Attorneys visit BP, meet detained kids
Conditions being checked to ensure requirements are met
Immigration attorneys from the Yuma area visited the Yuma Sector Border Patrol Station on Monday and Tuesday to interview migrant children and to ensure conditions inside the facility met the requirements outlined in the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, according to the Yuma Sector public affairs office.
The settlement, which set standards for unaccompanied minors who were in the custody of federal authorities, requires that children be detained in the “least restrictive” environment, and that they must be released to an appropriate adult “without unnecessary delay” — in other words, as quickly as possible.
In 2015, the courts clarified the Flores Agreement further, ruling that the settlement covered not just unaccompanied minors, but children who are accompanied as well. It also set a general standard that the government couldn’t hold them in custody for more than 20 days.
The two days of attorneyclient privileged visits to the Yuma Centralized Processing Center were arranged through the U.S. Custom and Border Protection’s Office of Chief Counsel and had been scheduled prior to President Donald Trump signing an executive order on June 20 ending family separation, according to the Yuma Sector public affairs office.
The immigration attorneys had to be vetted by the Department of Justice. While the meetings were private and media was not allowed inside the facility, the Yuma Sector Border Patrol provided a statement from Customs and Border Protection about its role in the process.
“Paragraph 32 of the Flores Agreement permits class counsel to make class access visits to facilities where class members are held, ‘in accordance with generally applicable policies and procedures relating to attorney-client visits at the facility in question.’ Where CBP facilities have no such policies and procedures, CBP has nonetheless accommodated requests by Plaintiffs’ counsel to conduct such visits where it is possible to do so without disrupting the operations of the facility. At the
request of Plaintiffs’ counsel, CBP is accommodating such visits at the Yuma Border Patrol Station on June 25 and 26.”
The Trump administration has cited the Flores Settlement as the reason why it had to separate parents from their children, indicating that it cannot keep parents and children in immigration detention together while the parent is being prosecuted for illegal entry.
As such, President Trump recently ordered the Justice Department to file a request to modify the court agreement known to allow for immigrant families to be detained together at the border for the duration of their legal proceedings.
The Flores Settlement Agreement has it roots in 1985, when two organizations filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of immigrant children who had been detained by the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) challenging procedures
regarding the detention, treatment, and release of children.
After many years of litigation, including an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the parties reached a settlement in 1997. The settlement agreement imposed several obligations on immigration authorities and has governed the detention of immigrant children since then.