Trump’s Attempt to End Protection for Migrant Kids Fails

(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration’s attempt to end a 22-year-old agreement that limits how long migrant children can be held in detention failed with a federal judge denying the government’s request to terminate it.

The Flores settlement has prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement from locking up families of immigrants indefinitely while their asylum requests wend their way through the courts. It also sets out requirements like placing minors in the least restrictive settings and providing them with safe and sanitary facilities, including drinking water, food and medical assistance.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee rebuffed the government’s claim that a new set of rules will make the 1997 deal redundant, saying they’re inconsistent with “substantive terms” of the Flores settlement. She made the same point at a hearing in Los Angeles earlier.

“I’m not sure how you, as an officer of the court, can come up here and tell me that the new regulations aren’t inconsistent with Flores,” Gee told Justice Department attorney August Flentje. “I understand the position you are in and I’m not denigrating your effort to carry the water.“

The judge ordered the government to comply with the Flores settlement and barred it from implementing or enforcing the new rules.

Flores prohibits ICE from holding minors in custody for more than 20 days. After that, the kids need be released to either a sponsor or to a facility that is state-licensed to care for dependent children.

The settlement has been blamed by the administration for the “catch and release” border policy whereby families apprehended crossing into the U.S. from Mexico get released because the children can’t be detained indefinitely with their parents.

The administration’s attempt to get around this obstacle by separating children from their parents backfired last year when a federal judge in San Diego ordered an end to it.

New federal rules that were to go into effect Oct. 22 provide an alternative licensing scheme for ICE family centers where children will be treated “with dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability,” the government argued in its attempt to close what it called a loophole in the settlement.

“With that loophole in the law, there has been an explosion of family migration patterns, where the number of people traveling in family units has increased over twenty-five times the number in 2013, from 14,855 that year to nearly 400,000 thus far this fiscal year,” the government said in its Aug. 30 termination notice. “Reducing the scope of that problem is an important and legitimate purpose behind this regulation.”

Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed the administration’s argument that its obligation, under the settlement, to detain children in safe and sanitary conditions doesn’t necessarily entail providing them with soap, towels, showers, dry clothing or toothbrushes.

Immigrants’ rights lawyers have objected that the administration’s arguments to end the Flores settlement repeat those that have already been rejected by the court.

“Obstinacy is not a legitimate reason for this court to reconsider its prior rulings,” lawyers for the Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law, said in a Sept. 19 filing.

Gee last year rebuffed the administration’s bid to modify the 1997 agreement so that it could detain children for more than 20 days, calling it a “cynical” attempt “to shift responsibility to the judiciary for over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to the current stalemate.”

The case is Flores v. Meese, 85-cv-4544, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).

To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Peter Blumberg

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