GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A Florida appeals court in Tallahassee overturned a lower court ruling Wednesday that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration was too slow releasing public records about its controversial 2022 airlift of 48 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
The three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeals sided with the governor in a legal fight over the records with the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a Sarasota, Florida,-based nonprofit watchdog group. The decision means the group can’t recover its attorney’s fees in the two-year legal fight, which it expected the state to pay.
In addition to DeSantis, the case involves some of Florida’s most powerful political appointees, including the state’s new attorney general, James Uthmeier, and the head of its newly created State Board of Immigration Enforcement, Larry Keefe.
The judges said it was reasonable that Uthmeier, who at the time was chief of staff for DeSantis, was taking weeks to produce any of the records because he had sent messages from a personal device and had to separate what was work-related and private.
“Sorting the public from the private in two weeks’ worth of text messages and phone calls would not be quick,” the judges wrote.
The judges also said the legal fight was happening just as the governor’s office was occupied with preparing for Hurricane Ian, which struck Florida in September 2022.
“Considering the magnitude and scope of the center’s request – which coincided with the ongoing statewide emergency of a major hurricane – the office’s response time cannot be considered unreasonable,” the ruling said. “The center’s demand that its two robust records requests be completed within a week was unfeasible and impractical given the breadth of the requests and the circumstances surrounding it.”
DeSantis’ office and a lawyer for the Florida Center for Government Accountability didn’t immediately respond to calls and emails Wednesday morning requesting comment.
The legal dispute highlights the frustrating delays and other obstacles that requesters can encounter when seeking copies of public records under Florida's powerful law intended to make the government's actions transparent and accountable. Some agencies take months to turn over records, citing backlogs of other requests, or charge high fees for officials to find and produce the documents. The law itself is vague on enforcing a deadline for government offices to turn over records, saying that the only reasonable delay is the time it takes officials to work on the requests.
First Amendment watchdogs and the media have clashed with DeSantis’ office over its responses to requests under Florida’s public records laws, which rank among the most transparent in the nation and offer insight into the inner workings of state politics.
The judge who wrote Wednesday’s opinion, Rachel E. Nordby, was appointed by DeSantis. The two other concurring judges, Thomas D. Winokur and Bradford “Brad” L. Thomas, were appointed by Govs. Rick Scott and Jeb Bush.
The trial judge, Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh of Leon County, ruled in October 2022 that the administration violated Florida’s Sunshine Law and ordered it to provide the documents within 20 days. The appeals court disagreed, citing a backlog of 150 pending requests at the time and calling the center’s requests too broad to fulfill in under one month.
“This was a comprehensive request that, due to its scope, was going to take some time,” the ruling said.
Keefe, who helped organize the flights, had been the governor’s former public safety czar and recently was named head of the State Board of Immigration Enforcement, a new agency created under an immigration law DeSantis signed last week.
The requests in question were for any phone calls and text messages related to the migrant flights from Uthmeier, sworn in as attorney general Monday to replace Ashley Moody. He had acted as one of DeSantis’ liaisons with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration on the flights.
The DeSantis administration on Sept. 14, 2022, flew 48 Venezuelan asylum seekers from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Massachusetts’ southern coast. A week later, the non-profit group filed two records requests and sued the DeSantis administration on Oct. 10, accusing the administration of failing to fully comply with the Sunshine Law.
In the October 2022 ruling, Marsh wrote that the governor’s office had “presented no evidence to the court of what direct steps it took to identify or produce records responsive to the public records request.” The appeals court disagreed.
The opinion ruled against DeSantis’ lawyers' previous arguments that none of Uthmeier’s communications regarding Martha’s Vineyard flights were subject to Florida’s public records laws because they were made through his personal cell phone. The appeals court found that any work-related communications made through personal devices are still public, a long-standing precedent in Florida.
So far, DeSantis’ office has released records revealing his deputies coordinated the flights using personal phones and non-state email addresses. Keefe used a personal email address with the alias “Clarise Starling” – a reference to an FBI agent from Robert Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels. Uthmeier used a personal cell phone to liaison with Keefe and the Abbott administration.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at garrettshanley@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.