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Judge orders temporary halt to construction at Florida’s detention center
Headline Legal News |
2025/08/04 06:30
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A federal judge on Thursday ordered a temporary halt to construction at an immigration detention center — built in the middle of the Florida Everglades and dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” — as attorneys argue whether it violates environmental laws.
The facility can continue to operate and hold detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but workers will be barred from adding any new filling, paving or infrastructure for the next 14 days. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued the ruling during a hearing and said she will issue a written order later Thursday.
Environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe have asked Williams to issue a preliminary injunction to halt operations and further construction. The suit claims the project threatens environmentally sensitive wetlands that are home to protected plants and animals and would reverse billions of dollars’ worth of environmental restoration.
Plaintiffs presented witnesses Wednesday and Thursday in support of the injunction, while attorneys for the state and federal government were scheduled to present next week.
Following Thursday’s testimony, Paul Schwiep, an attorney for the environmental groups, asked Williams to issue a temporary restraining order that would at least prevent any new construction at the site while the preliminary injunction was argued.
Williams asked Florida attorney Jesse Panuccio if the state would agree to halt construction so that she wouldn’t need to issue the restraining order. She pointed out that anything built at the site would likely remain there permanently, regardless of how the case was ultimately decided.
Panuccio said he couldn’t guarantee that the state would stop all work.
This sparked an hour-long hearing about the temporary restraining order, which will be in place for the next two weeks while the still ongoing preliminary injunction hearing continues.
The crux of the plaintiffs’ argument is that the detention facility violates the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of major construction projects.
Panuccio said during the hearing that although the detention center would be holding federal detainees, the construction and operation of the facility is entirely under the state of Florida, meaning the NEPA review wouldn’t apply.
Schwiep said the purpose of the facility is for immigration enforcement, which is exclusively a federal function. He said the facility wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the federal government’s desire for a facility to hold detainees.
Williams said Thursday that the detention facility was at a minimum a joint partnership between the state and federal government.
The lawsuit in Miami against federal and state authorities is one of two legal challenges to the South Florida detention center which was built more than a month ago by the state of Florida on an isolated airstrip owned by Miami-Dade County.
A second lawsuit brought by civil rights groups says detainees’ constitutional rights are being violated since they are barred from meeting lawyers, are being held without any charges, and a federal immigration court has canceled bond hearings. A hearing in that case is scheduled for Aug. 18.
Under the 55-year-old federal environmental law, federal agencies should have examined how the detention center’s construction would impact the environment, identified ways to minimize the impact and followed other procedural rules such as allowing public comment, according to the environmental groups and the tribe.
It makes no difference that the detention center holding hundreds of detainees was built by the state of Florida since federal agencies have authority over immigration, the suit said.
Attorneys for federal and state agencies last week asked Williams to dismiss or transfer the injunction request, saying the lawsuit was filed in the wrong jurisdiction. Even though the property is owned by Miami-Dade County, Florida’s southern district is the wrong venue for the lawsuit since the detention center is located in neighboring Collier County, which is in the state’s middle district, they said.
Williams had yet to rule on that argument.
The lawsuits were being heard as Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ′ administration apparently was preparing to build a second immigration detention center at a Florida National Guard training center in north Florida. At least one contract has been awarded for what’s labeled in state records as the “North Detention Facility.” |
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Austria’s new government is stopping family reunions immediately for migrants
Headline Legal News |
2025/03/12 23:52
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The new Austrian government said Wednesday that family reunion procedures for migrants will be immediately halted because the country is no longer able to absorb newcomers adequately.
The measure is temporary and intended to ensure that those migrants who are already in the country can be better integrated, Chancellor Christian Stocker from the conservative Austrian People’s Party said.
“Austria’s capacities are limited, and that is why we have decided to prevent further overloading,” Stocker said.
The new measure means that migrants with so-called protected status — meaning they cannot be deported — are no longer allowed to bring family members still living in their home countries to Austria.
The new three-party coalition made up of the People’s Party, the center-left Social Democrats and the liberal Neos, has said that curbing migration is one of its top issues and vowed to implement strict new asylum rules.
Official figures show that 7,762 people arrived in Austria last year as part of family reunion procedures for migrants. In 2023 the figure was 9,254. Most new arrivals were minors.
Migrants who are still in the asylum process or have received a deportation order are not allowed in the first place to bring family members from their countries of origin.
Most recent asylum seekers came from Syria and Afghanistan, the Austrian chancellery said in a statement.
The European Union country has 9 million inhabitants.
Stocker said the measure was necessary because “the quality of the school system, integration and ultimately the security of our entire systems need to be protected — so that we do not impair their ability to function.”
The government said it had already informed the EU of its new measures. It denied to say for how long it would put family reunions on hold.
“Since last summer, we have succeeded in significantly reducing family reunification,” Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said. “Now we are creating the legal basis to ensure this stop is sustainable.”
All over the continent, governments have been trying to cut the number of migrants. The clamp-down on migrants is a harsh turnaround from ten years ago, when countries like Germany and Sweden openly welcomed more than 1 million migrants from war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many communities and towns in other countries, such as Germany, also say they no longer have capacities to find shelter or homes for migrants.
