Federal judge orders U.S. to return children to their families within 30 days.
Judge halts separations, says children must be returned within 30 days
WASHINGTON — A federal judge in California issued a nationwide injunction late Tuesday temporarily stopping the Trump administration from separating children from their parents at the border and ordered that all families already separated be reunited within 30 days.
Judge Dana Sabraw of the U.S. District Court in San Diego said children under 5 must be reunited with their parents within 14 days, and he ordered that all children must be allowed to talk to their parents within 10 days.
“The unfortunate reality is that under the present system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property,” the judge wrote.
Sabraw’s order, which is likely to prompt a high-profile legal battle with the Justice Department, came on the same day that President Donald Trump won a landmark legal victory when the Supreme Court upheld his travel ban, ending a 17-month legal fight.
But the judge’s ruling in the family separation case raises the stakes on an issue that had already become a political crisis for Trump. The president last week issued an executive order seeking to end family separations but saying little about reuniting families.
The American Civil Liberties Union had filed a lawsuit to stop the separations before the president’s executive order. In his order, Sabraw said that children may be separated at the border only if the adults with them present an immediate danger to the children.
He also said that adults may not be deported from the United States without their children.
“The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government’s own making,” the judge wrote in the opinion. “They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution. This is particularly so in the treatment of migrants, many of whom are asylum-seekers and small children.”
In a statement, Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer in the case for the ACLU, hailed the judge’s order.
“This is an enormous win and will mean that this humanitarian crisis is coming to an end,” Gelernt said. “We hope the Trump administration will not think about appealing when the lives of these little children are at stake.”
Earlier in the day, 17 states, including New Mexico, sued Trump for his administration’s practice of separating immigrant parents from their children, saying that the tactic is causing “devastating harm,” even as a top official said the government was struggling to reunite families fractured by the policy.
On a day when Trump basked publicly in the glow of a victory, with the Supreme Court upholding his travel ban, he faced a new legal challenge to what has emerged as the most controversial piece of his immigration agenda. The states, including Washington, California and New York and joined by the District of Columbia, branded the forcible separation of immigrant families unconstitutional, “cruel and unlawful,” calling it a violation of the principles of due process and equal protection. They requested that the court halt it and immediately compel the government to reunite parents with their children.
The Trump administration says it is trying to do just that, but success has proved elusive. The administration has appeared unprepared for the fallout from its decision to prosecute every immigrant apprehended entering the country without authorization — without exceptions for parents.
Even after Trump reversed course last week and moved to detain parents facing charges of unlawful entry with their children, the challenge of reuniting families already torn apart has morphed into a crisis of its own.
Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, told senators Tuesday that his department — which is charged with taking custody of unauthorized unaccompanied minors — was having trouble figuring out how to care for the children it was holding who had been separated from their parents. Some of them, he said, were in federal custody even though their parents had been sent back to Central America after trying to enter the United States illegally.
Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, conceded that the process of reuniting families would be difficult. “This is a complex situation,” Shah told CNN. “Our goal is to fully reunite as many families as possible, as quickly as possible.”