Appeals Court Debates Closing Everglades Migrant Center Amid Eco Push

Environmental lawyers pressed a three-judge federal appellate panel in Miami on Tuesday to end a court-ordered halt that has kept Florida's controversial Everglades immigration detention center — dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" by critics — open and holding detainees despite a federal district judge's order to close it.

The facility, located in Collier County in the heart of the Florida Everglades, has been operating since last summer, when state officials opened it to support President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement push. A federal district judge in Miami ordered the center wound down in mid-August after concluding that officials had failed to conduct a federally required environmental impact review. A federal appellate court stayed that order in early September, citing Florida's argument that it had not yet received federal reimbursement and was therefore not bound by the environmental review requirement.

That calculation shifted sharply in late September when FEMA approved $608 million in federal funding to support the facility's construction and operation — a figure that now sits at the center of the legal fight. Jesse Panuccio, an attorney for the Florida Department of Emergency Management, told the judges that both federal funding and federal control were required to trigger the environmental law. "You need both," Panuccio said. "Even with funding, I don't think that would follow because they don't have federal control."

Paul Schwiep, representing the Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, countered that immigration is a constitutional federal function that makes the review requirement inescapable. "The state has no role," Schwiep said.

The judges did not indicate when they would rule. A separate federal ruling from a Fort Myers court has already ordered the facility to provide detainees with improved access to attorneys and unmonitored legal calls.

The case carries direct weight for residents of Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties, where the health of the Everglades ecosystem is not an abstraction. The Indian River Lagoon and the St. Lucie River are downstream recipients of Everglades water flows, and their water quality is tightly linked to how federal and state agencies manage the broader South Florida ecosystem. Martin County's Environmental Lands Committee has been actively reviewing a $20 million land acquisition program, according to public records. Conservation work that depends on the same federal-state environmental frameworks now being contested in Miami's courtroom could be affected. A ruling that narrows when federal environmental review is required could ripple well beyond the Everglades detention site, affecting how future land-disturbing projects in sensitive ecosystems are evaluated across South Florida.

The appellate panel gave no timeline for a decision.

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