More than three weeks after Florida officials insisted the Everglades immigration jail nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" had shut down permanently, a federal judge says nobody has actually shown her proof of that.
U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell, sitting in the Middle District of Florida in Fort Myers, this week declined to pause the long-running lawsuit over conditions inside the facility. Her written order was blunt: outside of what lawyers had argued in briefs, she wrote that the court had seen no evidence from a state or federal official with authority to declare the facility permanently closed. She gave both governments four days either to hand over that proof or to explain when it might arrive, according to syndication of the Miami Herald's reporting.
