An appeals court judge who blocked the closure of Ron DeSantis’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail is married to a powerful conservative attorney whose law firm has raked in millions of dollars from the Republican Florida governor’s administration, it has been revealed.
Barbara Lagoa authored the 11th circuit court of appeal’s 2-1 ruling last month that paused the Miami district judge Kathleen Williams’s earlier order that the harsh detention facility in the Florida Everglades must be wound down within 60 days.
Alligator Alcatraz is now fully operational again, with the Miami Herald reporting this month that hundreds of detainees held there by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) had “dropped off the grid”.
Lagoa is married to Paul Huck, a senior figure in Tallahassee-based Lawson Huck Gonzalez that is “one of Florida’s most politically connected conservative law firms”, according to Prism, an online news outlet that first reported the news.
The law firm, founded in 2023, is tightly aligned to DeSantis’s far-right agenda and has secured more than $10m in state contracts since, WUSF reported. It represents the DeSantis administration in a lawsuit against the retailer Target over its 2023 Pride campaign and was recently hired to assist the search for a new president at the University of West Florida, where DeSantis is engineering a “hostile takeover” of the formerly liberal college.
Prism said it was “not apparent” that Huck or his firm had a financial interest in any matter related to “Alligator Alcatraz”, the state-run remote tented camp for undocumented migrants that has been criticized for its harsh conditions and treatment of detainees.
But immigration advocates and Florida Democrats say the fact that Lagoa is making rulings in favor of the DeSantis administration while her husband is benefiting financially from it is a massive conflict of interest and grounds for her recusal.
“Judge Barbara Lagoa is definitely conflicted through her marriage to Paul Huck, and therefore, she has a personal interest that his firm maintains a good relationship with the state of Florida, as the state of Florida is his client,” said Tessa Petit, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
“The potential risk that her husband can influence her decision in favor of the state in this highly contentious case puts the legitimacy of our judicial system at risk.”
Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative, said Lagoa’s refusal to recuse herself “further erodes people’s trust in the judiciary”.
In a statement, she said: “It’s concerning to have on such an important case with huge ramifications for the environment a judge with that power to decide on this matter, with a husband that is working on high-profile political cases on behalf of DeSantis.”
The Guardian has contacted Lagoa and Lawson Huck Gonzalez for comment.
In a statement to Prism, Lagoa’s office pointed to judicial ethics rules that require recusal “if a judge has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party, has previously served as a lawyer or government official in the matter, has a financial interest in the outcome, or if the judge’s spouse or close family member has such an interest or role”.
The implication is that no such conflict exists.
In their 4 September ruling, Lagoa and Elizabeth Branch, another Trump appointee, rejected Williams’s finding that the DeSantis administration was required to comply with federal environmental rules, including an obligation to perform an impact study, as it raced to construct “Alligator Alcatraz” this summer at the site of a largely disused rural airport.
The majority agreed with the defendants – Ice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Florida department of emergency management – that because the site was built using only state funds, federal regulations did not apply.
The dissenting judge, Adalberto Jordan, noted that Florida acknowledged building the camp “in coordination with” the federal government and operated it on behalf of Ice, thus making it a “major federal action [that] affects the quality of the human environment”.
The ruling keeps “Alligator Alcatraz” open until the lawsuit, brought by several environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, reaches a conclusion. The plaintiffs have promised to challenge the appeals court ruling.
Lagoa was fast-tracked to federal appeals court by Donald Trump in November 2019, only 10 months after DeSantis awarded her a place on Florida’s supreme court as the panel’s first Latina and Cuban American justice.
Both Lagoa and her husband are aligned with the Federalist Society, an alliance of conservative and libertarian lawyers that counts all three of Trump’s supreme court picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, among its members.
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