You're watching Southwest Florida in focus.

Coming up.

New construction at alligator.

Alcatraz grinds to a halt.

Environmental concerns are at the center of a lawsuit that aims to close the doors on the detention facility.

As Florida continues to ramp up immigrant arrests.

Some lawyers claim racial profiling is putting a target on people, regardless of their status, And an overlooked community prepares for its centennial celebration.

We take a trip to Florida's Harlem.

I'm Jennifer Crawford.

Thank you for joining us.

The legal fight over the Everglades Immigration detention center continues in a Miami-Dade courtroom.

Judge Kathleen Williams granted a temporary restraining order telling the state of Florida to stop construction for two weeks.

The lawsuit does not include restrictions on law enforcement or immigration enforcement activity at the center.

Instead, it focuses on claims that Alligator Alcatraz is having a negative impact on the protected Everglades.

State officials claimed the facility does not need to adhere to those federal protections.

It is curious that the lawsuit was brought on the basis of environmental concerns and not necessarily, you know, how the prisoners are being treated or the, the wisdom of deporting all of these people who crossed illegally.

Yeah.

This lawsuit is focused on, their allegation is that we're failing to adhere to certain federal environmental regulations.

But this is state land, and it is a state run facility.

Just like no Florida state jails have to go through this federal Nepa process.

We don't have to either.

So we're going to continue to fight back.

We will appeal any rulings that we disagree with.

Ultimately, this is judicial activism trying to stop what the Trump administration is doing.

For members of the McCaskey tribe who were permitted to join the lawsuit, the halt in construction is a welcome relief from what they claim is an assault on their nation's sovereignty.

The future of Alligator Alcatraz remains unclear.

While the legal battle unfolds in federal court, the state of Florida and the Trump administration defend the construction of the immigrant detention facility in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

While environmental groups and the MCA Suki tribe joined forces against the government, they maintain the hastily built facility at a lightly used single runway training airport designed to house 3000 detainees, threatens the fragile Everglades ecosystem.

Endangered species.

Clean water and dark night skies for the Miccosukee.

Like William, Popeye, Osceola, the facility threatens land they hold sacred and their tribal nation sovereignty.

There is not environmental permitting process engaged here, so there's no way to say how big the environmental impacts are going to be on this land around the facility.

And for us, that's very concerning because that violates the usage rights and consultation process that we established with the government decades ago.

Osceola, an elected member of the Miccosukee Business Council, says the recent court order temporarily halting further construction of the mass detention facility signals hope.

Yeah, to me, it's an indicator that those who are running the system are still willing to listen and learn.

The two week reprieve, it's like a chance for us to come up for fresh air, make our case, recalibrate if we need to, and just put a pause on everything so people can stop just pushing forward and reacting and start trying to learn what's actually happening.

And if there needs to be some changes, that's what I see it as.

The Miccosukee tribe joined a lawsuit initially filed by the center for Biological Diversity, friends of the Everglades and Earthjustice, claiming state and federal agencies violated a landmark federal environmental law in the rush to build the migrant detention facility.

The temporary injunction means any new construction at the site, including paving, filling, installing new infrastructure and new lighting, must stop for a two week period ending in late August.

As a legal process unfold on the conservation groups motion for a preliminary injunction, governor DeSantis states on social media operations at Alligator Alcatraz are ongoing and deportations are continuing.

Communications director for the office of the governor, Alex Lanfranco, says last week's ruling by an activist judge will have no impact on immigration enforcement in Florida.

Alligator Alcatraz will remain operational, continuing to serve as a force multiplier to enhance deportation efforts.

Another lawsuit making its way through the courts focuses on the legal rights of detainees inside alligator.

Alcatraz.

The ACLU accuses the Trump administration of violating their due process.

Loved ones of 23 year old college student Helmuth Batiste says his case is a clear example of his constitutional rights being ignored, argues Sandra Victor over reports.

Every day that I wake up, there's this, like, split second where it feels like it wasn't real, like it didn't happen.

And then reality sets.

And then I realize he's not here.

When we recently met 29 year old Emma in South Florida, she had a hard time believing her boyfriend, Helmuth Petito, had been detained at Alligator Alcatraz for nearly a month.

She says Bethesda is a law abiding college student from Nicaragua, trying to build a life in the U.S. the right way.

How can you not be angry?

The most he's ever, got and talked to before by anyone is, His bike light wasn't bright enough.

That's the most.

No priors.

Nothing.

This is a person that came here and completely adapted to our culture.

Works in our local community.

So it's okay if this person is contributing to the tourism and is contributing to how our community there moves.

He doesn't have the same respect.

