Judge, calm in court, takes hard line on splitting families
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw appeared conflicted in early May on whether to stop families from being separated at the border. He challenged the Trump administration to explain how families were getting a fair hearing guaranteed by the Constitution, but also expressed reluctance to get too deeply involved with immigration enforcement.
“There are so many (enforcement) decisions that have to be made, and each one is individual,” he said in his calm, almost monotone voice. “How can the court issue such a blanket, overarching order telling the attorney general, either release or detain (families) together?”
Sabraw showed how more than seven weeks later in a blistering opinion faulting the administration and its “zero tolerance” policy for a “crisis” of its own making. He went well beyond the American Civil Liberties Union’s initial request to halt family separation - which President Donald Trump effectively did on his own amid a backlash - by imposing a deadline of this Thursday to reunify more than 2,500 children with their families.
Unyielding insistence on meeting his deadline, displayed in a string of hearings he ordered for updates, has made the San Diego jurist a central figure in a drama that has captivated international audiences with emotional accounts of toddlers and teens being torn from their parents.
Circumstances changed dramatically after the ACLU sued the government in March on behalf of a Congolese woman and a Brazilian woman who were split from their children. Three days after the May hearing, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the zero tolerance policy on illegal entry was in full effect, leading to the separation of more than 2,300 children in five weeks.
Sabraw, writing in early June that the case could move forward, found the practice “arbitrarily tears at the sacred bond between parent and child.” It was “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.”
David Martin, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Law, said, “It’s probably not the first judge who seemed more deferential and then got much more active when he or she thought the government was not being responsive or had taken a particularly objectionable stance. Childhood separation clearly had that kind of resonance.”
“The intrusion into the family is so severe, the judicial reaction has been just like much of the public’s reaction: ‘This is an extraordinary step, you shouldn’t have done it, you better fix it as quickly as possible,”’ said Martin, a Homeland Security Department deputy general counsel under President Barack Obama.