ACLU’s Alligator Alcatraz lawsuit CRUSHED: Trump judge smacks down liberal bid to close facility meant for illegal aliens

Another effort by liberal activists to shut down America’s first state-run facility for federal immigration detainees has fallen flat on its face.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, empowered by the governor’s 2023 emergency declaration over the border crisis, got to work in June on transforming the virtually abandoned Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport into Alligator Alcatraz.

Within weeks, the airport’s 10,499-foot runway was crowded with tents and unsavory characters set for deportation.

Enraged by the Republican administration’s success in raising and filling the facility, liberal activists filed multiple legal challenges in hopes of shutting down the facility.

One of those challenges was filed in August by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, Community Justice Project, and National Immigrant Justice Center on behalf of an anonymous plaintiff and a proposed class of foreign nationals who share in common their capture by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention at the facility.

The lawsuit claimed that Florida lacked the authority to detain illegal aliens at Alligator Alcatraz and asked the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida for a preliminary injunction barring state officials from detaining the plaintiff, identified only as M.A., and others like him at the site.

‘Plaintiff is essentially asking this Court to close a sizable and expensive detention facility, all before any decision on the merits of its legality.’

“Florida has wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to unlawfully detain people in this abusive immigration detention center,” Amy Godshall, an illegal aliens’ rights attorney with the ACLU of Florida, said at the outset. “Not only have the conditions been abhorrent, but the detention itself is unlawful.”

“The harm being inflicted on our clients is immediate and irreparable, and it underscores why states are not allowed to overstep into federal immigration processes,” added Godshall.

RELATED: ‘I’ll get the heat’: Milwaukee judge is now a convicted felon after violent illegal alien dodged ICE from her courtroom

Blaze Media illustration. Note: This is a Blaze Media illustration, not the actual facility.

U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek, an appointee of President Donald Trump, delivered the activist groups and their noncitizen client some bad news on Thursday, denying their request to prevent the DeSantis administration from holding illegal aliens at the facility.

Dudek said in his six-page ruling that “preliminary injunctive relief ‘is an extraordinary and drastic remedy’ that is appropriate only in limited circumstances” and that one of the conditions that must be satisfied was that the movant must show “he will suffer an irreparable injury without the injunction.”

The Trump judge underscored that the noncitizen plaintiff has failed to prove irreparable injury.

“To meet his burden, Plaintiff first points to his incarceration at Alligator Alcatraz,” wrote Dudek. “He claims that ‘unlawful detention is a paradigmatic form of irreparable harm.’ But this argument makes little sense here because Plaintiff does not dispute that he (and the proposed class) is subject to confinement by the Attorney General.”

Dudek suggested further that the supposed evidence of systematic problems at Alligator Alcatraz that was given in support of the noncitizen’s claim of “downstream irreparable harms” was not only “months old and largely stale” but particular only to a handful of detainees and contradicted by other evidence.

“Plaintiff is essentially asking this Court to close a sizable and expensive detention facility, all before any decision on the merits of its legality,” wrote Dudek. “While there may indeed be deficiencies at Alligator Alcatraz that ultimately justify its dissolution, Plaintiff has not made the extraordinary showing needed to justify immediate relief of such magnitude.”

This gut punch for the liberal activist groups comes just months after the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta blocked an Obama-appointed federal judge’s order that the facility be shut down.

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