JUDGE: SEPARATED FAMILIES MUST BE REUNITED IN 30 DAYS
McALLEN, Texas— A judge in California on Tuesday ordered U. S. border authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days, setting a hard deadline in a process that has so far yielded uncertainty about when children might again see their parents.
If children are younger than 5, they must be reunified within 14 days of the order issued Tuesday by U. S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego. Sabraw, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also issued a nationwide injunction on future family separations unless the parent is deemed unfit or doesn’t want to be with the child. It also requires the government to provide phone contact between parents and their children within 10 days.
More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in recent weeks and placed in government- contracted shelters— hundreds of miles away, in some cases— under a now- abandoned policy toward families caught illegally entering the U. S.
Amid an international outcry, Trump last week issued an executive order to stop the separation of families and said parents and children will instead be detained together.
The lawsuit in San Diego involves a 7- year- old girl who was separated from her Congolese mother and a 14- year- old boy who was separated from his Brazilian mother.
Also Tuesday, 17 states, including New York and California, sued the Trump administration Tuesday to force it to reunite children and parents. The states, all led by Democratic attorneys general, joinedWashington, D. C., in filing the lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, arguing that they are being forced to shoulder increased child welfare, education and social services costs.
“The administration’s practice of separating families is cruel, plain and simple,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement.
In a speech before the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Los Angeles, U. S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration for taking a hardline stand on illegal immigration and said the voters elected President Donald Trump to do just that.
“This is the Trump era,” he said. “We are enforcing our laws again. We knowwhose side we are on — so does this group — and we’re on the side of police, and we’re on the side of the public safety of the American people.”
InWashington, a far- reaching Republican immigration bill is careening toward likely House rejection, a defeat that would be a telling rebuff of the leaders of a divided GOP. The party’s lawmakers are considering Plan B: Passing legislation by week’s end curbing the Trump administration’s contentious separating of migrant families.
Speaker Paul Ryan, R- Wis., labeled the legislation “a great consensus bill” and tried putting the best face on the likely outcome.
“What we have here is the seeds of consensus that will be gotten to, hopefully now but if not, later,” he told reporters Tuesday.