They have that due process because of the way he looks.

Emma says this video shot by a bystander in Key West right before, but it does.

Detention, backs up her claims that his constitutes rights were violated by officers.

Border patrol agents stop at the door on his bike.

He was headed home to get ready for work as a maintenance engineer.

He had noticed that there was a car following behind him for a little bit, and eventually they threw on their lights.

Emma says that told her over the phone that he provided the officers his ID and calmly responded to their questions, including where he was from.

But Emma says that conversation became more aggressive.

They had said things to him like, we know you have the border to come here.

You know, you're you're where we're taking you because you came here illegally.

He's trying not to talk too much.

But he's also confused.

What are they talking about?

The one cop that was with him was just very verbally aggressive and making what felt like threats to kind of make him nervous.

And he would say things like, the more of you we hunt, the bigger my bonus is going to be.

And then, you know, he's asking me like, do they get bonuses for this?

I'm like, I have no idea.

Emma says, but that was confused about why he was detained.

If there's no ticket, there's no citation.

What is it?

Other than his skin tone?

It is very obvious that he was racially profiled.

No, I've not ever seen anything like this before in my career.

This is TT's attorney, Amanda Velasquez.

There's absolutely no criminal charges filed, to my knowledge.

None at all.

And he didn't have any criminal record prior to getting detained under our Constitution or the Fourth Amendment.

We have a, you know, due process rights and the, a law enforcement officer has to have probable cause to ask for our identify ourselves to be identified if there's no crime being committed, Velasquez says, but that his mom legally brought him to the U.S. from Nicaragua with a tourist visa when he was 16.

His mom says she was protecting her son from political persecution for eight years, but has been building a life in Key West.

Hellmouth.

Dream and take that leave.

In fact, a court hearing to decide his petition for political asylum is scheduled for 2028.

Velasquez says his detention is disturbing but not unique.

Young men like my client that we're talking about today who have been in different, you know, situations where no crime is being committed, where the probable cause for an arrest is really questionable.

And you have to ask yourself, what do they have in common?

And there's really one thing that they have in common and that I think that that's where racial profiling is really becoming a unfortunately, a pattern that we're seeing, down here in kids in Southern California.

Immigration advocacy groups have filed suit against the Trump administration, accusing it of systematically targeting brown skinned people on its ongoing immigration crackdown, something denied by the Trump administration.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently addressed a reporter's question about allegations of racial profiling.

And so that has been another false narrative that has been put out there in the media that I absolutely want to throw back at you and say, that is absolutely false, and don't you dare ever say that again.

We have judges out there and other individuals saying people have been targeted that way and it's not true.

Every single operation that we do on Ice is based on investigative work and our casework.

To show that there is a reason and reasonable suspicion to go into an area and to talk and look at individuals that are involved in criminal activity.

Like I told you before, he's just a giant teddy bear.

Emma, a U.S. citizen, says Petito's detention has changed her views about this country.

I don't trust our system at all to do the right thing.

Velasquez says she's also disturbed about the ongoing difficulty getting confidential communication with her client.

She says Petito, like others, has been caught in legal limbo for weeks between state and federal authorities.

Each claiming the other had custody, delaying efforts to get him out on bond.

His mom's, Your Mira, who also filed for political asylum, says the fear they fled in Nicaragua is happening here now.

Like, wait, she calls his detention a kidnaping because she says there was no reason for authorities to take him.

And she fears she could be detained, too.

It's also made Emma contemplate her future, the one she envisioned in the U.S. with Petito.

But I've never had to think about do I move my life?

Because of this?

Are you so pinned in a corner that you pick up your life and you go?

For WGCU news, I'm Sandra Victorova An update to the story, but it was moved to a detention facility in Texas last weekend.

A judge granted him bond Monday.

His family is awaiting his release.

In a statement to WGCU.

Border Patrol says Batata overstayed his tourist visa in 2018.

His attorney says U.S. law allows a person one year to apply for political asylum protection, which he did.

Coming up, the dark side of renewable technology.

How an important ingredient in rechargeable batteries is at the center of a humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

For nearly 100 years, a small southwest Florida community has found a way to forge forward.

The town south of Clewiston was originally carved out for minority sugarcane workers.

Despite borrowing its name from a notable New York City neighborhood.

Many Floridians may not even be aware of its existence or rich history.

Mike Walter ventured out to Hendry County.

This is Florida's Harlem.

Our community is safe, fun and friendly.

Just come see for yourself.

And so we did.

This is Harlem's main street.

Not many traffic jams here.

Well, Harlem is a nice, quiet community.

