FILE PHOTO: The entrance of "Alligator Alcatraz" ICE detention center in the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, U.S. August 3, 2025. REUTERS/Eva Marie Uzcategui/File Photo

By Dietrich Knauth

(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Thursday allowed the federal migrant detention center in Florida known as "Alligator Alcatraz" to resume operations, blocking a lower court ruling that ordered the facility to stop taking new detainees and ordered a halt to construction work.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a split opinion that President Donald Trump's administration is likely to prevail in a legal battle with two environmental groups that say the facility is endangering the Everglades and its wildlife. Two judges sided with the Trump administration, and one judge dissented.

The majority ruled that the project - which has been funded by the state of Florida - did not trigger the kind of environmental review needed for federally funded construction projects.

Although both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have said the federal government will pay for expanding the detention facility, there is no evidence that federal funds have been used for construction, the court ruled.

DeSantis said in a video posted to social media on Thursday that the detention facility was "open for business" and ready to support Trump's immigration enforcement efforts.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security called the ruling a "huge victory."

"This lawsuit was never about the environmental impacts of turning a developed airport into a detention facility," DHS said. "It has and will always be about open-borders activists and judges trying to keep law enforcement from removing dangerous criminal aliens from our communities, full stop."

The environmental groups behind the lawsuit, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a joint statement Thursday that they expect to prevail in the case.

"If the DeSantis and Trump administrations choose to ramp operations back up at the detention center, they will just be throwing good money after bad because this ill-considered facility — which is causing harm to the Everglades — will ultimately be shut down," Friends of the Everglades' executive director, Eve Samples, said.

The detention center is surrounded by the Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park.

The facility is located 37 miles (60 km) west of Miami in a vast subtropical wetland that is home to alligators, crocodiles and pythons - imagery that the White House leveraged to show its determination to remove migrants it says were wrongly allowed to stay in the U.S. under Democratic former President Joe Biden.

In a comment posted to social media in early July, Trump said the facility would "house some of the most menacing migrants—some of the most vicious people on the planet."

The detention center cost about $250 million to build, and covers more than 18 acres (seven hectares) at a site that was formerly used as a "small but bustling working airport" in Miami-Dade County and Collier County, according to court documents. The reconstructed site could house thousands of detainees. It has been used to detain 900 migrants so far, according to the environmental groups' lawsuit.

The two environmental groups that filed a legal motion in June seeking to block further construction at the detention site, say it violated federal, state and local environmental laws.

Trump, who has toured the site, has dismissed the environmental concerns, saying the detention facility was a template for what he would like to do nationwide.

The Republican president, who has a home in Florida, has for a decade made aggressive immigration and border policies central to his political agenda.

(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth in New York and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Rod Nickel, Edmund Klamann and Leslie Adler)