remain open and is not required to undergo a National Environmental Policy Act review, barring further court proceedings.
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“Using state employees and state funds, Florida officials, on their own initiative, constructed a detention center at an airport on state property in the Florida Everglades,” the court opinion read.
The three plaintiffs — Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe — argued that the facility in the natural wetland must go through a federal environmental review. The appeal centered on that review, which the three-judge panel rejected 2-1.
“Florida, not federal, officials constructed the facility,” the court opinion read. “They control the land and ‘entirely’ built the facility at state expense. The only federal action the environmentalists can identify is the decision not to conduct an environmental review. And that decision alone, as all parties agree, is not final agency action.”
State and federal government officials had argued this during the appellate court hearing, maintaining that the state controls the facility, thereby waiving the need for an environmental review.
The three-judge appeals court panel was composed of appointees of Presidents Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden. The Biden appointee, Judge Nancy G. Abudu, dissented from the majority’s opinion.
The decision formally vacates U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’s 2025 decision ordering the facility to be closed within 60 days. The court had paused Williams’s order before, pending the official hearing. The case is now remanded to the lower court.
The Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity vowed to continue their fight to block the detention center for illegal immigrants.
“We are pursuing every legal avenue available to right this wrong,” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said in a statement. “Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades, and we look forward to returning to the District Court to advance our case to shut it down.”
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) celebrated the ruling on X.
“Yet another example a leftist district court judge getting reversed on appeal. Rinse and repeat,” DeSantis wrote.
