‘Mortifying distinction’: Federal judge holds Florida Attorney General in civil contempt

It may not be one of the things to learn in kindergarten, but it’s supposed to be absorbed at some point in the education of a lawyer: Don’t disobey a judge.

You can disagree and you can appeal the judge’s decision. But unless a higher court overturns it, you had better not flout it.

Attorney General James Uthmeier, Florida’s 37-year-old chief legal officer, has just learned that lesson the hard way—by having a federal judge hold him in civil contempt.

He’s the first attorney general of Florida, and perhaps of any state, to have earned that mortifying distinction. 

Uthmeier, who was chief of staff to DeSantis, should have left it behind when the governor appointed him to replace Attorney General Ashley Moody, whom he had appointed to the U.S. Senate. 

Uthmeier’s situation is an embarrassment to Florida as well as to him.  

Until a few years ago, most Florida attorneys general felt responsible to put partisanship aside and try to represent all the people. Beginning in 2011, Pam Bondi and then Moody were the first to openly politicize their offices.

Most also had extensive trial experience. Uthmeier, contrastingly, has spent most of his short career as a political spear-carrier.

It’s a reasonable question now whether Florida’s governors should remain free to appoint anyone they choose to be attorney general, an office that is part of the separately elected state Cabinet and served historically as a check and balance on the governor’s powers. 

When DeSantis appoints a successor to Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, who was elected to Congress, he will have hand-picked two of the three Cabinet officers.  

Senate confirmation could be required, as it is for the governor’s department heads, which would take a constitutional amendment.

Defending Florida’s challenged anti-migrant laws is part of the attorney general’s job, but so is the responsibility of respecting what the courts decide.  

Uthmeier went overboard over 2025 Senate Bill 4-C, which makes it a misdemeanor for an undocumented immigrant to enter or reenter Florida.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, in Miami, ordered the law put on hold temporarily while she decides a lawsuit by immigrant advocates who say it conflicts with the federal government’s authority over immigration.

It came by way of the demonizing campaign that President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican politicians are waging against undocumented immigrants. 

She also ordered Uthmeier to advise police agencies of her temporary restraining order. He complied, grudgingly. 

“I must express my disagreement with this order” he wrote, and emphasized that he was not representing any police agencies in the case.

But five days later, he put out the word to Florida law enforcement that he couldn’t stop them from arresting migrants if they wanted to. 

“It is my view that no lawful, legitimate order currently impedes your agencies from continuing to enforce Florida’s new illegal entry and reentry laws,” he wrote.

Then he dug himself in deeper in interviews he posted on his own social media account. The judge quoted them in her contempt order.

“I am not going to rubber stamp her order,” Uthmeier said. “I’m not going to direct law enforcement to stand down on enforcing the Trump agenda (emphasis added) and carrying out Florida’s law….” 

Since “the ACLU didn’t sue any law enforcement officers,” Uthmeier argued, “if they want to arrest people under the law, if they want to hand them over to ICE, if they want to help the Trump administration carry out detentions and deportations, they have the legal authority do that and I’m not going to stand in their way.” (Emphasis added again.)

Is Uthmeier the attorney general of a sovereign state or does he still work for Trump?

His first job out of the Georgetown University Law Center in 2014 was with Jones Day, a mammoth international firm that represented Trump’s first presidential campaign and populated his administration with numerous officials including Don McGahn, the White House counsel. 

Uthmeier became a “senior counsel” at the Department of Commerce under Trump and went from there, after President Biden defeated Trump, to DeSantis’ office as deputy general counsel. He rose to chief of staff, taking leave to run the governor’s unsuccessful campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination against his former boss.

His career has been longer on politics than on law. Williams referred to that in a droll footnote:

“The Court recognizes Uthmeier may still be acclimating to the new and difficult role of attorney general, which he began two months prior to this case without the benefit of significant experience managing civil or criminal litigations,” she wrote. “The Court gives Uthmeier the benefit of the doubt that his words were, as his Counsel said at the Show Cause Hearing, merely ‘puffery,’ and that he did not intend to undermine the integrity of the Court or place law enforcement officers at risk of being held liable for committing constitutional violations. Again, however, ‘absence of willfulness does not relieve from civil contempt.’”

“Uthmeier’s role,” she wrote in the main text of the order, “endows him with a unique capacity to uphold or undermine the rule of law, and when he does the latter by violating a court order, the integrity of the legal system depends on his conduct being within the Court’s remedial reach.”

Even so, she let him off without a fine. Instead, she ordered him to file periodic and real-time reports on any more arrests, detentions or other police actions under the challenged law. 

If Uthmeier appeals her contempt citation, it would go to a higher court that has already taken a dim view of his conduct.

Four days before he was found in contempt, a panel of the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta turned down his request to set aside Judge Williams’ temporary restraining order and let arrests resume. 

The panel noted his “seemingly defiant posture vis-à-vis the district court” and said that “although he may well be right that the district court’s order is impermissibly broad…that does not warrant what seems to have been a veiled threat not to obey it.”

Uthmeier became attorney general amid clouds of controversy. 

He had been deeply involved in DeSantis’s shipment of lawfully admitted migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a transparent political stunt in September 2022. He ran interference for a no-bid contract award to Vertol Systems Company, Inc., the company that flew them and got paid roughly $1.5 million up front in a departure from state purchasing rules, court records show. In March 2024, the complaint was dismissed for Uthmeier and other defendants.

He stalled for more than a year—a familiar tactic in the DeSantis administration—from turning over public record text messages and phone logs that a Leon County Circuit Judge had ordered delivered to the Florida Center for Government Accountability (publisher of the Florida Trident).

He wrote a curiously timed letter to the City of Clearwater concerning a street-closing issue with the Church of Scientology in which he appeared to be taking Scientology’s side. Florida attorneys general have normally issued opinions to cities only at their request. Uthmeier’s letter, which wasn’t a formal opinion, wasn’t sought by the city.

And he figures in the scandal over $10 million that was diverted from a Medicaid overbilling settlement with a health care company, Centene Corp., to the Hope Florida Foundation that is the pet charity of Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, who is considering whether to run to succeed him next year. The $10 million then passed through to two political committees which invested most of it in the Keep Florida Clean Committee, chaired by Uthmeier, that DeSantis used to defeat the recreational marijuana amendment on the 2024 ballot. 

The state attorney in Leon County is investigating the transactions. Uthmeier has denied there was anything wrong with them.

Just the other day, he called on the state to set up a 1,000-bed immigration detention center at an abandoned air field in the Everglades and called it “Alligator Alcatraz.” 

Uthmeier’s passionate partisan politics are ill-suited to an attorney general.

Jimmy Kynes, appointed by Gov. C. Farris Bryant in 1964, was the only other political appointee in modern times. Bryant created the opportunity for Kynes, his executive assistant, by appointing Attorney General Richard Ervin to the Supreme Court.

Ervin served there for 11 years, but Kynes was defeated narrowly in the 1964 Democratic primary. 

Uthmeier is running for a full term next year, with so far only one Republican opponent who isn’t seen as a serious challenger. Miami lawyer Jose Javier Rodriguez, the one announced Democrat, is well-known as a state senator who lost his seat on account of a ghost candidate with the same surname, who was put in the race to split the vote.