Florida’s new attorney general, a DeSantis appointee, is making waves
By Patricia Mazzei | The New York Times
July 28, 2025 at 3:30 PM EDT
MIAMI — 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.
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 at his swearing-in as attorney general in February. “We were true conservatives. We stood on principle and ultimately, the electorate shifted massively to become what is now a red state.”
Uthmeier, who is Catholic and graduated from Georgetown Law, grew up in Destin, a beach town in the Florida Panhandle. His wife, Jean Uthmeier, owns a coffee and wine shop near the state Capitol in Tallahassee. Like the DeSantises, they have three young children.
James Uthmeier is known to be smart, driven and serious, to the point of sometimes diving into policy instead of answering personal questions. When Gabriel Groisman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Florida, interviewed Uthmeier for his podcast earlier this year, he had to press him about growing up in Destin and co-teaching religious education classes with his wife.
“If you designed a Florida attorney general in a lab, it would be James,” said David Polyansky, DeSantis’ former deputy presidential campaign manager.
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.
This month, Uthmeier subpoenaed a popular bar in Vero Beach, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, after it hosted an LGBTQ+ Pride event in June. His office claimed that the event at the Kilted Mermaid had illegally allowed “adult, sexualized performers in front of children,” even though a judge has blocked a state law that bans venues from admitting children to drag shows.
Linda Moore, the vice mayor of Vero Beach, owns the Kilted Mermaid with her husband. She said the subpoena did not specify which law may have been violated during the Pride event that featured drag performers, as it has for more than a decade.
“It’s unreal,” Moore said in an interview last week. “I’m just a small-business person with a little restaurant that’s been open for 14 years. We serve fondue!”
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
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.
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 at his swearing-in as attorney general in February. “We were true conservatives. We stood on principle and ultimately, the electorate shifted massively to become what is now a red state.”
Uthmeier, who is Catholic and graduated from Georgetown Law, grew up in Destin, a beach town in the Florida Panhandle. His wife, Jean Uthmeier, owns a coffee and wine shop near the state Capitol in Tallahassee. Like the DeSantises, they have three young children.
James Uthmeier is known to be smart, driven and serious, to the point of sometimes diving into policy instead of answering personal questions. When Gabriel Groisman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Florida, interviewed Uthmeier for his podcast earlier this year, he had to press him about growing up in Destin and co-teaching religious education classes with his wife.
“If you designed a Florida attorney general in a lab, it would be James,” said David Polyansky, DeSantis’ former deputy presidential campaign manager.
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.
This month, Uthmeier subpoenaed a popular bar in Vero Beach, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, after it hosted an LGBTQ+ Pride event in June. His office claimed that the event at the Kilted Mermaid had illegally allowed “adult, sexualized performers in front of children,” even though a judge has blocked a state law that bans venues from admitting children to drag shows.
Linda Moore, the vice mayor of Vero Beach, owns the Kilted Mermaid with her husband. She said the subpoena did not specify which law may have been violated during the Pride event that featured drag performers, as it has for more than a decade.
“It’s unreal,” Moore said in an interview last week. “I’m just a small-business person with a little restaurant that’s been open for 14 years. We serve fondue!”
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times