The Miccosukee Tribe makes its home in the Everglades, where a tribal village sits only a few miles from the federal immigration detention center called Alligator Alcatraz. Residents have for weeks lived with vehicles coming and going around the clock, stadium lights illuminating the once-dark nighttime sky, and the facility restricting access to the game they rely upon for food.
That is no longer the case.
A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to stop sending detainees to the facility and begin dismantling it within 60 days. In making her ruling, Judge Kathleen Williams sided with the tribe and environmentalists who argued that state and federal officials violated a federal law that requires an environmental review before proceeding with any federal construction project. The judge’s order also prohibits further construction at the site.
The judge granted the preliminary injunction sought by the tribe and a coalition of environmental organizations. Although the litigation will continue — Florida, which is managing the center on behalf of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, plans to appeal — tribal leaders hailed the decision and vowed to continue fighting to protect their land.
“We felt good. I felt good personally, but I know that this is only the first step in the legal process,” said Pete Osceola Jr., a long-term tribal lawmaker. “I believe that my tribe is willing to go the distance to preserve our rights and our culture.”
In her 82-page ruling, the judge posed a question that goes to the heart of the case: Why build a detention center in the middle of the Everglades and so close to a tribal community?
Williams recognized that, in addition to failing to conduct an environmental review, the U.S. government did not consult the Miccosukee ahead of the center’s construction. Such consultations are often legally required for any federal projects on historic sites, including on or near tribal land. In making the ruling, Williams cited Hualapai Indian Tribe v. Haaland, in which the tribe challenged a federal plan to extract lithium from a Bureau of Land Management site near a hot spring the tribe considers sacred. In that case, a judge ruled that the agency failed to consider alternatives before permitting the project and halted it.
The Everglades have served as a refuge and home to the Miccosukee since the Seminole Wars of the 19th century. The site of the detention center, built on Big Cypress National Reserve about 50 miles from Miami, also has particular significance to environmentalists. Alligator Alcatraz was built atop a former airfield that was built in the late 1960s successfully halted by environmentalists like Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who founded Friends of the Everglades. That organization, along with Earthjustice and the Center for Biological Diversity, sought the injunction alongside the tribe.
“Our well being is intertwined, and that’s why Congress created the National Environmental Policy Act and other landmark environmental laws to safeguard the health and welfare of people by requiring the government to carefully and publicly consider the impacts of its actions on our land, water, air and biodiversity,” Elise Bennett, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said during a press conference on Friday.
The judge seemed to have felt the same way, ruling that the detention center poses a risk to the environment and to the water supply that the Miccosukee and others rely upon. “The project creates irreparable harm in the form of habitat loss and increased mortality to endangered species in the area,” she wrote.
Williams’ ruling is a setback for the detention center, the first state-run facility built to house detainees for ICE, and could impact any attempt to open others like it. The case brought by the Miccosukee and the environmentalists “kind of set a precedent for this being a way to halt environmental harms from these immigrant detention centers,” said Michelle Lynn Edwards, a sociologist and professor at Texas State University. “I mean, this is not the only one.”
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law last month, earmarks approximately $45 billion for new immigrant detention centers, and the Washington Post reports that several are in planning stages across the country. Many are located in states with large tribal populations, including Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Colorado.
Edwards studies the link between federal environmental reviews and historically marginalized groups when federal agencies undertake projects, such as tribes, and can see environmental law being used to challenge future ICE detention sites. ”If these lawsuits are successful, then I do think that that would be something that would be used in other locations as well,” she said.
Osceola agrees, and the Miccosukee consider this a land and an Indigenous rights issue. “Any court decision involving Native tribes is a precedent,” he said. Osceola believes the case has the momentum to go before the Supreme Court eventually, and recent steps taken by the defendants support this. Florida has already filed an appeal. “This is not going to deter us,” Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters after the ruling. “We’re going to continue working on the deportations, advancing that mission.”
In a separate case challenging the legality of Alligator Alcatraz, legal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and DeSantis, alleging that it restricted migrants’ access to legal counsel. The agency has also rejected allegations that the facility is unsanitary and crowded.
Although Williams’ ruling is a setback for Alligator Alcatraz and the federal government, Osceola doesn’t think it should be considered a total victory. The issue at the center of the case — the government’s disregard for tribal sovereignty — remains. “As a native, as a Miccasukee, it’s a daily issue,” he said. “And I just want to make sure that people don’t forget these issues are not dead yet.”
