Settlement reached in family separation cases
As many as 1,000 asylum seekers whose claims were heard and rejected by the government under traumatic circumstances of family separation will get a second chance under an agreement announced late Wednesday. While the government did not agree to return parents already removed from the country, it said it would consider “individual cases in which plaintiffs’s counsel believes the return of a particular removed” class member “may be warranted.”
The agreement, which still needs approval by the court, was a significant development in the ongoing controversy over the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which resulted in the separation of thousands of parents from their children at the border starting in the spring. Some of the asylum seekers in question, according to a lawsuit brought on their behalf in August, were rejected by immigration authorities after interviews during which they were said to be “traumatized” by having had their children torn away from them.
But it does not guarantee that they will ultimately obtain asylum — and thus permission to remain in the United States. “It’s a really important step in the right direction,” Johnathan Smith, legal director for Muslim Advocates, one of the advocacy groups involved in litigation against the government, told The Washington Post. “There’s a lot more work to be done. These individuals have to have these interviews ... This is by no means the end of the road, but it does a lot of work in curing a lot of the injustice that our clients suffered as a result of the government’s policies or practices.”
The number of those affected is estimated at “well over 1,000 parents” by the two groups, Muslim Advocates and the Virginia-based Legal Aid Justice Center, that made the announcement late Wednesday.
“The exact plaintiffs are slightly different in the different cases,” Smith said, “but essentially the cases are on behalf of the parents and the children who were separated from their families at the border who had come seeking asylum.”
The settlement attempts to address issues faced by people who are in various stages of the asylum process, ranging from people who failed their “credible fear” interviews to those who lost their cases and are set to be deported. Under the agreement, the government will allow parents and children in certain situations to remain in the country together even if they are at different points in the asylum process. This could help bring to an end some of the family separations that created a massive uproar and a huge political backlash against the Trump administration.
Part of the settlement’s goal was to ensure that seeking asylum does not “undermine” the reunification efforts, Smith said.
“It’s important these families be reunified and these parents be with their children and the children with their parents,” he said.