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      Here’s what to know about the court ruling striking down Trump’s tariffs

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      Donald Trump suffered the biggest defeat yet to his tariff policies on Friday, as a federal appeals court ruled he had overstepped his presidential powers when he enacted punitive financial measures against almost every country in the world.In a 7-4 ruling, the Washington DC court said that while US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency”, none of those actions allow for the imposition of tariffs or taxes.It means the ultimate ruling on the legality of Trump’s tariffs, which were famously based on spurious economic science and rocked the global economy when he announced them in April, will probably be made by the US supreme court.Here’s what to know.Which tariffs did the court knock down?The decision centers on the tariffs Trump introduced on 2 April, on what he called “liberation day”. The tariffs set a 10% baseline on virtually all of the US’s trading partners and so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on countries he argued have unfairly treated the US. Lesotho, a country of 2.3 million people in southern Africa, was hit with a 50% tariff, while Trump also announced a tariff of 10% on a group of uninhabited islands populated by penguins.The ruling voided all those tariffs, with the judges finding the president’s measures “unbounded in scope, amount and duration”. They said the tariffs “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration used to pass them.Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress, but Trump claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.The court ruled: “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”Trump invoked the same law in February to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, claiming that the flow of undocumented immigrants and drugs across the US border amounted to a national emergency, and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.Are the tariffs gone now?No. The court largely upheld a May decision by a federal trade court in New York that ruled Trump’s tariffs were illegal. But Friday’s ruling tossed out a part of that ruling that would have struck down the tariffs immediately.The court said the ruling would not take effect until 14 October. That allows the Trump administration time to appeal to the majority-conservative US supreme court, which will have the ultimate say on whether Trump has the legal right, as president, to upend US trade policy.What does this mean for Trump’s trade agenda?The government has argued that if Trump’s tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it has collected, which would deliver a financial blow to the US treasury.Revenue from tariffs totaled $159bn by July, more than double what it was at the same point last year. The justice department warned in a legal filing this month that revoking the tariffs could mean “financial ruin” for the United States.The ruling could also put Trump on shaky ground in trying to impose tariffs going forward. The president does have alternative laws for imposing import tariffs, but they would limit the speed and severity with which he could act.In its decision in May, the trade court said that Trump has more limited power to impose tariffs to address trade deficits under another statute, the Trade Act of 1974. But that law restricts tariffs to 15% and to just 150 days on countries with which the United States runs big trade deficits.How has Trump respondedHe’s not happy. Trump spent Friday evening reposting dozens of social media posts that were critical of the court’s decision. In a post on his own social media site, Trump claimed, as he tends to do when judges rule against him, that the decision was made by a “highly partisan appeals court”.“If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country,” Trump wrote. He added: “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”Trump claimed “tariffs are the best tool to help our workers”, despite their costs being typically borne by everyday Americans. The tariffs have triggered economic and political uncertainty across the world and stoked fears of rising inflation. More

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      Most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal, federal court rules