Harlem has a current population of about 3000 people, almost all black.

According to the website data USA.

Poverty has been a problem here since the community's founding.

This place dates back to 1926, when sugar companies set aside land outside Clewiston for black workers.

Companies recruited blacks from the Caribbean.

People who knew how to grow cane and then burn it to make the harvesting of the sugar easier.

There were small homes for workers and their families, and public outhouses.

The companies gave the place the rather dull name of townsite.

But in the Roaring 20s, the music of Duke Ellington and other black artists reached Henry County.

The African American Renaissance in Manhattan, New York, received a lot of attention.

So the settlers here renamed their town Harlem.

I love this place.

Jerome Nichols was born here 46 years ago.

He left for the Army, says he suffered disabling wounds in the Iraq war and is back now on what he calls this caring community.

If you're in need and you ask, can I have it?

You can get it.

The culture here is support each other, help each other.

Philip Ford says he lived here as a young man, but left to work in a bigger place in Florida.

Now he's back saying he missed the kind people of Harlem.

The only word I can come up with is neighborliness.

But I need another word to describe it.

Yeah.

Close knit community.

Yet?

Decades ago, public schools were segregated.

So people in Harlem set up their own academy to educate children.

It closed in 1971 when the schools were integrated and the students began taking busses to public school and Clewiston.

For a while, a daycare operated here, but it closed a few years ago during Covid.

Now the buildings are deteriorating.

Henry County government has gotten $1.5 million to refurbish and save some of the buildings that, according to the county commission chairwoman, Emma Byrd, who went to the academy for one year and lives in Harlem due to personal and professional commitments.

She could not accommodate a TV interview, but spoke by phone about the Academy.

It's a missing piece.

I love to see every store in the middle of where we come from.

We are no report.

Byrd notes the county has provided parks, playgrounds and other recreational facilities for Harlem.

And she says Henry is budgeting to put it on sidewalks along three streets in the next year or so.

The town is most proud of its Brown Sugar festival, the biggest event of the year held in May.

But folks here say few outsiders visit any other time of the year.

Churches are everywhere in the one square mile community.

We saw more than half a dozen.

We live simple lives and we're happy.

We don't have to be rich, rich or God.

Family ties key people like Shanta mixon in Harlem.

She says she's been here since 1979, and she and her sister live on the same street.

Because I knew something about feeling sick, I could just call my sister and she'd be right over.

Harlem has problems, like any place.

But people here rely on neighbors, faith, family, and some help from the government to keep their community going.

For WGCU news in Henry County, I'm Mike Walshaw.

To increase community engagement.

Harlem leaders announced a partnership this year with U.S. sugar.

They will build a new amphitheater inside the Janet B Taylor Community Tree Park.

They hope it will serve as a hub for events capable of hosting large gatherings.

Rechargeable batteries are used in everything from cell phones to computers to electric vehicles.

However, a Naples resident and former United Nations ambassador says few of us realize that modern day slavery is powering much of the rechargeable battery industry.

Cobalt, a key ingredient in many rechargeable batteries, is mined by workers in slave like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Many of those workers are children.

Sandra Victor Nova spoke with Tony Hall, a former congressman and former ambassador to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, to learn more about this crisis.

So we're grateful to have you.

I know that you previously educated the world in what we call blood diamonds.

Those are diamonds that are mined and in war zones and sold to fund armed conflicts against legitimate governments.

Now, you want us to know about blood batteries?

What does that mean?

And what similarities do you see in those two industries?

I'll call them.

Well, it's an iPhone.

It's it's turned off.

But in here is, cobalt, and it's a, it's a mineral that's in iPhones.

It's in rechargeable batteries.

It's in cars.

It's in aerospace industry.

It's in a lot of metals.

And we need this.

The problem is, 70% of it, is mined, in, in the Republic of the Congo or in the, the country of the Congo, and it's refined in China.

And, the problem is 40,000 children are involved.

Child labor.

And in this process and these kids are six, seven, eight years old, in some cases, there are three year olds mixing and this very toxic mineral.

Now we need this mineral.

You know, it's an important mineral.

I mean, I mean, it's it's sold to everybody in in Western world, it's all over the world, it's in my iPhone, it's and iPads, etc..

But what we don't need is 40,000 children, that don't go to school, that work seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day and, they're, they're working in a very toxic mining outfit.

That's it's destroying them.

It's it's killing them.

It's, it's hurting their health.

And, it's very similar to the campaign and law that that I have passed in the Congress when I was a sponsor.

I have one called Blood Diamonds.

And, you know, Americans were buying 65% to 70% of all the blood diamonds in the world.

