Environmental Violations — But Not the Torture — Deal Alligator Alcatraz a Judicial Blow

By Dave Levitan | August 22, 2025 | 9:46am

Photo via DHSgov/Wikimedia Commons

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Environmental Violations — But Not the Torture — Deal Alligator Alcatraz a Judicial Blow

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration and Florida to effectively start shutting down the concentration camp grimly known as Alligator Alcatraz. According to US District Judge Kathleen Williams, the site, now the subject of numerous complaints and descriptions of what pretty clearly amounts to torture of the people sent there, did not adequately address its potential environmental harms to the Everglades ecosystem and the people who rely on it.

The 82-page ruling grants a preliminary injunction, ordering the government to refrain from transferring any further prisoners to the site, and instructs that much of the site must be dismantled within 60 days. “The project creates irreparable harm in the form of habitat loss and increased mortality to endangered species in the area,” Williams wrote, in response to a lawsuit brought by Friends of the Everglades as well as other groups and members of the Miccosukee Tribe, who live near the facility.

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“Plaintiffs have provided substantial evidence to prove that irreparable harm from the detention camp is ongoing and likely to worsen absent injunctive relief,” the ruling reads. The Trump administration has argued that federal environmental review statutes including NEPA do not apply because it is run by the state of Florida; the state of Florida, meanwhile, argues it has authority to run the place because of an agreement with the federal government. No one has accused these people of logical consistency.

Williams wrote that the claims of state-level authority are, well, a tad hollow. “Detainees are brought onto the site by federal agents and deported from the site by federal agents on federally owned aircraft,” she wrote. “In concluding the camp is a major federal action, the Court will ‘adhere to the time-tested adage: if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s a duck.'”

[An irresistible aside: Williams actually cites the duck test, to the 2008 case Sierra Club v. Van Antwerp. The judge in that case does indeed make the same duck argument — cited to 1998’s BMC Industries v. Barth Industries. Head to endnote 28 in that decision and learn that “The ‘duck test’ has received wide support from the courts” — cited to no less than three other cases, the earliest of which was Loudermilk v. Loudermilk, from 1990. There, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia footnotes its “duck test” reference with, finally, an appeal to the vagaries of history: “The duck test emerges from the old adage that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it is probably a duck.” No further citation is offered.]

“This decision sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government — and there are consequences for ignoring them,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, in a statement.

The ruling will be appealed, of course. No word, in this case at least, if the camp’s particular “type of torture,” which those sent there have described as like being “dead alive,” with inmates kept in sweltering metal cages that routinely flood and are infested with various creatures that inhabit the swamps of South Florida, will run afoul of any other federal statutes.