A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump will this week decide whether to reinforce his ban on a key part of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s “callous” anti-immigration law after handing the extremist Republican a humiliating courtroom defeat last month.
The Miami district court judge Roy Altman has invited written arguments from both sides after ruling that the “human smuggling” clause of a sweeping immigration bill DeSantis signed into law last year exceeded the state’s authority.
Section 10 of the law makes it a felony for anybody, even US citizens, to knowingly transport an undocumented person. It was touted by DeSantis as a robust response to “Joe Biden’s border crisis”, but assailed by representatives of Florida’s legions of immigrant farm workers for its cruelty.
It also sparked a diplomatic spat with the government of Mexico, which accused the DeSantis administration of “discrimination and racial profiling”.
“This callous and blatantly unconstitutional law’s effect has been pretty devastating for our plaintiffs and for farm workers and immigrants across the state,” said Spencer Amdur, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigration rights project, representing the Farmworker Association of Florida.
“It’s prevented people from doing things like visiting their families, in Florida and other states; it’s prevented people from going to work and putting food on the table; it’s prevented people from engaging in their religious practice.
“Those were all harms that our plaintiffs were experiencing while the law was in effect, and that the judge cited in blocking it. It was just such a clear and on-point ruling from the circuit court that basically states have no business enacting laws like this.”
With the injunction in place, law enforcement, including the Florida highway patrol (FHP), can no longer stop and detain drivers suspected of carrying undocumented riders. About a dozen people were arrested after the law took effect on 1 July last year, including Raquel López Aguilar, a 41-year-old from Mexico, who was stopped by an FHP officer last August while driving a minivan containing immigrant roofers. He has been incarcerated in the Hernando county jail ever since.
The case of Aguilar, who faces up to 20 years in prison on four counts of felony human smuggling, has become something of a cause célèbre for the law’s detractors, as well as the Mexican government, which has been paying his legal bills. Juan Sabines Guerrero, the Mexican consul in Orlando, did not answer questions from the Guardian, but told 10 Tampa Bay in April: “We will win this case. Nobody is illegal in this world.”
Altman, a Venezuelan-born member of the Federalist Society who was nominated to the federal bench by Trump in 2018, will revisit his preliminary ruling later this week after issuing a secondary decision, with a 6 June deadline, for parties to offer comment on its scope.
Ashley Moody, Florida’s attorney general, has argued forcefully that any injunction should apply only to plaintiffs with standing in the wider legal challenge to the law, which has yet to be heard.
Lawyers for a coalition including the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the American Immigration Council and Americans for Immigrant Justice, say it must be a permanent, statewide ban.
“I think the court agreed with us that a statewide injunction makes sense at the preliminary level, and that’s of course what we’ll argue for at trial,” said Paul Chávez, senior supervising attorney for the SPLC’s immigrant justice project.
“But there has been controversy over statewide injunctions, so they issued the follow-up order asking for the briefing. My sense is that [Altman] just wants to be certain in that finding. I don’t get the sense that he changed his mind, but he has recognized there is current controversy over it.
“The Farmworker Association has members all over the state, and those members are part of the suit. Ideally the injunction will apply so that nobody gets prosecuted.”
Chávez also has stories of immigrants terrified by the consequences of the DeSantis law. Many are among the hundreds of thousands of Florida’s agricultural workers, an estimated 60% of whom are undocumented.
“A lot of farm workers left Florida and let us know they aren’t coming back. So the broader impact is economic, if you have workers not willing to come back into the state that otherwise would be here,” he said.
“But then there’s just the cruelty behind it, people that normally go in and out of Florida. It’s had a chilling effect on travel. One of our plaintiffs is a US citizen who’s part of a mixed-status family. She often drives between Florida and Georgia and was concerned she could be exposed to felony charges just for driving to visit her family.”
Altman’s injunction is among a succession of recent legal setbacks for DeSantis’s extremist agenda in Florida, much of which was enacted immediately prior to the launch of his failed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Last month, another Trump-appointed district court judge, William Jung, dismissed the state’s challenge to a new federal law blocking it from booting children from lower-income households from a popular health insurance program.
The Guardian reported in April that more than 22,500 children in the state had been disenrolled from the Children’s Health Insurance Program since 1 January, despite the law’s continuous eligibility clause that secures 12 months of healthcare coverage if at least one premium payment is made.
In March, a settlement between DeSantis’s education department and civil rights attorneys removed contentious clauses of Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” law that was derided by the LGBTQ+ community. Under the agreement, teachers and students can again conduct previously banned discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity outside of formal classroom instruction.
DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
