Trump moves to lift legal limit on child detention
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is moving to end an agreement limiting how long migrant children can be kept in detention, the president’s latest effort to curb immigration at the Mexican border.
A court fight is almost certain to follow, challenging the attempt to hold migrant families until asylum cases are decided.
A settlement overseen by the federal courts now requires the government to keep children in the least restrictive setting and to release them as quickly as possible, generally after 20 days in detention.
Homeland Security officials say they are adopting their own regulations that reflect the “Flores agreement,” which has been in effect since 1997. They say there is no longer a need for the court involvement, which was meant to be temporary. But the new rules would allow the government to hold families in detention much longer than 20 days.
Tightening immigration is a signature issue for President Donald Trump, aimed at restricting the movement of asylum seekers in the country and deterring more migrants from crossing the border.
The move by the administration immediately generated fresh outrage, following reports of dire conditions in detention facilities, and it is questionable whether courts will let the administration move forward with the policy.
Mr. Trump defended it, saying, “I’m the one that kept the families together.”
The Mexican government expressed concern over the prospect of prolonged detention of migrant children in the U. S. In a statement from its Foreign Relations Department, Mexico said it would monitor conditions at U. S. detention centers and continue to offer consular services to any Mexican families that may be held under the new conditions. It also said that “appropriate legal alternatives will be evaluated.”
In the U. S., immigrant advocates and Democrats decried the new regulations, saying prolonged detention would traumatize immigrant children.
“The administration is seeking to codify child abuse, plain and simple,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D- Calif., said in a statement.
Peter Schey, a lawyer for the immigrant children in the Flores case and president of the Center
for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said if the regulations don’t match the settlement in that case, “they would be in immediate material breach, if not contempt of court.”
“I think all these things are now part of the 2020 campaign,” Mr. Schey said.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday the regulations create higher standards to govern family detention facilities. The facilities will be regularly audited, and the audits made public.
The regulations are expected to be formally published Friday and go into effect in 60 days absent legal challenges.
Holly Cooper, co- director of the immigration law clinic at University of California, Davis and a lawyer in the Flores case, said attorneys haven’t seen the final rule and will have a week to brief a federal judge, who will weigh whether they are consistent with the settlement.
The government’s proposed rule, she said, wouldn’t have let lawyers monitor conditions in border facilities and would have dramatically changed how long children could be detained and the standards for their care.
“We’re going to have a world that looks a lot like the internment of families and children, where we have basically regularized prison as a default for families seeking political asylum in this country,” she told reporters.
The rule follows moves last week to broaden the definition of a “public charge” to include immigrants on public assistance, potentially denying green cards to more immigrants. There was also a recent effort to effectively end asylum altogether at the southern border.
There has been a dramatic increase in the number of families crossing the border — about 475,000 so far this budget year, nearly three times the previous full- year record for families. Most are released into the U. S. while their asylum requests wind through the courts — a practice Mr. Trump has derided as “catch- and- release.”
The Flores agreement has been in effect since 1997 but mostly was applied to children who came to the country alone. In 2015, a U. S. District Court judge ruled the requirements applied to children who crossed the border with families, after the Obama administration built family detention centers and started detaining families until their cases were completed.
Homeland Security did not say how long it expects families to be kept, but Mr. McAleenan said under the previous administration it was about 50 days. He said “the intent is for a fair and expeditious proceeding.”
Asylum cases involving detained families move much more quickly than cases for families released, taking months instead of years, in part because there are none of the delays that result when immigrants fail to show up for hearings.