The underlying dispute centers on the South Florida Soft-Sided Facility South, a temporary immigration detention center that Florida officials built at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport — a small airport in Big Cypress National Preserve — after the state commandeered the site on June 23, 2025. Florida used state funds and state employees to construct the facility, which the dissent noted involved paving approximately 800,000 square feet of land and installing industrial lighting impacting the night sky at least 20 to 30 miles away. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials completed a post-construction compliance check to ensure the site met federal standards for immigration detention, and federal immigration officials began transferring detainees there, with state officers managing day-to-day operations under section 287(g) agreements. Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sued, arguing that the failure to conduct an environmental review before construction violated NEPA and the Administrative Procedure Act. The district court agreed and issued a preliminary injunction halting further construction and barring new detainees from being brought to the site.
The Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion authored by Chief Judge William Pryor and joined by Judge Brasher, vacated the injunction on two independent grounds. First, the court held that the plaintiffs failed to identify a final agency action reviewable under the APA. Florida, not federal officials, built the facility entirely at state expense, and the only federal conduct the plaintiffs could point to — a decision not to prepare an environmental impact statement — is not itself a final agency action. The court rejected the argument that a federal request to build the facility, a post-construction compliance check, or the entry into section 287(g) agreements could supply the required final agency action, reasoning that none of those steps determined rights or obligations in a legally binding way.
Second, the court held that the facility's construction did not constitute a major federal action under NEPA's 2023 amendments, enacted as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. Those amendments define major federal action to exclude non-federal actions with no or minimal federal funding, or with no or minimal federal involvement where a federal agency cannot control the outcome of the project. The court read the disjunctive to mean that a non-federal action is excluded from NEPA's reach if either condition is satisfied — meaning that to qualify as a major federal action, a non-federal action must receive more than minimal federal funding and be subject to more than minimal federal involvement. Because Florida retained final authority over every construction decision — from the facility's size to its materials — and because federal officials could not have overruled a Florida decision to stop building or repurpose the land, the court held the facility was not subject to substantial federal control. The court declined to address whether the facility was federally funded, finding the absence of federal control dispositive.
The court also vacated the portion of the injunction barring federal officials from bringing additional detainees to the facility, holding that it independently violated the statutory bar in 8 U.S.C. section 1252(f)(1), which strips district courts of authority to enjoin or restrain the operation of sections 1221 through 1231 of Title 8 other than with respect to the application of those provisions to an individual alien. The court held that the bar applies regardless of the nature of the underlying claim, and that an injunction preventing the Secretary from detaining aliens at a facility of his choosing directly restrains those operations rather than merely producing a collateral effect on them.
Judge Abudu dissented, arguing that the majority improperly substituted its own factual findings for those of the district court, which held a four-day evidentiary hearing. In her view, the 287(g) agreements represent a delegation of federal authority rather than cooperative federalism, the federal government's commitment to fund the facility and its exclusive jurisdiction over immigration detention supplied the necessary federal control, and the majority's reasoning would allow the federal government to abandon its constitutional and statutory responsibilities for detained immigrants simply by routing detention through state actors.