Tag Archives: preliminary injunction

Associated Press: Judge to weigh detainees’ legal rights at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida Everglades

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A federal judge will hear arguments Monday over whether detainees at a temporary immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades have been denied their legal rights.

In the second of two lawsuits challenging practices at the facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” civil rights attorneys are seeking a preliminary injunction to ensure that detainees at the facility have confidential access to their lawyers, which they say hasn’t happened. Florida officials dispute that claim.

The civil rights attorneys also want U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz to identify an immigration court that has jurisdiction over the detention center so that petitions can be filed for the detainees’ bond or release. The attorneys say that hearings for their cases have been routinely canceled in federal Florida immigration courts by judges who say they don’t have jurisdiction over the detainees held in the Everglades.

“The situation at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is so anomalous from what is typically granted at other immigration facilities,” Eunice Cho, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, said Thursday during a virtual meeting to prepare for Monday’s hearing in Miami.

But before delving into the core issues of the detainees’ rights, Ruiz has said he wants to hear about whether the lawsuit was filed in the proper jurisdiction in Miami. The state and federal government defendants have argued that even though the isolated airstrip where the facility was built is owned by Miami-Dade County, Florida’s southern district is the wrong venue since the detention center is located in neighboring Collier County, which is in the state’s middle district.

The judge has hinted that some issues may pertain to one district and other issues to the other district, but said he would decide after Monday’s hearing.

“I think we should all be prepared that, before we get into any real argument about preliminary injunctive relief, that we at least spend some time working through the venue issues,” Ruiz said Thursday.

The hearing over legal access comes as another federal judge in Miami considers whether construction and operations at the facility should be halted indefinitely because federal environmental rules weren’t followed. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams on Aug. 7 ordered a 14-day halt on additional construction at the site while witnesses testified at a hearing that wrapped up last week. She has said she plans to issue a ruling before the order expires later this week.

Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week that his administration was preparing to open a second immigration detention facility dubbed “Deportation Depot” at a state prison in north Florida. DeSantis justified building the second detention center by saying President Donald Trump’s administration needs the additional capacity to hold and deport more immigrants.

The state of Florida has disputed claims that “Alligator Alcatraz” detainees have been unable to meet with their attorneys. The state’s lawyers said that since July 15, when videoconferencing started at the facility, the state has granted every request for a detainee to meet with an attorney, and in-person meetings started July 28. The first detainees arrived at the beginning of July.

But the civil rights attorneys said that even if lawyers have been scheduled to meet with their clients at the detention center, it hasn’t been in private or confidential, and it is more restrictive than at other immigration detention facilities. They said scheduling delays and an unreasonable advanced notice requirement have hindered their ability to meet with the detainees, thereby violating their constitutional rights.

Civil rights attorneys said officers are going cell-to-cell to pressure detainees into signing voluntary removal orders before they’re allowed to consult their attorneys, and some detainees have been deported even though they didn’t have final removal orders. Along with the spread of a respiratory infection and rainwater flooding their tents, the circumstances have fueled a feeling of desperation among detainees, the attorneys wrote in a court filing.

“One intellectually disabled detainee was told to sign a paper in exchange for a blanket, but was then deported subject to voluntary removal after he signed, without the ability to speak to his counsel,” the filing said.

The judge has promised a quick decision once the hearing is done.

Judge to weigh detainees’ legal rights at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida Everglades
A federal judge is considering whether detainees have been denied their legal rights at a temporary immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades.

https://apnews.com/article/florida-immigration-ice-trump-alligator-alcatraz-2edf0cd03409b3526f34d4d7b33074be

Law & Crime: ‘Naked attempt to evade clear law’: Federal judge says Trump admin ‘unequivocally’ acted unlawfully in unilaterally shuttering Job Corps

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A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has halted the Trump administration’s effort to shutter the Job Corps training program — the nation’s largest residential career training program for thousands of low-income youth — becoming the second to do so within the span of a month.

U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich — an appointee of President Donald Trump during his first term — on Friday granted the request for a preliminary injunction blocking the closing of 99 Job Corps centers throughout the nation, reasoning that the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) unilateral closing of the program, which was created and authorized by Congress, violated federal law.