The EU is trying to keep more migrants from entering its 27-country bloc and move faster to deport those whose asylum procedures are rejected.
On Tuesday, the EU unveiled a new migration proposal that envisions the opening of so-called “return hubs” to be set up in third countries to speed up the deportation for rejected asylum-seekers.
So far, only 20% of people with a deportation order are effectively removed from EU territory, according to the European Commission.
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Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly
Headline Legal News |
2024/09/05 08:37
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One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.
They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.
“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
Dunn said Supreme Court precedents warn judges about “the serious risk of error or unintended consequences” when dealing with rapidly emerging technology and considering whether antitrust law requires intervention. She also warned that any action taken against Google won’t benefit small businesses but will simply allow other tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok to fill the void.
According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has actually declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023,
The trial that began Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, over the alleged ad tech monopoly was initially going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.
The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.
The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine, which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets. |
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Ukraine ratifies the statute for joining the International Criminal Court
Headline Legal News |
2024/08/15 15:25
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Ukraine ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, taking a step toward membership that Kyiv says will increase chances of prosecuting war crimes by Russians and boost victims’ chances of receiving compensation.
Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, voted Wednesday to ratify the founding treaty of the ICC, which currently has 124 member states.
“We are trying to take real steps on all of the fronts of international justice to bring the Russian Federation to justice,” said Deputy Justice Minister Iryna Mudra.
“The ratification of the Rome Statute will increase the chances of victims receiving compensation for Russian war crimes,” she added.
Ukraine is not a member of the court but has accepted its jurisdiction dating back to 2013. The court’s prosecution office opened an investigation in 2022.
In 2023 the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, over allegations of war crimes involving the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. The following year, more warrants were issued for Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, Gen. Valery Gerasimov.
Membership of the ICC also is a requirement for joining the European Union, which Ukraine hopes to do. It was formally accepted as a candidate in June 2022, four months after Russia began its full-scale invasion.
The document was initially signed by the Ukrainian government in 2000, but the Constitutional Court blocked ratification in 2001 and declaring it unconstitutional to authorize the ICC to rule on Ukraine’s actions.
The question of ICC membership resurfaced in 2014, after Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine and occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
However, many Ukrainians feared that ratification of the Rome Statute could allow the ICC to prosecute Ukrainian citizens participating in the armed conflict on Ukrainian territory.
To reflect those concerns, the legislation contains a clause that says Ukraine will not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction in cases where the crimes may have been committed by Ukrainian nationals. |
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Hearing in Karen Read case expected to focus on jury deliberations
Headline Legal News |
2024/08/09 13:14
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nse attorneys for Karen Read are expected to argue Friday that two charges in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend be dismissed, focusing on the jury deliberations that led to a mistrial.
Read is accused of ramming into John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a snowstorm in January 2022. Her two-month trial ended when jurors declared they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of deliberations. A new trial is set to begin Jan. 27.
In several motions since the mistrial, the defense contends four jurors have said the jury unanimously reached a not guilty verdict on second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident and were deadlocked on the remaining manslaughter charge. Trying her again on those two charges would be unconstitutional double jeopardy, they said.
They also reported that one juror told them “no one thought she hit him on purpose or even thought she hit him on purpose.”
The defense also argues Judge Beverly Cannone abruptly announced the mistrial without questioning jurors about where they stood on each of the three charges Read faced and without giving lawyers for either side a chance to comment.
Prosecutors described the defense’s request to drop charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident as an “unsubstantiated but sensational post-trial claim” based on “hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance as to the substance of jury deliberations.”
But in another motion, prosecutors acknowledged they received a voicemail from someone who identified themselves as a juror and confirmed the jury had reached a unanimous decision on the two charges. Subsequently, they received emails from three individuals who also identified themselves as jurors and wanted to speak to them anonymously.
Prosecutors said they responded by telling the trio that they welcomed discussing the state’s evidence in the case but were “ethically prohibited from inquiring as to the substance of your jury deliberations.” They also said they could not promise confidentiality.
As they push against a retrial, the defense wants the judge to hold a “post-verdict inquiry” and question all 12 jurors if necessary to establish the record they say should have been created before the mistrial was declared, showing jurors “unanimously acquitted the defendant of two of the three charges against her.”
Prosecutors argued the defense was given a chance to respond and, after one note from the jury indicating it was deadlocked, told the court there had been sufficient time and advocated for the jury to be declared deadlocked. Prosecutors wanted deliberations to continue, which they did before a mistrial was declared the following day.
“Contrary to the representation made in the defendant’s motion and supporting affidavits, the defendant advocated for and consented to a mistrial, as she had adequate opportunities to object and instead remained silent which removes any double jeopardy bar to retrial,” prosecutors wrote in their motion.
Read, a former adjunct professor at Bentley College, had been out drinking with O’Keefe, a 16-year member of the Boston police who was found outside the Canton, Massachusetts, home of another Boston police officer. An autopsy found O’Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.
The defense contended O’Keefe was killed inside the home after Read dropped him off and that those involved chose to frame her because she was a “convenient outsider.” |
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