And they were coming a good portion of them from Sierra Leone.

And the blood diamonds were not they were being sold to these very distinguished, well known companies.

Sure.

De Beers de all of them were buying them and we in America were buying a we bought into this whole idea diamonds are a girl's best friend.

Well, the reason why they call them blood diamonds is that these ragtime, you know, groups of gangs were coming into these country, into these, villages and Sierra Leone, and they were terrorizing whole neighborhoods, and they were building their armies, and they were cutting off the arms of of children and kids and and their ears and noses.

And they had a little bag that you'd reach in if you pull out a piece of paper said hand what, what a machete.

They'd.

So that's why they called it blood diamonds, because they'd seize the diamonds that these people were mining.

Both children and adults, and they would sell them through these brokers.

And that and the blood diamonds found themselves.

They they came into the United States.

We were buying 65, 70% of them.

And so we had to get the women and America to start asking the question, are these blood diamonds?

And when they started doing that, the jewelers got worried.

Sure.

So I got back to the to the companies in Sierra Leone.

These diamonds have to be registered.

And so that's what we wanted to do with blood, blood batteries.

We have to say.

If cobalt is in my iPhone then I need the cobalt for the iPhone.

I need it for my batteries.

I need it for if I have an electric car.

But the fact is, I don't.

I don't need it if child labor, if these kids are dying, if they're six, seven and eight years old, this is wrong and we've got to stop this.

And if we do that, if we can bring it back to the consumer like we did with blood diamonds, we can stop this practice.

A much tougher mission, though, correct?

Because of the the the fact that cobalt is in so much compared to diamonds.

Right.

Not everybody's out shopping for diamonds.

It's going to be a tough, tough mission and a tough campaign.

And it's not going to happen overnight.

And China, it's not an easy country to deal with.

And but there are other countries that do have cobalt, but they don't produce it like the Congo does.

They have 70% of, of the cobalt.

But the other countries like Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, they they have it they have an abundance of it, but none are not producing it in a big way.

And so we need to start this campaign.

We need to bring awareness to the people that child labor is producing.

A good portion of the cobalt that goes into these phones to iPads, to, rechargeable batteries, etc.. Yeah, it's going to be a long campaign and a tough one.

If somebody is listening today and they want to do something, what can they do?

Well, we have we have bills that have been introduced into the Congress of the United States.

And, we need and there they've been introduced in a bipartisan way.

Congressman Chris Smith is the sponsor of it.

And his good friend, he's he's a Republican from, new Jersey.

And he has bipartisan support.

I was just in London and and the Netherlands, and they're introducing legislation in the next couple of weeks to stop it.

And we hope to take, this issue to the European Union and, and hopefully next year we're going to introduce it in Japan.

Diet in the Japan, Parliament, we have to pass legislation to stop this.

Ambassador Hall, thank you for educating us on this topic.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Coming up, backpacks and notebooks aren't the only things students need to succeed.

Why?

Experts say a key to better studies could start with a good night's sleep.

As schools wrap up their first week, plenty of students are still trying to get their sleep schedules back on track.

Professionals suggest a slow and steady approach to build up those nighttime patterns.

In the summer, we tend to go to bed later.

The sun is setting later.

Our body's natural circadian rhythm, our clock in our brain is set for later.

And so we might be going about a lot later than we normally would be for school.

And if you start trying to scoot it back now, it will be a gradual, gradual scooting back instead of a cold turkey, flip back to school time, which could be really rough for that first week of school.

Experts from the Cleveland Clinic warn that when a child doesn't get enough sleep, it can negatively impact them in the classroom.

They can become more irritable, have trouble remembering things, and struggle to focus.

Lack of sleep can also impact performance in sports and other activities.

Professionals recommend kids under 12 years old get 9 to 12 hours of sleep.

Teenagers should get 8 to 10 hours of sleep each night.

It's also a good idea to keep a regular bedtime with school back in session.

Having a good bedtime routine is the key to being able to fall asleep on time.

And that bedtime routine should include things like getting your pajamas and brushing your teeth and getting into bed and relaxing your brain and your body.

However, it should not include things like using phones, screens, bright lights.

The same goes for sunlight, too, since the sun sets later in the evenings.

It can make it harder for children to go to sleep.

To help combat that, you may want to consider blackout curtains.

There's a new place to bike, run and enjoy the great outdoors.

Next week, we take a trek on a trail that seeks to unite Southwest Florida.

Thank you for joining us.

Don't forget to like and subscribe to our WGCU news YouTube channel.

That's where you'll find all of our stories and extended interviews.

We hope you have a great day and we'll see you next week.