The case stems from the Labor Department notifying the 99 private Job Corps centers across the nation on May 29, 2025, that they would “cease operations” by June 30.

The lawsuit was filed last month by a group of seven student-enrollees in the Job Corps program hailing from Georgia, Mississippi, Oregon, North Dakota, and Michigan on behalf of themselves as well as the putative class of students enrolled at all 99 centers affected by the program’s shuttering.

The complaint alleged that the Labor Department was legally required provide advance notice and an opportunity for public comment before closing any Job Corps center, as required by federal law. By failing to do so, the administration’s actions allegedly violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014.

The administration asserted that the shuttering of all Job Corps centers was a “statutorily authorized pause — as opposed to a closure,” a claim that Friedrich said did not stand up to scrutiny.

“This argument fails because DOL’s across-the-board shutdown extended far beyond any ‘pause’ contemplated by the statute,” the judge wrote. “The agency suspended operations at all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers without any expectation of future reopenings. And it effected the mass shutdown without complying with any of the statutory requirements that must precede a ‘pause’ in operations. DOL failed to conduct an individualized assessment or develop a performance improvement plan for any of the 99 centers. It instead suspended all operations based on the perceived failures of the Job Corps program as a whole.”

Friedrich said the nationwide shutdown was “not only unprecedented,” but also” inconsistent with its historic standard of practice.” While earlier “pauses” allowed for the realistic possibility that Job Corps centers would be reopened, here, the administration informed students that they should harbor “no expectation of transfer to another center or return to their current center.”

The court said there was no need to engage in any analysis regarding the difference between a “pause” and a “closure” because “the record unequivocally demonstrates that DOL unlawfully ‘closed’ all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers, in violation of the WIOA.”

“At bottom, DOL’s position is entirely circular: So long as the agency uses the term ‘pause’ and never makes a final decision to ‘formally close’ a center, it is authorized to shutter any Job Corps center indefinitely,” Friedrich wrote. “In DOL’s view, the WIOA’s procedural mandates hinge on the terminology the agency chooses to use, allowing it to sidestep its statutory obligations entirely. That cannot be correct. Because DOL unlawfully ‘closed’ all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers, in violation of the WIOA, the Court finds that the plaintiffs have established a likelihood of success on the merits of their APA claims.”

The plaintiffs are being represented in the case by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Public Citizen. Adam Pulver, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, lauded the ruling.

“The Department of Labor’s decision to abruptly close Job Corps centers across the country, ignoring legal requirements and literally putting vulnerable young people on the street, was callous, and as the Judge today agreed, illegal,” Pulver said in a statement. “The Department’s ludicrous argument to the court, that in shutting down 99 Job Corps centers it was not actually closing those centers, was a naked attempt to evade clear law.”

Federal judge says Trump admin ‘unequivocally’ violated law in shuttering Job Corps
A Trump-appointed judge blocked the administration’s effort to shutter al 99 Job Corps centers nationwide, saying it violated federal law.
‘Unprecedented’: Judge says Trump admin ‘unequivocally’ acted unlawfully in unilaterally shuttering youth job training program

Law & Crime: ‘This discrepancy is not insignificant’: Judge alleges Trump admin misled SCOTUS about injunction over federal layoffs

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The Trump administration provided incorrect information to the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent high-profile case about firing federal employees, according to a federal judge sitting in San Francisco.

On Monday, in a terse, two-page filing, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that the U.S. Department of Justice substantially mischaracterized the reach of a preliminary injunction the lower court issued in response to one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders.

That injunction, issued in late May, came on the heels of a temporary restraining order issued in early May. Later that same month, a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit upheld the lower court order, rejecting the government’s request to stay the injunction.

Then, in early June, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed a 147-page application for an emergency stay with the nation’s high court.

In that application, Sauer described Illston’s injunction in the following terms: “In fact, this Office has been informed by OPM that about 40 [reductions in force] in 17 agencies were in progress and are currently enjoined.”

Now, Illston says Sauer protested a bit too much.

