Feds Fight ‘Alcatraz’ Class Action

By The News Service of Florida

Federal government attorneys Thursday urged a judge to reject certifying as a class action a lawsuit alleging that immigrants at a detention center in the Everglades are being denied proper access to lawyers.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other defendants pushed back against a request by lawyers for three named plaintiffs who are detainees at the facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” The plaintiffs’ request, filed last month, asked for class certification to include all current and future detainees at the facility.

But in a 15-page document Thursday, federal-government attorneys contended the proposed class is “overly expansive” and said there are “divergent issues of fact and law at play” that prevent sufficiently defining a class. “The proposed class includes all detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, a facility that houses detainees in all stages of immigration processing — presumably including those who have never been in removal proceedings, those who will be placed into removal proceedings, those who are already subject to final orders of removal, those subject to expedited removal, and those detained for the purpose of facilitation removal from the United States pursuant to a final order of removal,” the document said. “The wide variation is important because while the court retains jurisdiction to rule on issues impacting some of these individuals, it does not retain jurisdiction on others.”

But in their motion for class certification, lawyers for the plaintiffs said “proposed class members are all bound together by common questions of law and fact — whether barriers to meaningful, confidential access to counsel violate their rights under the First Amendment.”

The lawsuit, which is playing out in federal court in Fort Myers, alleges that detainees have faced improper barriers in communicating with their lawyers, such as not being able to speak and exchange legal documents confidentially. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell.