Florida’s New Attorney General, a DeSantis appointee, is making waves

President Donald Trump speaks while touring a newly-constructed area for a detention camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz” with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, foreground, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, second from right, after arriving at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Fla., on Tuesday, July 1, 2025. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By Patricia Mazzei

As chief of staff to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, James Uthmeier worked behind the scenes to cement the Republican governor’s national reputation as a culture warrior. DeSantis rewarded him this year by appointing him attorney general.

It was Uthmeier who announced last month that the state was opening its own immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades. He made international headlines by referring to the swampy, remote location as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

The detention center’s first weeks have been chaotic, and something of a mystery. But it has amounted to a political coup for Uthmeier. President Donald Trump visited before it opened and praised the attorney general.

“You do a very good job,” Trump told him during a visit to the center early this month. Then, referring to Uthmeier, Trump remarked to others in attendance, “He’s even a good-looking guy. The guy’s got a future.”

The moment offered Uthmeier hope that Trump might consider endorsing him when he runs for a full term as attorney general next year, despite Uthmeier’s close ties to DeSantis, who ran against Trump in last year’s presidential primary. And it raised the profile of Uthmeier, a 37-year-old lawyer who has never been on a ballot, just as the term-limited DeSantis’ power wanes.

Florida Republicans have speculated that primary races in next year’s midterms could pit a slate of Trump-backed candidates against a slate backed by DeSantis.

Trump’s comments at the Everglades detention center quieted some of the chatter that Uthmeier could draw a primary challenger, but he remains vulnerable because of his involvement with the financial transactions of a charity tied to Casey DeSantis, the state’s first lady. State prosecutors are investigating.

The charity, the Hope Florida Foundation, received $10 million last year from a Medicaid contractor that had overbilled the state; it gave the money to two “dark money” political groups. Those groups then routed $8.5 million to a political committee that Uthmeier was running to back an anti-marijuana campaign led by DeSantis.

Text messages obtained through a legislative investigation showed that Uthmeier informed at least one of the two “dark money” groups about the $10 million and urged it to solicit the Hope Florida Foundation for the money before the charity’s board knew about it. Uthmeier has denied any wrongdoing.

His office did not respond to a request for an interview. But in a statement sent after this article first published, he defended his tenure. “My priority is to protect Florida’s most vulnerable, our kids and our seniors,” he said. “We’ve already locked away dozens of child predators in the past few months, and we won’t stop until we’ve gotten them all.”

His political rise is inextricably tied to DeSantis, who hired Uthmeier as deputy counsel shortly after becoming governor in 2019 and made him chief of staff in 2021. Uthmeier had previously worked as senior adviser and counsel in the Commerce Department, where he was among the officials involved in the Trump administration’s contentious decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Uthmeier helped the governor defy public health guidance during the coronavirus pandemic. He was also instrumental in flying a group of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts after they crossed the southern border — one of DeSantis’ highest-profile political maneuvers.

In 2023, DeSantis tapped Uthmeier to manage his foundering presidential campaign.

“We did not run to the middle in a swing state,” Uthmeier said on a podcast last month. “We were true conservatives. We stood on principle and ultimately, the electorate shifted massively to become what is now a red state.”

As attorney general, Uthmeier has followed an aggressive playbook intended to make a splash, much like that of his former boss.

He filed a class-action lawsuit against Target, arguing that the company’s “radical LGBTQ activism” hurt its investors. He opened a parental rights office and said he would no longer defend a Republican-passed state law that raised the age requirement to buy a rifle to 21, from 18.

Uthmeier also suggested that “weather modification could have played a role” in the recent deadly floods in Texas.

In May, Uthmeier threatened “swift legal action” against a gym in Palm Beach Gardens for allowing transgender people to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The gym, owned by the national chain Life Time, reversed its policy.

“He has always been comfortable using the weight of his office in a way that other people would balk at,” said state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican who led the state House investigation into the Hope Florida Foundation and is one of Uthmeier’s fiercest critics.

Uthmeier has been especially forceful on immigration enforcement — the current top priority of DeSantis — threatening to remove elected officials in Fort Myers and Key West who initially opposed working with federal officials on the issue.

Last month, a federal judge held Uthmeier in civil contempt of court for defying her order to put part of a new state immigration law on hold. The law would have made it a state crime for a migrant lacking legal status to enter Florida. Uthmeier told police officers that he could not “prevent” them from making arrests under the order. He appealed the contempt ruling last week.

His office said the previous week, in a report required by the court, that at least two men in St. Johns County, near Jacksonville, were wrongly charged under the blocked state law in late May, more than a month after the judge’s order.

Several Republicans in Tallahassee said that Uthmeier hatched the idea for the Everglades detention center, and that the Department of Homeland Security, eager for more detention capacity, was happy to go along. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said when she visited the facility last month that James Percival, her agency’s general counsel, had approached DeSantis about partnering on a detention site.

It did not go unnoticed in Florida political circles that, in an unusual upstaging of the governor, it was Uthmeier, and not DeSantis, who announced that the detention center was under construction. DeSantis then gave an exclusive tour of the facility to Fox News before Trump’s visit, an unusual upstaging of the president.