The district court judge, in her Monday statement, alleges the fourth-highest ranking DOJ official got both sets of numbers wrong.

“Petitioners provided this information to argue that the preliminary injunction was causing them irreparable harm,” Illston writes. “Now that petitioners have filed their RIF list, it is apparent that the figure presented to the Supreme Court included numerous agencies that are not defendants in this case and therefore were not enjoined by the District Court.”

The document goes on to list seven “non-defendant” agencies and nine RIFs which were incorrectly included in the government’s representations before the justices in its June stay application.

Illston then crunches the numbers – using bold to highlight the math.

Based on this list, petitioners’ application to the Supreme Court should have stated that the injunction paused 31 RIFs in 10 agencies, not 40 RIFs in 17 agencies. This discrepancy is not insignificant. In this Court’s view, this further underscores the Court’s previous finding that any deliberative process privilege, if it exists at all, is overridden by ‘the need for accurate fact-finding in this litigation[.]'”

While the Supreme Court stayed the injunction itself, other business in the litigation has been moving forward at the district court level.

The underlying lawsuit, filed by a coalition of labor unions, nonprofit groups, and municipalities, challenges the 45th and 47th president’s Feb. 11 executive order, “Implementing The President’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” The order, on its own terms, purports to “commence” a “critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy” by “eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity.” In real terms, Trump’s plans ask agency heads to quickly “initiate large-scale reductions in force,” or massive layoffs, in service of a goal to restructure the government.

The plaintiffs, for their part, have continued to push for discovery regarding the extent of the government’s RIFs and reorganization plans. The defendants, in turn, have sought various reprieves from both the district court and the court of appeals.

On July 18, Illston issued a discovery order which directed the government to provide the requested information. The order provided a win for the plaintiffs on the basic request as well as a win for the government – which requested to file some information under seal.

More Law&Crime coverage: ‘Greenlighting this president’s legally dubious actions’: Jackson upbraids SCOTUS colleagues for ‘again’ issuing a ‘reckless’ ruling in Trump’s favor on emergency docket

That discovery order is the first instance in which the “40 RIFs in 17 agencies” assertion was called into question by the court.

“Defendants made this assertion to the Supreme Court to highlight the urgency of their stay request and the extent of irreparable injury facing the government,” Illston observed. “Yet defendants now back-track, telling this Court that, actually, ‘those RIFs have not been finalized, many were in an early stage, and some are not now going forward.'”

The court ordered the DOJ to clear things up as follows:

Defendants must file with the Court, not under seal, a list of the RIFs referenced in the Supreme Court stay application. Defendants may note which RIFs, if any, agencies have decided not to move forward, or provide any other details they wish.

On July 21, the DOJ filed a petition for a writ of mandamus – a request for a court to force another government entity to do what it says – with the 9th Circuit. That petition complains Illston’s discovery order “directs the government to produce voluminous privileged documents to plaintiffs’ counsel and the district court.” The petition goes on to ask the appellate court to both pause and kibosh completely the elements of the discovery order which require the filing of the documents under seal.

On July 22, the panel issued a stay on the sealed production order.

On July 28, the 9th Circuit directed the parties to respond and reply to the mandamus request by Aug. 1 and Aug. 8, respectively. The panel also said the district court “may address the petition if it so desires.”

In her filing, Illston said she “appreciates the invitation to address” the government’s mandamus petition.

As it turns out, even after the government filed its requests to stay Illston’s more invasive discovery orders, the Trump administration provided the information the lower court directed them to file “not under seal.”

“Since the Discovery Order issued, petitioners produced the list of the reductions in force (RIFs) that petitioners represented to the Supreme Court were in progress and were halted by the District Court’s May 22, 2025 preliminary injunction,” Illston explains.

Now, that information is being used against the Trump administration to allege the DOJ overstated its case before the nation’s highest court.

Judge alleges Trump admin misled SCOTUS about injunction over federal layoffs
“Petitioners provided this information to argue that the preliminary injunction was causing them irreparable harm.”
‘This discrepancy is not insignificant’: Judge alleges Trump admin misled SCOTUS about injunction over federal layoffs