An appeals court judge who blocked the closure of Ron DeSantis’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail is married to a powerful conservative attorney whose law firm has raked in millions of dollars from the Republican Florida governor’s administration, it has been revealed.

Barbara Lagoa authored the 11th circuit court of appeal’s 2-1 ruling last month that paused the Miami district judge Kathleen Williams’s earlier order that the harsh detention facility in the Florida Everglades must be wound down within 60 days. Alligator Alcatraz is now fully operational again, with the Miami Herald reporting this month that hundreds of detainees held there by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) had “dropped off the grid”.

Lagoa is married to Paul Huck, a senior figure in Tallahassee-based Lawson Huck Gonzalez that is “one of Florida’s most politically connected conservative law firms”, according to Prism, an online news outlet that first reported the news.

The law firm, founded in 2023, is tightly aligned to DeSantis’s far-right agenda and has secured more than $10m in state contracts since, WUSF reported. It represents the DeSantis administration in a lawsuit against the retailer Target over its 2023 Pride campaign and was recently hired to assist the search for a new president at the University of West Florida, where DeSantis is engineering a “hostile takeover” of the formerly liberal college.

This weekend, Dan Frosch, Patrick Thomas, and Andrea Peterson of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ending its annual report on household food security. Those reports began in the 1990s to help state and local officials distribute food assistance. Last year’s report found that 18 million U.S. households experienced food insecurity during 2023. In a statement, the Department of Agriculture said: “These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.”

Colleen Hefflin, an expert on food insecurity, nutrition, and welfare policy at Syracuse University, told the Wall Street Journal reporters: “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.” Whitney Curry Wimbish of The American Prospect reported last week that food banks across the country are seeing more visits even as immigrants are staying away from them out of concern that their information might be shared or that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might show up.

Nutrition scholar Lindsey Smith Taillie of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health told the reporters: “I think the only reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance, because it basically allows you to pretend like we don’t have this food insecurity problem.” The budget reconciliation law the Republicans passed in July cuts funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by about 20%, or $186 billion through 2034, the largest cuts to SNAP in its history.