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      Donald Trump overstepped his presidential powers with most of his globe-rattling tariff policies, a federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled on Friday.US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”, the court said in the 7-4 ruling.Many of Trump’s steep tariffs are “are unbounded in scope, amount and duration”, the ruling added, and “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration has leant on.The court’s decision is the biggest blow yet to Trump’s tariff policies and will likely mean the supreme court will have to rule on whether he has the legal right as president to upend US trade policy. The court said the ruling would not take effect until 14 October.“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT!” Trump wrote on social media, moments after the ruling came down, after the stock markets closed ahead of a three-day weekend in the US. In a lengthy post, he accused the appeals court of political bias.“If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” he continued. “At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products.”The ruling voided Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that set a 10% baseline on virtually all of the US’s trading partners and his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on countries he has argued have unfairly treated the US.Trump has claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.The Trump administration has cited various national emergencies – including US trade deficits with trading partners, fentanyl trafficking, and immigration – as the reasons for the actions.But a group of small businesses has challenged the administration’s arguments, arguing they are “devastating small businesses across the country”.And on Friday, the appellate court ruled: “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”The ruling also said the US law “neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the president’s power to impose tariffs”.Earlier on Friday, Bloomberg reported that the administration, worried the court might invalidate the tariffs immediately, filed statements by Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warning that such a decision would be a “dangerous diplomatic embarrassment” for the US.In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said that Trump “lawfully exercised the tariff powers granted to him by Congress to defend our national and economic security from foreign threats”.He said: “The president’s tariffs remain in effect, and we look forward to ultimate victory on this matter.”William Reinsch, a former senior commerce department official now with the Center on Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters that the Trump administration had been bracing for this ruling. He said: “It’s common knowledge the administration has been anticipating this outcome and is preparing a Plan B, presumably to keep the tariffs in place via other statutes.”The US trade court heard the case – VOS Selections Inc v Trump – in May, and ruled that the tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the president”. But the court agreed to a temporary pause in the decision pending an appeal hearing.The US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC heard oral arguments about the case on 31 July. Judges expressed skepticism about the administration’s arguments at the hearing. The IEEPA “doesn’t even say ‘tariffs’”, one of the judges noted. “Doesn’t even mention them.”In its ruling, the appeals court noted there were “numerous statutes” that do delegate the power to impose tariffs, in which “clear and precise terms” are used to this make clear.When Congress wants to delegate such authority, it typically “does so explicitly, either by using unequivocal terms like tariff and duty, or via an overall structure which makes clear that Congress is referring to tariffs”, the court added.It said: “The absence of any such tariff language in IEEPA contrasts with statutes where Congress has affirmatively granted such power and included clear limits on that power.”Trump’s tariffs have triggered economic and political uncertainty across the world and stoked fears of rising inflation. More

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      ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to be vacated in compliance with court order to shut it

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      Florida’s immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will probably be empty of detainees within days, a state official has said, indicating compliance with a judge’s order last week that the facility must close.The Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s administration appealed the order by federal court judge Kathleen Williams that the tented detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which attracted criticism for its harsh conditions, must be dismantled within 60 days.But in an email reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the federal government, appeared to confirm it would be shuttered.“We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” Guthrie wrote to Mario Rojzman, a Miami Beach rabbi who has been helping to arrange chaplaincy services.Representatives for Rojzman confirmed the authenticity of the memo to the news agency. Guthrie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Miami Herald had previously reported that hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities in the state in advance of Williams’s ruling.On Monday, protesters who have maintained an almost permanent presence at the gates of the jail reported seeing convoys of buses driving out.Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democratic congressman, said that he was told during a tour last week that only about 300 to 350 detainees remained.“Alligator Alcatraz” was touted by Donald Trump as a holding camp for up to 3,000 undocumented immigrants as they awaited deportation. The jail, he said, was reserved for “the most vicious people on the planet”.Since it opened in early July after being hastily constructed in late June at a remote disused airstrip about 50 miles (80km) west of Miami, it drew waves of criticism. Several lawsuits sought its closure, and there have been claims that hundreds of those detained had no criminal records or active proceedings against them.Williams’s ruling was a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, who claimed the camp had caused permanent and irreparable damage to the ecologically fragile wetland and its wildlife.Another lawsuit, filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claimed detainees were abused by jail staff, and that their human and constitutional rights were denied because they were refused access to attorneys and due process.The plaintiffs said the Everglades facility was not needed, especially because Florida plans to open a second immigration detention facility in the north of the state that DeSantis has dubbed “deportation depot”.Williams had not ruled by Wednesday on a request by attorneys for the state to stay her order of closure. In her original 82-page ruling, she said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days by transferring detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed.She wrote that the state and federal defendants could not bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property.The environmental groups and Miccosukee tribe had argued in their lawsuit that further construction and operations should be stopped until federal and state officials complied with federal environmental laws. Their lawsuit claimed the facility reversed billions of dollars spent over decades on environmental restoration.State officials have signed more than $245m in contracts for building and operating the facility at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the rugged and remote Everglades. The center officially opened on 1 July.In their lawsuits, civil rights attorneys described “severe problems” at the facility which were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system”. Detainees were being held for weeks without any charges, had disappeared from the online detainee locator maintained by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), and nobody at the facility was making initial custody or bond determinations, they said.Detainees also described worms turning up in the food, toilets that did not flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, mosquitoes and other insects everywhere and malfunctioning air conditioning that alternated the temperature between near freezing and extreme heat. More

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      America survived a coup attempt. Can it endure dictatorial creep? | Lawrence Douglas

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      January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of iniquity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police.Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed.Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”?While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day?In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine if the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest. Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days.As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable.

      Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More

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      NAACP sues Texas over congressional redistricting, saying it strips Black voters of political power

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      Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.The lawsuit, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, names Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and secretary of state, Jane Nelson, as defendants. It asks a federal judge for a preliminary injunction preventing the use of the redrawn maps, arguing that the redistricting violates the US constitution by improperly reducing the power of voters of color. It also argues that the maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.“We now see just how far extremist leaders are willing to go to push African Americans back toward a time when we were denied full personhood and equal rights,” the president of the Texas NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, said in a statement. “We call on Texans of every background to recognize the dangers of this moment. Our democracy depends on ensuring that every person is counted fully, valued equally and represented fairly. We are prepared to fight this injustice at every level. Our future depends on it.”Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map on Saturday, with the expected result of an increase in Republican representation by five seats in the next Congress. Democratic state legislators are a minority in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving them with few options to block it. A group of state house representatives spent nearly a month away from the state to deny Republicans a quorum. That maneuver ended last week, after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the state legislature began a process to counter the Republican gerrymander with a Democratic gerrymander of their own.“The state of Texas is only 40% white, but white voters control over 73% of the state’s congressional seats,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”Democrats in Texas promised lawsuits out of the gate.The League of United Latin American Citizens – a group of 13 Texas voters – filed suit within hours of the redistricting bill’s passage. The map “eviscerates minorities’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in four key areas of the state”, the filing states.Other challenges are likely to follow. Republicans, however, believe that they are operating on favorable legal ground, hoping to overturn key sections of the Voting Rights Act as the lawsuits work their way through the courts.The US supreme court will hear a re-argument of Louisiana v Callais in the term to come. In that case, the court will be asked to upend the core tenet of the Voting Rights Act and hold that the use of racially identifying voter data to prevent voters of color from being able to select a candidate of their choice is actually an act of racial discrimination.Without that protection, Republican state lawmakers across the country can be expected to redraw maps for increased partisan advantage by cutting Black-majority districts into ribbons.Meanwhile, Donald Trump said the Department of Justice would sue California for its redistricting. Last week, the Democratic-led legislature placed a measure to redraw the state’s district lines on the 4 November ballot.In a sharp break against longstanding progressive efforts to turn redistricting over to neutral commissions, the NAACP said today that it “is urging California, New York and all other states to act immediately by redistricting and passing new, lawful and constitutional electoral maps” to counter expected efforts in Texas and other states to redraw maps for midterm advantage. More

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      Court tosses Trump lawsuit against Maryland judges over US deportations

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      A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit filed by the Trump administration earlier in the summer against all 15 judges serving on Maryland’s federal district court – a case that opposed pausing some deportations from the state.In a 37-page ruling, US district judge Thomas Cullen of Virginia’s western district – who was nominated and confirmed to his position during Donald Trump’s first presidency – wrote that “any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss”.“To hold otherwise,” Cullen added, “would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.”The Trump administration had challenged an order issued by Maryland’s chief district judge that temporarily barred the government from deporting undocumented immigrants for two business days if they filed challenges to their detention. Trump’s justice department argued that the order exceeded the court’s authority and violated federal law.But Cullen, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020 and was assigned the case because all Maryland district judges were named as defendants, wrote that the judges were “absolutely immune” from lawsuits over their judicial actions. And Cullen said that instead of suing, the administration should have challenged the order though other legal channels, such as appealing against the order.“As much as the executive fights the characterization, a lawsuit by the executive branch of government against the judicial branch for the exercise of judicial power is not ordinary,” Cullen wrote.“In their wisdom, the constitution’s framers joined three coordinate branches to establish a single sovereign. That structure may occasionally engender clashes between two branches and encroachment by one branch on another’s authority. But mediating those disputes must occur in a manner that respects the judiciary’s constitutional role.”He added that if the administrations’s arguments “were made in the proper forum, they might well get some traction”. But he said that “as events over the past several months have revealed, these are not normal times – at least regarding the interplay between the executive and this coordinate branch of government”.It was “no surprise that the executive chose a different, and more confrontational, path entirely”, Cullen’s ruling said.“Instead of appealing any one of the affected … cases or filing a rules challenge with the judicial Council, the executive decided to sue – in a big way.”In a footnote, Cullen also criticized the Trump administration’s attacks on judges across the country throughout his second presidency, which began in January.“Over the past several months,” he said, Trump administration officials had described federal district judges around the country as “left-wing”, “liberal” “activists”, “radical”, “politically minded”, “rogue”, “unhinged”, “outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional”, “[c]rooked,” and worse.“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” Cullen wrote.Among the judges named in the lawsuit was US district judge Paula Xinis, who ruled in April that the Trump administration had unlawfully deported Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador and ordered the US to return him. More

