environmental group

ORLANDO, Fla. — Environmental groups on Tuesday asked a federal appellate court panel to drop its temporary halt of a lower court’s order instructing state officials to close an immigration detention center in the heart of the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

The Everglades facility remains open, still holding detainees, because the appellate court in early September relied on arguments by Florida and the Trump administration that the state had not yet applied for federal reimbursement, and therefore wasn’t required to follow federal environmental law. State officials opened the detention center last summer to support President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Questions by the three appellate judges during oral arguments in a Miami courtroom focused on how much control the federal government had over the state-built facility and under what circumstances an environmental review was required to be in compliance with federal law. The judges did not indicate when they would rule.

Jesse Panuccio, an attorney for the Florida Department of Emergency Management, told the judges federal funding and federal control of the facility were the two criteria for determining if the federal environmental law would apply and the federal agencies had no control over the state-run detention center.

Florida was notified in late September that FEMA had approved $608 million in federal funding to support the center’s construction and operation.

“You need both,” Panuccio said. “Even with funding, I don’t think that would follow because they don’t have federal control.”

An attorney for the environmental groups said the law requiring a review applied to the facility because the Department of Homeland Security had authorized the funding and immigration was a responsibility of the federal government, not the state.

“What is different about this property is that immigration is constitutionally a federal function,” said Paul Schwiep,” an attorney representing the Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity. “The state has no role.”

The federal district judge in Miami in mid-August ordered the facility to wind down operations over two months because officials had failed to do a review of the detention center’s environmental impact according to federal law. That judge concluded that a reimbursement decision already had been made. The appellate court halted the order on an appeal.

The environmental lawsuit was one of three federal court challenges to the Everglades facility since it opened. In the others, a detainee said Florida agencies and private contractors hired by the state had no authority to operate the center under federal law. The challenge ended after the immigrant detainee who filed the lawsuit agreed to be removed from the United States.

In the third lawsuit, a federal judge in Fort Myers, Fla., ruled the Everglades facility must provide detainees there with better access to their attorneys, as well as confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press.

MEXICO CITY — Environmentalist groups accused Mexico’s government of lying about the source of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, something authorities promptly denied.

The spill of off the coast of the southern state of Veracruz has spread more than 373 miles and into seven nature reserves. Turtles and other marine life have been found on sea shores coated in oil, and fishermen have been unable to work in waters they have fished for decades.

Mexico’s government reported that 800 tons of hydrocarbon-laden waste have spilled into the ocean. The government said the spill started in March and the sources were a ship anchored off the coastal state of Veracruz and two sites from which oil naturally flows.

On Monday, a group of 17 organizations — including Greenpeace Mexico, the Mexican Alliance Against Fracking and the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights, or CEMDA — contradicted that claim and said that satellite images they captured show the root of the spill was actually a pipeline from Mexico’s state-run oil company, Pemex, and that a large oil slick appeared in early February.

“All this lack of information is causing massive economic and environmental damage. So far no one has been held accountable,” Margarita Campuzano, spokesperson for CEMDA, said Tuesday.

Images from February circulated by the activists match images obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday through Copernicus, the European climate agency. The photos show a boat floating over a sea clouded with what the groups say is oil, which appears to be streaming out of a platform.

The groups said that the boat in the images is Árbol Grande, which specializes in pipeline repair — implying that the government knew about the spill before it had reported it and “hid it.”

Pemex called the information and images circulated by the groups “inaccurate” and said the Árbol Grande boat traverses the Gulf of Mexico continually, “carrying out preventive inspections of platforms and specialized spill response operations.”

Campuzano called for greater transparency and more aggressive investigations by authorities.

“They’re trying to dilute their responsibility when technology makes it very easy to know where this occurred and who is responsible,” she said.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday denied the accusations during her morning press briefing and said that up until now, “no leak has been reported” in state oil infrastructure and that such natural seeps in the Gulf have happened in the past.

She said the government was investigating with scientists whether the spill was “due to these natural seeps in the area, which have been reported on many occasions and are well-documented in scientific literature, or a leak from one of the facilities.”

Sheinbaum said that it was more probable that the spill came from the natural seeps, and added that teams were hard at work cleaning up the spill and mitigating the effects.

While government officials recognized the impacts on turtles, birds and fish, and the spread to protected ecosystems, they also insisted that it had not caused “severe environmental damage.”

The accusations come as environmental groups in the United States have also raised alarm after the Trump administration exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act, saying environmentalists’ lawsuits threatened to hobble domestic energy supplies during the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Critics said the move could harm marine life and also doom a rare whale species.

Janetsky writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writer Teresa de Miguel in Mexico City contributed to this report.