Judge Blocks Trump Rules on Detaining Families and Children

By AMY TAXIN, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A U.S. judge on Friday blocked new Trump administration rules that would enable the government to keep immigrant children in detention facilities with their parents indefinitely.

U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles said the rules conflict with a 1997 settlement agreement that requires the government to release immigrant children caught on the border as quickly as possible to relatives in the U.S. and says they can only be held in facilities licensed by a state.

Gee said the Flores agreement —named for a teenage plaintiff— will remain in place and govern the conditions for all immigrant children in U.S. custody, including those with their parents.

“The agreement has been necessary, relevant, and critical to the public interest in maintaining standards for the detention and release of minors arriving at the United States’ borders,” the judge wrote in her decision.

“Defendants willingly negotiated and bound themselves to these standards for all minors in its custody, and no final regulations or changed circumstances yet merit termination of the Flores agreement.”

The Trump administration sought to end the agreement and issued the new rules with the hope of detaining immigrant children in facilities with their parents. The move came as part of a broader crackdown on asylum seekers arriving on the Southwest border, many of them families with children from Central America.

The Flores agreement allows for the settlement to be phased out when rules are issued for the custody of immigrant children that are consistent with its terms.

Family Separation Cases

Ed Note: in the report below from Politico, they often use the term deported,  INS is apparently using the term in responding to the judge,  It is not clear if these family members were deported, or did they sign a Voluntary Departure and accept removal in order to allow access to their separated children.

In a federal courtroom on Tuesday night, attorneys representing the Trump administration told U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw that it has not yet identified the parents of nearly 40 of the separated migrant children in custody, and has not yet located and contact hundreds more. Of the more than 460 parents it says are no longer in the United States, it was unable to say how many were forcibly deported and how many signed “voluntary removal” papers, and how many were deported with their children versus alone.

REUNIFICATION OF DEPORTED PARENTS: "A federal judge ordered the Trump administration Tuesday to provide better information about migrant parents who may have been deported after they were separated from their children at the border," POLITICO's Ted Hesson reports. The Justice Department said in a court filing Monday that 463 of the parents were not in the United States. The group remains 'under review,' but could include parents who were deported or who agreed to depart the country without their child, DOJ attorney Sarah Fabian said in court Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw "ordered the Trump administration to provide lists by Wednesday of parents who were deported; who were released into the United States; and who waived reunification with their child after being split from them," POLITICO reports. "He added that the administration should note when it's unsure of a parent's whereabouts." Sabraw called the potentially errant information "a deeply troubling reality of the case" but demanded that the administration face that reality. "The sooner the plaintiffs have all that information, they can hopefully locate them and then a reunification can be in process down the road," he said.

"The chiding came as the Trump administration approaches a Thursday deadline — issued by Sabraw in late June — to reunify parents who were separated from children ages 5 to 17 at the border," Hesson reports. "The administration appears on track to reconnect 1,637 parents with their children by Thursday. The court's focus will then shift to the fate of 914 parents who are judged ineligible to join their children or who are 'not yet known to be eligible' — a group that includes deported parents." 

Whether the Trump administration has developed any processes to reunite deported parents with their children in the U.S. remains unclear. Lee Gelernt, an attorney with ACLU, which represents the plaintiffs in the class-action suit, noted Tuesday that even if the administration completes reunifications of all the parents it deems "eligible" by Thursday, that won't include deported parents and those it can't find. He added that the "eligible" list is based on administration decisions that are "unilateral" and "unchecked."

What's next: The ACLU will file a reply brief by 3 p.m. EDT (noon PDT) related to its motion last week to delay deportations of reunited parents by seven days. Both parties submit a status report Thursday and will be back in court Friday. Read more here.

Related read: "'What we were suffering for': Separated, then reunited, immigrant families face what comes next," from Michael Miller in the Washington Post. Find it here.

Federal Judge Orders Migrant Families be Reunited

JUDGE ORDERS MIGRANT FAMILIES REUNITED: "A federal judge has ordered the federal government to reunite migrant parents with children taken from them under the Trump administration's family separation policy," Josh Gerstein reported late Tuesday for POLITICO.

"San Diego-based U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday night requiring that nearly all children under five be returned to their parents within 14 days and that older children be returned within 30 days.," Gerstein writes. "'The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process,' Sabraw wrote in his order." More here. Read the injunction here.

The ruling followed a statement earlier Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that the Trump administration would not reunite migrant children with any parents held in immigration detention. Azar's declaration, made at a congressional hearing on an unrelated topic, "confirmed what immigrant advocates have feared," reported Jazmine Ulloa reports in the Los Angeles Times. "The administration will reunite children with their parents quickly only if the parents drop their claims for asylum in the U.S. and agree to be deported." 

"Under administration policy," Ulloa wrote, "immigrants claiming asylum are held in detention awaiting a hearing — a process that can often take months or years. Because current law allows children to be held in immigrant detention facilities for no more than 20 days, Azar's agency would not place any of the children with parents who are in those facilities, he said. 'If the parent remains in detention, unfortunately, under rules that are set by Congress and the courts, they can't be reunified while they're in detention,' Azar said." It wasn't clear last night how or whether Judge Sabraw's ruling would affect the newly-declared HHS policy. More here. 

Congress, meanwhile, struggled to address the issue. "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday urged bipartisan negotiators to reach a deal this week to fix the Trump administration's slapdash policy on migrant family separations — but he's poised to be disappointed," POLITICO's Elana Schor and Nolan D. McCaskill report. "Immigration talks that began this week are only in their early stages, according to senators in both parties. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) met on Monday, and their efforts are likely to stretch into next month given that lawmakers are scheduled to leave Washington next week for their Fourth of July recess."

McConnell told reporters he hoped the "unusual couple" of Cruz and Feinstein would be able to reach a solution that could pass the Senate on a voice vote. "That's what I'd like to see, and I think we have a pretty diverse group of people working together to try to get an outcome," he said. But big gaps remain to be bridged between Republican and Democratic lawmakers proposals, including what to do about the 1997 Flores settlement, which prevents children from being detained longer than 20 days. More here. 

Then there's this: "The pace of arrests on the U.S.-Mexico border dropped in June, according to a preliminary government estimate — potentially signaling that the Trump administration's controversial 'zero tolerance' policy discouraged migrants from traveling north," POLITICO's Ted Hesson reports. "U.S. Customs and Border Protection is projected to arrest roughly 37,000 people at the border in June, based on arrest data from June 1-16, a DHS official told POLITICO."

Judge Orders Release of Migrant Children in Texas

SAN ANTONIO — A federal judge in California has ordered the government to release immigrant children from family detention centers “without unnecessary delay,” and with their mothers when possible, according to court papers.

In a filing late Friday, California U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee refused the government’s request to reconsider her ruling in late July that children held in family detention centers after crossing the US-Mexico border illegally must be released rapidly.

Calling the government’s latest arguments “repackaged and reheated,” she found the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in breach of a longstanding legal agreement stipulating that immigrant children cannot be held in unlicensed secured facilities, and gave agency officials until October 23 to comply.