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      Who is Lisa Cook, the Fed governor facing removal by Trump?

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      Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to sit on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, is now facing removal by Donald Trump, another obstacle in a long line she has faced and written about during her experiences as one of a small number of Black women in the field of economics.Cook was nominated to the Fed in 2022 by then president Joe Biden after building a career that spanned both government and academia, including work at the treasury department, service in the White House, and a long record of scholarly contributions.But her path to confirmation wasn’t without hostility. Republicans opposed her nomination, forcing Vice-President Kamala Harris to break a 50–50 Senate deadlock. That narrow vote made Cook the first, and so far the only, Black woman to serve as a Fed governor.Her potential dismissal comes just days after federal housing finance agency director Bill Pulte alleged on social media that she falsified records and other documents to obtain favorable mortgage terms prior to her appointment. Cook has not been charged with a crime or found guilty of misconduct.By law, governors on the Fed’s board are appointed to 14-year terms and can only be removed for “cause”, generally understood to mean corruption or serious wrongdoing. Cook has continued to push back. Last week, she declared she had “no intention of being bullied” and promised to gather “accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts”.In a statement on Tuesday, she insisted that “no cause exists under the law, and he [Trump] has no authority” to strip her of the seat she has held since 2022. Her attorney has said they intend to sue.Since joining the board, Cook has consistently voted in line with chair Jerome Powell, supporting last year’s decision to cut interest rates and this year’s decision to hold them steady. She is sometimes described as a “dove”, a label economists use for officials who lean toward lower rates.Cook was born in Georgia, where she was raised by a hospital chaplain and a nursing professor. She and her sisters were among the first Black students to integrate their schools.She went on to study at Spelman College, then Oxford University as a Marshall scholar, before earning her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.Her academic work often linked economics with the realities of race and discrimination. One of her most recognized works, Violence and economic activity: evidence from African American patents, described how lynchings and other acts of racial violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s drastically reduced patent activity among Black inventors.Cook has also written candidly about the challenges she has faced in her profession. In a 2019 opinion piece in the New York Times, she and a co-author argued that “economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women”.She added: “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.” More

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      Federal judge orders closure of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail

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      A federal judge in Miami late on Thursday ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.She also noted that a plan to develop the site on which the jail was built into a massive tourist airport was rejected in the 1960s because of the harm it would have caused the the land and delicate ecosystem.“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote.“This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”No further construction at the site can take place, she ruled, and there must be no further increase in the number of detainees currently held there, estimated to be about 700. After the 60-day period, all construction materials, fencing, generators and fixtures that made the site a detention camp must be removed.The ruling is a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and a native American tribe that sued the state of Florida and the federal government. Williams agreed that the hasty, eight-day construction of the jail at a disused airfield in late June damaged the sensitive wetlands of a national preserve and further imperiled federally protected species.“This is a landmark victory for the Everglades and countless Americans who believe this imperiled wilderness should be protected, not exploited,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.“It 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.”The alliance plans to hold a press conference on Friday morning to discuss the ruling in detail.Conversely, the ruling is a blow to the detention and deportation agenda of the Trump administration. The president touted the camp, which recently held as many as 1,400 detainees, as a jail for “some of the most vicious people on the planet”, although hundreds of those held there have no criminal record or active criminal proceedings against them.There was no immediate reaction to Williams’s ruling from the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), or from the Department of Homeland Security.But lawyers for the state told Williams in court last week that they would appeal any adversarial ruling, the Miami Herald reported.In addition, hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities at the weekend in anticipation that Williams would order its closure, the outlet said.Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, announced earlier this month that the state will soon open a second immigration jail at a disused prison near Gainesville to increase capacity. More