Miccosukee Tribe Lawsuit Challenges Environmental Harm at “Alligator Alcatraz”

When William “Popeye” Osceola first learned about the construction of a sprawling immigration detention facility on land adjacent to the Miccosukee Reservation in the Florida Everglades, his first reaction was “shock and disgust.”

“I found out about it basically when everybody else found out about it, which, considering our tribal nation status with the government, that’s obviously an issue,” Osceola said in an interview. “Something so major is happening here in this environmentally damaged area.”

The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, whose ancestral territory lies in the heart of the Everglades, announced on July 14 that it was joining a lawsuit against the state and federal governments for what they call a blatant violation of environmental and tribal sovereignty. The facility, nicknamed by the Trump administration as “Alligator Alcatraz,” was built in near-total secrecy at a decommissioned airfield in Collier County without any environmental impact study or tribal consultation, the lawsuit claims.

“We are trying to just make sure we follow our constitutional duty to preserve our land and resources for future generations. That way we’re able to maintain our sovereignty. And we felt that this path would be able to reinforce that,” said Osceola, who serves as the tribe’s secretary. “It’s purely driven by our need to protect and save what protected and saved us.”

The suit — originally brought by Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Earthjustice — accuses officials of violating federal law by building and operating the detention facility without environmental assessments or public input. It names the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County as defendants.

The tribe’s legal filing also documents a deep cultural, legal, and spiritual connection with the lands surrounding the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, where the detention center now sits. Ten Miccosukee villages lie within a three-mile radius; one camp, home to a Panther Clan family, is just 1,000 feet away. Tribal members use the surrounding area for subsistence hunting, fishing, ceremonies, and schooling. Their spiritual practices depend on dark skies and unpolluted water. Their sovereignty, they argue, has once again been ignored.

“We’ve always been fighting for this land,” said Osceola. “We’ve always been fighting for our sovereignty, our existence, to live on the land we’ve always known.”

In court documents, the tribe outlines a long legal history affirming its rights to occupy and use Big Cypress National Preserve, which is adjacent to the detention site, and the surrounding area, rights enshrined in the Big Cypress National Preserve Enabling Act, the Florida Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, and decades of state and federal precedent. Yet despite these protections, the tribe argues that it was never consulted about the detention facility, nor was any environmental impact study conducted, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

On July 25, attorneys for the Florida Division of Emergency Management filed an 11-page response opposing the tribe’s intervention. The department argued that the tribe’s participation would be “duplicative” of arguments already raised by environmental groups and would create “additional briefing and discovery that would seriously burden the existing parties and the Court.”

“If the Tribe seeks simply to mimic Plaintiffs in every particular, then Plaintiffs — who are already vigorously litigating this case — adequately represent the Tribe’s interests,” the state’s filing read.

In response, the tribe submitted a 13-page rebuttal on July 29, dismantling the state’s arguments point by point. The filing cites precedent from the 11th Circuit affirming that the burden of proving inadequate representation is “minimal” and emphasizes that tribal rights — including the duty to prevent degradation of downstream water — go far beyond the environmental groups’ purview.

Federal officials, by contrast, said they did not take a position on the tribe’s intervention. U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams has yet to issue a ruling on the motion.

The tribe’s motion to intervene underscores the immediate and long-term dangers posed by the detention center: environmental degradation; contamination of downstream water sources; endangered species disruption; and cultural harm from noise, lights, and militarized surveillance. The tribe cites growing road hazards from increased vehicle traffic and stress on the region’s fragile ecosystem.

“I just think about the increased presence out here, and it always adds to more environmental damage [and] pollution. You just have all these added vehicles coming through here,” Osceola said. “And then on the cultural level, our medicine men still need to be able to see the stars.”

The lawsuit landed just days before Gov. Ron DeSantis hosted a press conference in Marco Island on July 18 celebrating an agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers to accelerate the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, a project he called “historic” and a testament to Florida’s environmental leadership.

DeSantis defended the facility during the press conference, calling it temporary and brushing off environmental concerns as unfounded. When asked whether any environmental impact reviews had been conducted for the new detention facility, DeSantis dismissed the question, claiming the site operates on an “existing footprint” and that no harm would be done to surrounding lands or waters.

“There’s like a fence line, and they’re doing the operations. … They take the wastewater out, and they truck it out, they bring in potable water,” DeSantis said. “We’re not worried about it at all.”

But internal documents and the tribe’s legal motion suggest otherwise: no permits, no studies, and no community engagement.

“It feels like history is slowly not repeating, but echoing,” said Osceola. “It’s not lost on us that there’s this facility where you’re trying to round up individuals who do not look like them, that they say do not belong here, and they’re not part of their country. And just looking at tribal history, that’s the whole basis of the reservation system in this land.”

The facility, which will reportedly cost over $450 million annually to maintain, is poised to be partially reimbursed with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds — diverting emergency resources in the middle of hurricane season and undermining the very resilience Florida leaders claim to champion. In a statement accompanying the lawsuit, Miccosukee Chair Talbert Cypress called the facility’s presence an unacceptable risk.

“We must take legal action to compel the parties to remove this facility, given its outsized budgetary, environmental, community safety, and logistical impacts,” Cypress said. “We are hopeful that the administrations will change course and preserve these lands.”

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.