Judge key to reuniting families
Opinion blames White House for border ‘crisis’
SAN DIEGO — 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.
“How can the court issue such a blanket, overarching order telling the attorney general, either release or detain (families) together?” he asked.
Sabraw answered his own question more than seven weeks later, issuing 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 Thursday to reunify more than 2,500 children with their families.
Insistence on meeting his deadline has made the San Diego jurist a central figure in a drama that has captivated international audiences with accounts of toddlers and teens being torn from their parents.
Circumstances changed 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 from their families 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.”
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.”
Sabraw, 60, was born in San Rafael, near San Francisco, and raised in the Sacramento area. His father was stationed in Japan during the Korean War, where he met Sabraw’s mother.
The judge has said prejudice against Japanese growing up made their housing search difficult.
“In light of that experience, I was raised with a great awareness of prejudice,” he told the North County Times in 2003. “No doubt, there were times when I was growing up that I felt different, and hurtful things occurred because of my race.”